I find it very difficult to even mentally construct a YouTube comparison test that can be taken as a fair evaluation of a pickup's (or cord/pedal/string/pick/AMP/guitar) characteristics. The problem is dealing with what sounds "good." The evaluators generally want one thing to sound better, you can't deduce that from the structure of the test or what manufacturers love to call a "tutorial"- i.e., how to sound awesome by buying the only product in the teat that shreds, roars, doesn't suck etc.
I do think that you can tell a bit more of what you'd need to know about frequency range from a dead-clean test, but - wouldn't you like to hear each pickup/effect (etc.) at it's very best? In other words, the amp need to be readjusted so you can hear each effect at it's finest. What I would want as a minimum standard is single notes, played all over the fretboard, and allowed to decay naturally. And each note would have to be A/B'd adjacently, and if you were trying to evaluate THREE Dingleberry Deluxes note-by-note it just goes Blooiee! impossible. And it would be quite boring to anyone who just wanted some really cool dude to tell them what to do with their extra money... which is the biggest problem. EVERYBODY wants their widget to sound really rockin', slammin', bitchin' and killin', and they REALLY want you to buy their widget, and there is no way one video "test" can be compared to any other test because the methods of comparison were written by Captain Kangaroo on Tuesday and by Mr. Green Jeans on Wednesday.
The single best influence I use is simply what some professional guitarists sound like, and what the use to get there. And even so, much of hardly matters, because there are so many good products out there. How many clean boost pedals? How many PAF pickups and PAF+ pickups? As David Gilmour keeps saying, he could walk into any decent music store anywhere in the world and get what he needs to do the things he does. There's some obvious universals: a midrangey Tube Screamer and a wide spectrum 308-chip overdrive, a wah, a couple of delays. Reliability counts, too.
I do think that you can tell a bit more of what you'd need to know about frequency range from a dead-clean test, but - wouldn't you like to hear each pickup/effect (etc.) at it's very best? In other words, the amp need to be readjusted so you can hear each effect at it's finest. What I would want as a minimum standard is single notes, played all over the fretboard, and allowed to decay naturally. And each note would have to be A/B'd adjacently, and if you were trying to evaluate THREE Dingleberry Deluxes note-by-note it just goes Blooiee! impossible. And it would be quite boring to anyone who just wanted some really cool dude to tell them what to do with their extra money... which is the biggest problem. EVERYBODY wants their widget to sound really rockin', slammin', bitchin' and killin', and they REALLY want you to buy their widget, and there is no way one video "test" can be compared to any other test because the methods of comparison were written by Captain Kangaroo on Tuesday and by Mr. Green Jeans on Wednesday.
The single best influence I use is simply what some professional guitarists sound like, and what the use to get there. And even so, much of hardly matters, because there are so many good products out there. How many clean boost pedals? How many PAF pickups and PAF+ pickups? As David Gilmour keeps saying, he could walk into any decent music store anywhere in the world and get what he needs to do the things he does. There's some obvious universals: a midrangey Tube Screamer and a wide spectrum 308-chip overdrive, a wah, a couple of delays. Reliability counts, too.
