Review: Holydiver Revisited

[darkbluemurder]

Just curious:
what's distance between strings and Holydiver poles (bridge) for you? (in mm if you can  8) )

Good question - I never measure, I just set it where it sounds good to me. My guess is that it is about 2mm to the 1st and a bit more to the 6th string.

Cheers Stephan

[seancorker]

It's a sort of same experience when I loaded my swampash strat with a Crawler and Irish Tours. Took me some time to find the sweet spot, especially with the middy Crawler. Once you got it right, you dig the beef and push of the Crawler, which is like the HD a very good bridgepickup in (non-mahogany) bolt-on guitars.

I've got the Crawler in a mahogany body Kramer Nightswan and it is awesome! Chunky thick and cuts through in the mix. As others have said, the PU height is key. I set mine so that the clean channel stays clean on full volume. On the dirty channel the mids don't compress and the top end sparkles.

[Telerocker]

It's a sort of same experience when I loaded my swampash strat with a Crawler and Irish Tours. Took me some time to find the sweet spot, especially with the middy Crawler. Once you got it right, you dig the beef and push of the Crawler, which is like the HD a very good bridgepickup in (non-mahogany) bolt-on guitars.

I've got the Crawler in a mahogany body Kramer Nightswan and it is awesome! Chunky thick and cuts through in the mix. As others have said, the PU height is key. I set mine so that the clean channel stays clean on full volume. On the dirty channel the mids don't compress and the top end sparkles.

 :D Yeah, it's a great pickup, even in mahogany I see.

[darkbluemurder]

Now what's left to do with that guitar? Enhance the wiring. I only got a 5-way selector wired the normal way except an automatic humbucker split in #4 (counting from the neck pickup as #1), master volume (500k log) and master tone (250k log). I got a 470k resistor which is in parallel to the volume pot when the humbucker is split to bring the load down to approx. 240k. I will use a push-pull pot in the third pot spot to be able to split the humbucker individually and wire the pot as a blend control to be able to combine bridge and neck pickups.

Update: I did this wiring yesterday evening and it did everything I expected from it. This was the first time I heard the Holydiver split individually (the 5-way-rotary on the PRS does not offer this option with the stock wiring), and it sounds great there, too - like a strong single coil but retains some of the humbucker compression which makes it a bit more forgiving than a real single coil in the bridge. The neck plus bridge combination sounds great as well, especially with the bridge pickup split.

At the same time I installed a volume kit (aka treble bleed), consisting of an 1 meg ohm resistor in parallel with an 150pf cap, soldered between the input and wiper terminals of the volume pot. This retains the highs when turning down the volume control, and it does so for all pickup selector positions. Now this guitar is even more versatile than it was with the basic wiring.

Cheers Stephan