A while ago I ordered a Bareknuckle Black Dog for my SG. Essentially I keep this guitar at my parent's place in Germany. While I live and work in England, I spend quite a substantial amount of time in the year (about 3 months in total) in Germany, as I have many friends here, sometimes work to do and the climate agrees more with me as well.
A picture from our garden:
So it might seem like overkill for some to spend so much money on a guitar that essentially only gets played a quarter of the year, but the truth is I need nothing else gearwise and just felt that this was at least something worth doing, as a long term investment anyway.
So I finally installed the pickup in the guitar and did some other work as well:
1. Cleaned the guitar
2. Replaced the screws for the tunomatic bridge with stainless steel screws (#6 32x2"). I got this tip from a very nice guy on the ESP boards, who has done the same mod with his Les Paul Goldtop.
3. Screwed the tailpiece down fully.
4. Redid some soldering on the tonepots (what horrible job had I done there the first time????).
5. Installed the Bareknuckle Black Dog in the bridge.
My first impressions are:
- The tone pots now work better.
- The bridge vibrates stronger, it seems to be better connected to the body thus transferring more string vibrations between them.
- Tim is a genius when it comes to pickup makings, the Black Dog sounds great in this guitar! I've not had such an organic and harmonic sound from this guitar before. It works well with the neck humbucker as well.
- Adding a fresh set of strings is a nice touch!
- 4-string conductors are sooo much easier to solder than the old-fashioned wire mesh!!!!!! The green and white cables were actually already properly soldered together and shielded, again a nice touch from a great company!
Now, to the other pickup: I took out the Miracle Man from the SG in the bridge. I had bought this used once actually (shame on me, I know!!!! :( ). It had been Nickel anyway, so it didn't match the stock neck pickup ever. I discovered something in the box, however:
Whereas the packaging says:
Seems it is time to borrow a meter from a friend and get some resistance readings on that pickup. Tonally though, my ears say it must be a ceramic magnet pickup, it's too close to the EMG81 tonally to be a Warpig.
