Mixing brands

[bananagab]

Hello,
I fell in love with the sound of the Alnico Nailbomb on the bridge after watching a few Muse covers on Youtube. I've been looking for quite some time for new pickups for my PRS S2 Custom 24 which is very fun to play but sounds very bland and boring.

Unfortunately, BKP being expensive good stuff, I can't really afford to buy a set of pickups from BKP. I've already settled for the Nailbomb, I want to know if some of you have had good experiences mixing a Bare Knuckle pickup with a SD or a DMZ pickup in the neck. I briefly looked at the Dimarzio Paf Joe and the Seymour Duncan Alnico II Pro neck.

I mainly play alternative rock, classic rock and some blues occasionally.

Thanks!

[Serratus]

I have a guitar with a BKP Rebel Yell in the bridge and a diMarzio air Norton in the neck - got the diMarzio for next to nothing from eBay and it will get replaced with another BKP sometime, but they work absolutely fine together. So you should be ok, just be aware of voicing and output when you pair them up, the same as you would with any two pickups (ie, make sure you consider the relative outputs of the two pickups in relation to each other, etc).

[Dave Sloven]

I could see the PAF Joe working with the Nailbomb.  It seems to work fine with the Super Distortion.  PAF Pro might also work well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tC5EgF8mnaY

[bananagab]

Thanks for the inputs!

I decided to try a Alnico II Pro bridge in the neck position because I found one used for 20 bucks and I ordered the Nailbomb. Looking forward to try this combo!

[ztevie]

If you plan to split coils from each humbucjer and use them together in any position of the switch, beware that they might be out of phase or loose the humcancelling. That's why middle single coins often are RWRP, Reversed Wind/Reverse Polarity.
This can be corrected by swap hot cable on one of them, but worst scenario  you need to flip magnet in one of the pickups.
With that said, out of phase tones can be pretty cool sounding sometimes.

[one]

I recently made a mistake mixing brands, I think.

I have an Ibanez S520 loaded with Crunch Lab and Liquid Fire. I'm in love with the latter, but I was bored of the CL, don't get me wrong, I liked it, but I took chances just to put something with more bite, and I was very curious about mixing brands, especially a Duncan for the bridge, the Black Winter. Man, it's a month since I changed it and still weird as hell. When I play at home it's not so bad, but playing with my band is a strange feeling. It's like the two most incompatible pickups I've ever heard, The BW sounds very trebblish and thin, cannot listen to it in the mix, the LF is awesome for solos but not in a metal rhythm context, so the only way here is playing with the two humbuckers compensating each other.

I kind of think I made a big mistake here, got a new amp so I'm going to give it a last chance, if I don't like it the next day, I'll go back to the Crunch Lab or something different from Seymour Duncan for the bridge. (yes, I haven't learnt anything) :(

[ztevie]

Trebley and thin sounds like out of phase. Doublechecked the wiring?

[darkbluemurder]

Doublechecked the wiring?

This is indeed something to check since DiMarzio and Duncan use different color codes.

Cheers Stephan

[one]

Trebley and thin sounds like out of phase. Doublechecked the wiring?

Didn't know about that, a local guy changed them for me.. but I don't actually trust him too much, so it could make sense. 

I don't know anything about wires and colours, that's why I took it to the guy, can you orientate me about any specific recommendation to check that wiring? Otherwise, I'll just turn to my good old safe DMZ.

I include a pic in case somebody can help here, remember, the bridge pickup is a SD and the Neck one is a Dimarzio:

[ztevie]

Hard to say without the wiring diagram and it's not easy to see on a pic either... But it looks like red from both pickups goes to the switch. If HOT is supposed to go directly to switch then with DiMarzio color code it's correct, but not with Duncan,they use black for HOT.
Check which 2 wires are tied together without going to any switch or pot for each pickup, it should be different between them. For Duncan red and white together, for DiMarzio black and white.
  I'd say he wired them wrong... Check this color scheme below.

[one]

Sorry for hijacking this thread and thanks a lot for your help, ztevie.

One more thing that might help identifying the problem came to my mind. The distorsion channel sounds, as I said, trebley and thin, but what puzzles me more is that the clean channel barely sounds, the output of this pickup is supposed to be very high and I raised it a lot, less than 1 cm. from the strings.

[ztevie]

It could be wired in parallel? Then the dc resistance will go from for example 15k to 3 or 4... You need to check how it's wired. If the wiring is on the humbucker is broken. But i doubt it... 

[one]

Thanks for your help, guys, I took the guitar to the tech for a quick resoldering and now I HAVE a Black Winter pickup. Cannot wait for Sunday to test it properly with my band mates. :)