What pickup settings does Billy Corgan use on the clean intro to Cherub Rock and Starla? He gets quite a unique, percussive sound.

seeing as nobody else is replying, i`ll give this a shot. Was quite into the pumpkins years ago, cant listen top anything but mellon collie and gish now, still think mellon collie is mind blowingly good whenever i do rarely put it on.

My honest answer is, i dont know. My hazarded guess would be, the neck pickup on that entire album, with the exception of some of the solo`s and maybe most of the guitars on `rocket`. He used lace sensor pickups i think, and was a stickler for brand new strings to keep that top end there, so was really trying for the fattest sound he could get and keep the tone. To me it sounds like JCM800`s cranked right up in the preamp stage, but then some serious studio work going on with butch vig afterwards to effectively suck lots of the frequencies out of the sound and give it that...errr. siamese dream sound? Cant think of a better way to describe it.

Lot of respect for Billy, was one of my heroes for a while, but i do wish he`d got another singer for his band, they didnt have to be so alternative in my eyes now, he just writes great riffs, and he had a great drummer, all he needed was to stick to guitar and backing vox himself and he would have had an absolute classic rock status of a band with their own sound and everything. As it is they are and were great, but they severely restricted their audience by him choosing to sing himself.... which is is incidently exactly what im going to do with my new outfit!! hey ho.

Eep, sorry, i get a bit opinionated at times Hope some of that helps though. Cheers

Olly

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`I prefer not to listen to music that I can't rip off or improve on` - Ian Dury

Billy Corgan - Long Way to the Top:

http://youtu.be/QDnomq8Wf2Q

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you can save the world with your guitar one love song at a time it's just better, more fun, easier with a fender solid body electric guitar or electric bass guitar.

THANK YOU for posting this. This song is awesome. I wasn't aware this was an AC/DC song, but I went back and listened to the original AC/DC version and I prefer Billy's version (I'm a Pumpkin fanboi.) The bagpipes on the AC/DC version were not expected. I also noticed that Billy's guitar is severely detuned. It seems to be 1 1/2 steps down in a "dropped" tuning.

My brother and I are planning on forming a band. My biggest influence is the Pumpkins and his biggest influence is AC/DC so our sound should be interesting if nothing. He's a shredder, I'm a slow melodic lead player. Hopefully it will work.

That's cool to hear, bugo! Billy Corgan loves the high-gain sound. I believe his signature strat uses Dimarzio pups. So yeah. Strat + gain +- dimarzios and you're off.