Bare Knuckle Pickups Forum
Forum Ringside => Tech => Topic started by: Philly Q on May 26, 2008, 04:39:49 PM
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Not a technical question, just curious - does anyone else have a guitar they use specifically for pickup testing?
Some guitars - e.g. Teles - are extremely awkward to wire up, and sometimes I like to mix & match pickups which may not work together, or which may turn out to be out of phase. Total pain in the backside if you have to take everything apart.
So I have this old Squier Strat with a WD neck which I use for pickup testing. I have a few scratchplates with various pickup configurations, 250K or 500K pots, 3-way or 5-way switches. Everything including the jack is on the scratchplate, so it's easy to swap in and out. And I have a Kahler fixed bridge which it's fairly easy to pop the strings out of so they can stay fixed at the tuner end.
Here it is - currently sporting a DiMarzio DLX+ (minus its P-90 style cover) and a Hot Minibucker. Of course it doesn't tell me how the pickups will sound in another guitar, but I can see how they work as a set.
(http://i129.photobucket.com/albums/p216/phillyq/IMGP1848a.jpg)
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You could just upgrade to one of these (http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=190223848424)
Looks like an easy swap.
But no, I do not have enough money to have many pickups :(
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pretty cool philly!
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whats the mini one sound like
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I would love to do this, trying out different combinations. I just don't have the guitar, lol..
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You could just upgrade to one of these (http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=190223848424)
Looks like an easy swap.
But no, I do not have enough money to have many pickups :(
Wow, that's quite a contraption! It's very "homespun" looking, like something from the 1950s.
I don't have all that many pickups lying around, but I tend to get ideas, buy parts and then take months (or years) to get round to doing anything. Quite often I've bought pickups for a guitar then sold the guitar without ever using the pickups :oops: . I had a bit of a clearout of old pickups recently, but I kept a few I thought "might come in useful" :roll: .
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whats the mini one sound like
It's pretty good, surprisingly powerful - although it's the "Hot" Minibucker it's not supposed to be really high output, but it's quite dark and fat, even a wee bit muddy TBH. Not a classic Firebird tone at all, but that's not what I was after anyway.
The DLX+ is actually the neck model (the same as the Q100, which Yamaha used in some guitars like the AES800 and AES1500). It has a bit of a mid-scoop and (as DiMarzio say) it sounds quite clear with distortion, even though it's high-output, so there's a good contrast with the Mini. I've got them wired with a 5-way which gives the inside coils in position 2 and the outside coils in position 4, so I've got some Strat-ish and Tele-ish tones.
They're not the most amazing pickups in the world, but it's a good versatile combination, I think I'm going to move them into another guitar. :)
Anyway, maybe I should stop bigging up DiMarzios now. :oops: