Fishman Fluence Single Width and Fluence Classic Humbucker

98 Guitarist June 2015
FRET-KING CORONA 60 & 70 FLUENCE EQUIPPED £1,699 EACH
ElEctrics
the price when purchased
individually, the gap narrows
considerably when sold as a
three-unit set with that
shared preamp.
Sounds
Evaluating a guitar pickup isn’t
straightforward. Unlike a
microphone, which you can line
up next to your reference mic
and listen to how it sounds
capturing your voice or guitar,
for example, you can’t just
compare a Fluence-loaded
instrument with another guitar.
Well, perhaps you can, and
that’s what most of us will do.
So let’s start there…
In Voice 1, the Corona 60
exhibits a clean, bright, pretty
balanced Strat-like voice that
sounds a little polite; it is very
quiet in terms of noise pick-up.
There’s a marked difference in
Voice 2: noticeably higher in
output, thicker and more ballsy.
We’d be very tempted to either
hard-wire this second voice or
swap them around so Voice 1 is
activated when you pull up that
switch. Pulling out a first-
generation, and now well-
gigged, Fender Road Worn
Strat, it sounds bigger, tougher
The Corona 70 comes
with a pair of Fluence
Classic Humbuckers
Like the Single Width units,
the Classic Humbucker (neck
shown here) offers two voices
and darker. We also throw
another custom-made Strat-
alike into the mix, which sits
sonically between the Fret-King
and the Road Worn.
But, of course, we’re not just
listening to the pickups, are we?
There are the different woods,
ages and finishes, string gauges,
string condition, hardware, and
last but not least, the pickups
themselves, how they are
placed height-wise, and so on
and so forth. It’s 50 shades of
subtlety that can add up to a
substantial difference in what
we’re hearing. After our initial
listening test, we restring our
three guitars with the same
gauge strings and set each of the
pickup sets as close as we
physically can at the same
distance from the strings. It
certainly narrows the field a
little, but, for example, our
Fender Road Worn still has the
‘bigger’ sound, while the
Corona 60 sounds a little more
‘produced’, as if we’ve EQ’d it to
maximise that ‘Stratty’
high-end sparkle and tightened
up the lower mids. The more we
play the Corona 60, however,
the more we like it, especially
that Voice 2 tone. In anyone’s
book, it’s a good single-coil tone.
One deal breaker might well
be that volume control. Of our
passive guitars, the Road Worn
is pretty classic in that as we
turn down we lose highs and
there’s quite a steep hump: we
GIT394.rev_fret.indd 98 16/04/2015 14:22