Guitar for pickup testing

[Philly Q]

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.

[Will]

You could just upgrade to one of these
Looks like an easy swap.
But no, I do not have enough money to have many pickups :(

[gwEm]

pretty cool philly!

[sgmypod]

whats the mini one sound like

[Jonny]

I would love to do this, trying out different combinations. I just don't have the guitar, lol..

[Philly Q]

You could just upgrade to one of these
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: .

[Philly Q]

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: