Could you hear what pickup has been used on an album recording?

[Cagey]

Once you run your signal through some tone bender thingy like an EQ or wah pedal, then some distortion device, then maybe a booster, then some kind of modulation effect, plus maybe some reverb and/or delay, then your amp's front/back end into one of the 3,528 different speaker/cabinet combinations available, can you tell what kind of pickup it was? Phbbt. The only reason you can even recognize it as a guitar is because you've been trained to.

 

[TBurst Std]

Once you run your signal through some tone bender thingy like an EQ or wah pedal, then some distortion device, then maybe a booster, then some kind of modulation effect, plus maybe some reverb and/or delay, then your amp's front/back end into one of the 3,528 different speaker/cabinet combinations available, can you tell what kind of pickup it was? Phbbt. The only reason you can even recognize it as a guitar is because you've been trained to.

Amen

 

[Cagey]

The other thing is in a signal chain like that, it's ALL solid state, and parts of it are almost certainly digital which involves at least one A->D, D->A conversion, if not several. So, all the tube and analog purists are kidding themselves. Bare minimum, they're running a solid state digital front end <GASP!>