Gibson's blurb about the six Seymour Duncan engineered varitone settings of the Ripper II:
"Tonal Control
The new six-position selector knob lets you dial in six very different tone selections. In position one you get the bridge pickup only. Position two gives you the second coil of the neck pickup and the first coil of the bridge pickup. Position three delivers the first coil of the bridge pickup. Position four dials in the second coil of the neck pickup. Position five gives you the first coil of the neck pickup and the second coil of the bridge pickup. And the sixth position gives you only the neck pickup. That’s six distinct choices – each one a clear and well-defined tone all its own."In reality, all six options have unsurprisingly one tonal base character, there are no radical changes here, but it's all audible, though Pos 2 and 5 are VERY similar:
Pos 1 - bridge in humbucking mode, not too thin though I'm generally not a friend of just bridge pup mode, Jaco left no lasting imprint on me
Pos 2 - a single coil from each pup, as you would imagine given the spread of the two coils (that is one gigantic humbucking pup this pos creates) quite a bit of midrange cancelling out and "hollowing" of sound, similar to Pos 5 which has bit more depth
Pos 3 - bridge in single coil mode and true single coil it is as the humming of my Ampeg can testify!
not such a huge difference to Pos 1 really, but audible, sounds a bit more vintage
Pos 4 - neck in single coil mode, as above not such a huge sound difference to the humbucking mode in Pos 6, but a very typical Ripper sound
Pos 5 - a single coil from each pup, but this time even farther apart than in Pos 2, just slightly bassier than what Pos 2 offers
Pos 6 - neck pup in humbucking mode, see comments to Pos 4, deep guttural Ripper sound
In essence, whatever Seymour Duncan has done pretty closely resembles the character of the old Ripper varitone set up without aping it. My Ripper II is about as loud as my 73 big body maple board Ripper, but not quite as loud and deep as my 81 ebony Ripper.
Gibson took a different course on this reissue than to what it has done before, the Ripper II is closer to a Ripper I in sound than a modern day TBird would be to a Bicentennial or sixties model. And, in comparison, the Grabber II is to an original Grabber what The Incredible Hulk is to Bruce Banner. I think I prefer the latter approach, perhaps I'm just hooked on that TB Plus sound!
Uwe
