Worst pickup you've tried

[jibidy]

I havent played many different guitars let alone pickups but from what i have played, there have been some bad pickups.

Seymour duncan pickup in the old Tom Delonge strat, the one with one pickup. Just sounded way over the top.

EMG's consume you soul and spit it out as a sterile little black sweepy hairstyle.

EMG Hz's and some cheap Ibanez (I think it was a GA model with silver scratch plate) pickups both had a similar sound. It sounded very scratchy.

[bucketshred]

Yeah, but this doesn't help without the full context:

"EMG 85/81 set. Just awful."

( Sorry Bucketshred - nothing personal, I'm just trying to ilustrate my point  ;) )

No offence taken. To Expand...


I bought the set to put in my old Ibanez PGM. I was a wanna be shredder (not any more, give me the big riffs!) and playing in a Thrash metal band thru a Marshall TSL100. Bought the pickups thinking 'aha! Loads of dead heavy meral bands use these and some of my friends have them and they sound really heavy! Turns out that I just didn't get on with the sound or the response of active pickups. They look cack too.

I'm not slating EMG's at all because I've played guitars with other models of EMG that have sounded better and I like the tones of James Hetfield/Zakk Wylde who are both noted EMG users.

Paddy.

EDIT: I don't see a problem with people adding BKP pickups to the thread. It's easy to ask whats good about the Cold Sweat/Painkiller/Whatever but no-one really mentions any thing BAD about them. Of course, this has to be Ok'd with Tim, its his forum and he can do what he likes.

[WezV]

Worst was a pair of fender black dove P-90's.  they were not very P-90 like and quite microphonic, which wasnt surprising when i saw how badly they were made.   it takes a lot of effort to make a pickup noisier than a normal P-90

[Mr. Air]

Seems like I should have been a little more specific when typing in the thread title. But if I had we would have missed all those funny pickup lines  :D

[HTH AMPS]

I bought some 'Bill & Becky' Lawrence L500-XLs a while back and they were really cr@p.  I was expecting them to be bright, but they were mushy in the low end.  Weird.

[WezV]

tbh i have been disapointed by most XL-500's i have tried from B&B or BL USA.   shame i have a rebuild i am doing at the moment where the owner is insisting on having them :(  .... i will do as i am told and them try and convince him to change ;)

[FELINEGUITARS]

For me it was the disillusionment with the first Duncan JB that I bought to go in my Ibanez Iceman IC50 back in 1986
Dont know if it was the guitar or the pickup or if the just didn't suit each other, but it sounded lame - and I felt really disappointed after all the hype and build up from talking to the guy in the shop

[Alex]

Gibson 500T.

And some people apparently like that pickup. I found it plain horrible sounding.

[AndyR]

Gibson 500T.

And some people apparently like that pickup. I found it plain horrible sounding.

:lol:

I've replaced them (with MQs - so folks can hopefully see roughly where I was heading...) in a Gibson Explorer.

But I have to admit I'm one of the people that quite like them, based on my limited experience... it's just that I don't really play the kind of music they seemed to be begging for (and I wanted covered pickups :roll:)

Possibly if I'd replaced them with a BKP high output pickup, to produce "similar but better" results, I might view them differently, dunno :D


A more general comment, though - I have a real feeling, like others have said here, or in the past, that every pickup needs to be assessed in conjunction with a bunch of other stuff - the guitar (and its strings), the amp/speakers, the person playing (and the sound they're after, and their ability to take advantage of the various knobs at their disposal), the room you're in, phases of the moon... etc..

Even BKPs, which I love and am addicted to, and which seem more "all-rounder" than some other things I've tried, seem prone to this... and I'm sure the BKP folks would agree.

Eg - I learnt something last night.

I've been playing through modellors for years now. I've just acquired a Vox AC4TV valve amp. One of the guitars I tried it with was a Gibson Faded SG with it's stock pickups. In the shop it sounded FAB, and I was itching to get my SG through it.

Started using the amp at home at the weekend. It's a bit bluddy louder than I was hoping (even on 1/4 watt) - but that's for another thread with questions that I've got brewing.

Loads of my guitars sound fab through the amp. But my Gibson Faded SG with my beloved Riff Raffs, which is just peachy through a modellor, sounded like a Complete Turd. Muddy at one end, tinny and scratchy at the other... :(

Last night, I moved the amp to another room - the room it was eventually destined for anyway - and suddenly the SG sounds heavenly, better than through a modellor. Went back to the other room, and the turd-quotient returned...

Go figure :lol:

[Elliot]

Its like that famous story of Robert Johnson playing sitting facing into the corner of the shop being used as a recording studio to get the right bass on the recording - not all rooms are built equally!  Nothing to do with pickups that!

[gingataff]

Are the J Customs mahogany?  I'm guessing the through-necks are mostly maple.... the neck material and the trem are going to affect the acoustic tone a lot more than the body wood, in that case (I believe).

Aye. That is true, and yeah they are mahogany.

Just to clear things up a little, over the years J Customs have been made of mahogany, ash, solid flame maple, etc and the through neck is quite recent addition, they're usually bolt on.
They do often like to stick a Tone Zone in the bridge though regardless of what it's made of.

[FernandoDuarte]

Andy, the Amp was place ON the ground? As Elliot said, the groung of the room might be the difference

[Stevepage]

Duncan JB, every guitar I had one in sounded too bright and shrill. (Duncan Distortion kills it).

Some cr@ppy Schaller humbucker in a Marlin guitar that a school friend had. Microphonic, lacked everything really.

EMG 707. Sounded terrible in Alder. Too raspy and sizzly. Sounded ok in Mahogany but overall, too compressed.

[AndyR]

Andy, the Amp was place ON the ground? As Elliot said, the groung of the room might be the difference

It was more the natural reverb of the two rooms. It was on an armchair both times - can't afford to put it on the floor, 'er downstairs is very accommodating, but this thing would be pushing her a bit far! And I always try and get an amp up off the floor anyway.

Even with modellors, I've found that half the battle with getting a good tone is configuring the small amount of reverb you add... not for noticable "reverb" but just to make it more "alive"... so I wasn't that surprised when I found this out last night.

It was just an illustration of how I might have viewed the Riff Raffs if all I had was the AC4TV and the first room (incidentally, they sound great, in the same guitar, in the same room, but through my old 50W master volume valve amp... :roll:)

[FernandoDuarte]

:)