Irish tour set - first impressions

[axg20202]

I received the IT set today and have had about 2 hours of playing to get them dialed in.

Guitar: brand new 2008 model American Standard strat (maple neck)
Replacing stock pickups with Irish Tour set, vintage stagger, no base plates.

When I installed the pickups, I took the opportunity to completely shield the routings and pickguard with adhesive copper tape and rearranged the wiring to be star grounded. The guitar was pretty quiet already, but now it is very quiet.

It has taken me most of the two hours playing time to get the pickups set at the correct height for balance across the 3 pickups and for optimum tone - this is always a PITA with strats much more so than any other guitar IME. To cut a long story short, I really wasted about an hour being generally disappointed with the tone (way too bright and harsh sounding) and was beginning to think I'd made the wrong choice of pickup set.

With the pickups set much (much) further away from the strings and only just protruding from the pickguard, I finally realised why I had been getting cr@p tone. Now that the amp was doing the hard work rather than the pickups, the ITs were sounding a lot sweeter and less brittle. I really kicked myself over that one because I've setup countless guitars in my time. Felt a tw@, and not in the good way...

I need to live with these pickups for a few days before I get the full feel of how they interact with my setup, but I'm pleased so far. I had to leave this post and come back to finish it another hour later because I was enjoying the tone so much (just strat -> Germanium Fuzz Face clone -> amp) - yoo byooty - turned into an hour of self-indulgent guitar Barclays. I can see I'm going to like these pickups a lot once I get used to them.

[ailean]

Set up seems so important with BKP's, when I fiited my Nailbomb set it took me weeks to finally settle on the setup I liked (took so long as I am a real amature player so I had to live with it each time I made a change). Once you get them dialled in though... We have a IT set in a Custom Shop Strat and it sounds awsome.

Keep us updated on your thoughts!

[JamesHealey]

for some reason BKP's take it much more personally when it comes to setting the height than most other pickups.. take heed.

[MrBump]

Had the same with my Nailbombs - weeks of adjusting and playing, adjusting and playing...

If I had a strat I'd get the IT's I think...

[AndyR]

for some reason BKP's take it much more personally when it comes to setting the height than most other pickups.. take heed.

+1 on that in my experience...

In fact, I'm just about to start fiddling with the height of my ITs again (lowering them), after I thought I was happy for the last month or two!

My advice would be to get them to a height that sounds "pretty good", then live with it for a bit (days or weeks, rather than hours). Then (this is VERY IMPORTANT!!) when you do adjust, count the number of turns of the screw driver that you use - if you don't, you're guaranteed to want to put it back to what you've been using already...(!)

[Twinfan]

It's funny, it took me months to set my Riff Raffs and Mules up spot on and yet my P90s were perfect from the word go!  My VH2s took an hour or so of playing.

Experimentation is the key!

[kellar]

I agree, you have to mess with it a bit. BKP's for whatever reason seem to need that extra bit of adjustment. The Mules took me forever to set up, literally a few weeks of listening and adjusting before they were where I liked them.
My Stormy Monday/Riff Raff set were even worse because they are two different pickups and they really took some playing with. But like the others said, in the end I ended up somewhere between two and three mm's away. That seems to be the best starting point for BKP's. After that you can make small adjustments.

[WezV]

i had an 'oh yeah!!!' moment with the bridge riff raff on sue's guitar yesterday.   I think it was literally half a turn on the treble side

still need to play around a bit though to make sure i am happy

[axg20202]

I'm definintely finding the bridge IT hard to dial in. Neck and middle are fine (i particularly like the neck and the neck/middle position) and not as sensitive to height settings in terms of tone vs output, but the bridge IT is sounding a bit thin and weak despite a lot of time adjusting height. I'll continue tweaking tonight. I'm expecting a Callaham trem block to turn up in a few days, which may add some bottom to the tone in general (or could just turn out to be mucho mojo).

[Twinfan]

Interesting.

I always find the bridge pickups hardest to dial in as they sound thin and weak to me too until I get it right.........

[AndyR]

Interesting to me as well!

I found the bridge IT no problem at all - seems to work whatever height I set it! Neck not too problematic, but I had real trouble making the middle give me a tone I was expecting from a strat middle.

In the end (and this was ages ago) I balanced the 3 for relative volume, then raised and lowered them all until I got a middle I liked (and I liked it a lot when I found it)

By the way, yesterday, I did lower them all, by 1.5 turns of the screws - quite a bit! It's even better now. The ITs are definitely giving me bell-like tones when I back off the volume on the guitar now, but this is just a side-effect. I was looking for more "growl" when I absentmindedly and aggressively hit the bottom of an open E chord (think SRV, plays a little turnaround lick, and finishes it by whacking the bottom end...). The bottom of the chord felt a bit muddy compared to my other strat that I've just resurrected. Lowering the ITs put it in the same ballbark (even though the other strat has brand new strings, and the strings on this one are rather old now!)