good point bad horsie, wes doesn't use EMG p/u in all of his guitars especially in the PRS models he uses. i have seen the quilted yellow top 7 string that wes uses and those don't have EMG's on them as does his other AX series guitars. it is weird but unless he figured the EMG's to look like passive open top pickups then I am in the dark about his gear. keep me up to date on this.

it is weird how some people criticize wes' tone as being sucky when everyone giving the opinion is a guitar player and/ or musician . Because of this they tend to loose sight of the fact that one guy's heavenly tone may be another guy's suck ass sound. you can't generalize everything under the sun just because a bunch of guitar techs say so, right? they may fix the guitars and do the mechanical stuff but they still have a secondary view to the musicians who churn out the music. hell, I can't stand trebly punk rock guitar sounds and surf guitar textures but i love the sound of a fat blues tone as well as the crunch of a dual recto mesa. inversely, eric clapton may not like White Zombie's razor sharp guitar attack as much as he does BB King's smooth Gibson based tone. herein lies the paradox that every guitar player must understand, you can't love them all and expect everyone to agree on one damn thing because personal taste is what makes music different and unique. trying to squeeze everything into a common category is just not going to work and people need to learn that.

with regards to Soldano amps...I have used and owned a couple Soldanos and I didn't like them as much as the Mesa amps I have now. The SLO-100 was too inflexible to tweak to miniscule detail and the HR-50 XL was too glassy sounding that it annoyed me beyond normal grief. some other guy somewhere might be infuriated by this because he might happen to hate mesa and love soldanos. that is my 2 cents...