Interesting. The CC/PW genre has me all over my neck......
....If there is a soft note somewhere, it is clearly not enough to notice.
...Once the Super P5 arrives I'll check, but I'd be shocked if anything material shows. I just don't see Sheldon tolerating a significant issue.
Actually, there's an old thread on the Dingwall forum about this. Sheldon says that for all the things you can do to minimize dead spots, about the only way to completely avoid them is to build your instruments out of concrete.
I've been fascinated by them ever since my holy grail (the '64 P-bass I had in college) turned out to have a whopper. I actually didn't realize how uneven it was until I made a ridiculously overbuilt 12-odd pound 5-string that had almost no dead spots. All of a sudden, I found that my playing sounded very uneven- I'd been instinctively adjusting my attack to minimize the effect of the various minor dead spots and wolf notes up and down the neck.
If you know how to look for them, nearly all Fenders have at least one somewhere. The secret is to turn off all effects, set your amp fairly flat, lower the gain, gently pluck long, sustained notes with an even attack, and then listen intently to the note decay. If you play an A at the second fret on the G-string, followed by a C or C#, and then again somewhere up around the 10th fret, it will stand out more. The first few frets and the upper ones will sound noticeably fatter.
The one that really bugs me, is when the fundamental dies out faster than the upper harmonics. In really bad cases, there's a sort of shaaaa-wing sound as the note seems to jump an octave near the end of it's decay.
Over the years, I've found that a lot of people are "dead spot deniers", with good reason. If you play hard, with a fairly staccato attack; if you play a lot of loud rock; if you slap; if you use all-tube amps or run compression; if you tend to play C's C#'s and D's on the second string to get a fatter sound, then you may be completely unaware of existing dead spots.
Despite all the clever things Sheldon does to minimize dead spots, my ABZ has a marginal one at the C on the G string. With the SS strings, it was effectively inaudible. A fresh set of the new nickels seemed to excite it a little more, but even then it was only really audible in one situation: playing quiet acoustic sets through a little practice amp, in a really boomy room.
Whatever the reason, whenever I ended a phrase on the high C on that gig and let it ring, the note would drop flatter than a pancake. Play the same phrase in the key of D, and it would sustain forever.
I actually took the nickels off for a while because of it. Thankfully, after I let them play in a little more and switched to a different rig, it retreated enough that it's no longer a big deal.
