Ormsby TX Exotic 6 - Purr Pull
This is nominally a T-style guitar, but with fanned frets, an offset body, and everything is tweaked and curved in such a way that it looks like Salvador Dali’s tele.
We’ve previously discussed angled or slanted pickups, and how you get more upper harmonics closer to the bridge and more of the fundamental tone closer to the midpoint of the string. Thus, angling the treble side closer to the bridge results a wider sonic spectrum of brighter highs and deeper lows. Conversely, with “reverse slanted” pickups (or a right-handed guitar played left-handed), you get a more focused sound with brighter lows and warmer highs. With single coil pickups, there is some leeway regarding the angle while still having the pole pieces line up with the strings. Humbuckers, however, need to be specially designed with the two bobbins offset to keep everything inline.
It is much more common to see a slanted bridge pickup than neck pickup. The reason is, if you think about it, the bridge pickup is always near the endpoint of the string. Whereas on a traditional 21 or 22 fret instrument, the neck pickup is typically right about where the 24th fret would be, which is 3/4 of the scale length from the nut or 1/4 from the bridge. So it senses a particular set of harmonics on the open strings. (In fact, some players dislike 24 fret guitars specifically because it requires the neck pickup to be closer to the bridge.) As you move up the fret board, you change the effective string length, resulting in a different set of harmonics, such that when playing at the 12th fret, the pickup is now positioned at the halfway point of the vibrating string. Moving all the way up to the highest frets, the neck pickup is now potentially even closer to one endpoint of the string than the bridge pickup is to the other.
Obviously these tonal changes occur for the bridge pickup as well, but given that is always relatively close to one endpoint, the actual change is much less dramatic. Although again, angling the pickup would magnify these differences from one string to the next. It is not as though angling the neck pickup does not matter, as playing the same song note-for-note on a guitar with a slanted pickup verses one without will certainly have a different tonality. It is just that the actual effect is so unpredictable that we generally feel that an angled neck pickup is probably more of an aesthetic choice than a tonal one.
Which brings us back to this guitar. Technically, it has a reverse slanted bridge humbucker, but considering the multi-scale angled bridge, these two factors effectively cancel out, and it would sound more or less like a normal humbucker on a normal guitar. The neck pickup is not only slanted, but since the frets themselves are angled in the opposite direction, the total angle is quite extreme. More importantly, Ormsby filled that extra space with partial frets for the upper strings, resulting a whopping 29 frets for the high E string. This guitar is also available in a seven string version, which (depending on tuning) boasts an octave or more of extra range compared to a more typical guitar.
So in spite of everything we said above, this is the first guitar we have seen where the neck pickup is definitely angled for a functional purpose.
The “Exotic” part of the name refers to the quilted maple top, stained in a black to purple burst, which they cheekily call ”Purr Pull.” Finished off with a pearloid pickguard and all black hardware including a basic volume/tone/toggle switch setup on curved control plate.
