Black Hawk. To buy or not to buy

[LesPaul70]

Hello again after a long while.

I'm a long time BKP user (see my earlier post from much earlier). I'm currently having a custom LP style guitar built, and looking for pickups to put into it. Of course, thanks to my very pleasant earlier experiences, BKP is the top of the list...

So here's the deal.

The neck pickup will be an Abraxas. That much is certain. I have a Crawler set in a Les Paul Standard, and the neck pickup (basically the same as Abraxas) is exactly what I want from my neck pickup.

The bridge pickup is the problem.

I was going to go with a ceramic Warpig. I have an alnico 'Pig as the bridge PU in a Gibson SG, and it is very, very good indeed. For my future custom Les Paul, I thought I'd get the same albeit with a more modern flavor, hence the ceramic version.

Then I made the mistake of surfing the BKP site and this forum. And discovered the Black Hawk.

I have never used that pickup so I have no prior experience. But the samples definitely fascinate me. I especially adore the wonderfully lush rich harmonic content I hear in the samples. It just makes me smile every time I hear it.

So it became a coin toss. A C-Pig or a ceramic Black Hawk?

I talked to Tim already, and was ready to pull the trigger on the Black Hawk already...and then started second-guessing my choice.

What bothers me that I have already had, in the past, other bridge pickups that had excellent rich harmonic content (wonderful for lead playing!) but were somehow thin and weak for heavy rhythm playing through certain amps. JB was one (and perhaps the worst offender in this regard - but it was great for solos), and the stock BurstBucker Pro in a Gibson LP Standard was another (nowhere even near as bad as the JB, though). Ultimately, I ended up replacing each...with BKP pickups.  The SG got an A5 Warpig in the bridge position (instead of the JB), and the LP Standard got a Crawler set to replace the BBPros. So I got much phatter-sounding pickups and was very pleased with the results!

So...am I inadvertently heading down the same road again? Get a bright pickup with wonderful harmonic content only to toss it away because it is too thin and weak for rhythm playing?

Or how would you describe the lows of a (ceramic) Black Hawk? Are they thin and inaudible? Or does it have enough body and low end for heavy riff playing?

How does it compare to a Seymour Duncan JB in this regard? (Or to a BurstBucker Pro, for that matter?)

Any help will be appreciated! Please help me avoid making a colossal mistake that I will regret later. 

[Dave Sloven]

I haven't used a ceramic bridge yet but I have two sets with the alnico bridge and a ceramic bridge struggling to get on a plane to Australia during covid.

I also have the Impulse set

The alnico Black Hawks have considerably more output than the Impulse bridge, and more low mids.  People say that the ceramic is tighter sounding than the alnico BH.  The Impulse is because it is brighter, and I think the ceramic will be brighter too. The Impulse seems to need a thicker guitar (I tried it in an SG and found it lacking) but the alnico BH has plenty.  The Impulse sounds amazing in a heavier guitar like my Schecter C-1 Blackjack ATX, which also sounded great with the Black Hawks

You might want to look at the Impulse set rather than the Black Hawks in a Les Paul, especially if there is a lot of wood in the guitar to give it a lot of beef.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kot1vCp0IQ

I have no hesitation in recommending the Black Hawk neck, Black Hawk alnico bridge, Impulse neck, or Impulse bridge ... I just haven't tried the ceramic BH bridge yet but based on my experiences with the others I ordered one
 
Comparing the alnico War Pig and alnico Black Hawk in my SG the Black Hawk is more powerful and yet has better cleans.  The Impulse bridge lacked bottom end in that guitar but is fine in my Schecter, which is all mahogany, set neck, and ebony fretboard

I have three amps that I have played them through, all Peaveys: JSX, 3120, and 6534+

Here is our recent album all recorded with the alnico BH set. https://slovendoom.bandcamp.com/releases

[LesPaul70]

Aww, please - I was just trying to make up my mind between a Black Hawk (that I don't know) and a Warpig (that I know very well and would be a safe bet), and now you suggest a third pickup! That said, I really liked the sounds in the Impulse demo, even if not exactly the kind of sound I'm after. But just thinking about it confuses me even more.   And now I'm also wondering "ok, so what about an Alnico Black Hawk vs a Ceramic Warpig".

Seriously though...

Although my custom guitar will be a "Les Paul style" guitar, there will be some notable differences. That's why I'm having it custom-built, after all. For one thing, it will have a little less wood than your typical Les Paul. I want a slight body bevel (just a very slight one, not Stratocaster-deep by any means, just something that doesn't hurt my ribs), and the fretboard will be 24 frets, so the cut will need to be a little deeper. Another significant difference is that the bridge will be a Floyd Rose FRX. (Yes, I was a huge EVH fanboy when I grew up...and who knows, there just might be a hair metal gig in my future, although I'm maybe a little old for that kind of thing...and it's not my cup of tea, musically speaking, anyways.) So effectively it will be something of a 'Super Les Paul' concept the same way as old Jackson and Kramer guitars were labeled 'superstrats'.

What this means, practically, is that the loss of (some) tone wood and especially the bridge will munch up some tone and sustain. Hence the need for pickups with a little more output and thicker tones to offset that.

And since I have previous experience with old 1980s superstrats (Jackson, Kramer, you name it), I would avoid particularly bright pickups with a floating bridge. They can sound excessively trebly and tinny (of course this will depend on a number of other things as well, not the least of which is the tone wood). So I guess that's basically what I was asking, whether the Black Hawk would be a 'bright' pickup since its projected EQ curve on the BKP site suggests it emphasizes the top end of the frequency spectrum. In which case I might be safer with the Warpig.

But based on your description, I understand that the Black Hawk will not be short on the low frequencies (unlike a JB, for example), and its output is at least on par with the Warpig, all of which sounds great to me. But that also makes my choice so much harder because I think I was already going to ditch the Black Hawk and simply go with the safe bet (Warpig). Safe but buring - it would have been much more interesting to try something new.

Maybe 50.00001% of me wants something new (or 49.99999%, hard to say, it varies from day to day). The Black Hawk is the only BKP pickup that made me feel this way - the other newer BKP offerings that I hadn't encountered before pretty much left me cold. Either they were too dry/'djent-sounding' to my ears  or simply didn't sound that much more interesting than the Warpig. But I immediately fell in love with the wondrously rich harmonic content of the Black Hawk. ...And then started having the aforementioned doubts about its bottom end fullness.

[Dave Sloven]

If you are building a custom guitar, why don't you use a proper recessed Floyd Rose, Schaller, or Gotoh?

The FRX is not that great really.  The Gotoh GE1996T is brilliant. I would also go 25.5" scale like the Schecter Solo-6 Blackjack SLS FR:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofXPZGm0j1g

If the wood is thick enough to take a recessed FR with a 33mm brass block it will be fine with a less bassy pickup like an Impulse.

That's the other thing: the normal FR design gives you all that hardened steel and a brass block, which add chunk to the tone.  The Gotoh certainly did add that to my Schecter Stiletto 6-FR, which came with a cheap licensed FR with some horrible pot metal block.  The guitar gained weight but the balance and tone improved as well as the functionality of the guitar.  I got the Gotoh top mounted 41mm locking nut and locking tuners as well, that guitar never goes out of tune, even after big divebombs.  I've just ordered another one to replace the FR1000 in my C-1 Blackjack SLS FR-S.

All I can tell you is that the alnico Black Hawk is beautiful in my Schecters ... the neck pickup also.  If anything the neck pickup is the star, it is amazing.  Like I said I am waiting on a ceramic Black Hawk currently stranded at Langley waiting for a plane to Australia, but you can hear the differences between the Black Hawk bridges in the following video, which is a seven string but sounds similar to my six string tuned to C standard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qacdnnbe2k

As you can hear in the video, bottom end bigger and warmer, leads warmer, top end rolled off in the A-Hawk vs the C-Hawk

[LesPaul70]

Thanks again for your invaluable insights!

The FRX is something of a compromise here. The main advantage is that it is somewhat reversible: if it is not working out as well as I want, I can (relatively)  easily jump over to to a fixed Tune-O-Matic solution. The regular Floyd wouldn't be as easily reversible after all the woodwork. (The FRX also happens to fit the visual look I'm after better than a regular Floyd.)

As for the original pickup question…

I confess I'm totally confused here. Unable to choose between a C-Pig and a C-Hawk, I'm starting to think maybe I should go with an A-Hawk instead! It actually seems to combine a number of attributes I'm after. and besides I believe Alnico jives better with my sonic ideal than ceramic, in general. Something of a compromise, maybe, and yet another option to mess up my head with.

Or maybe I should just sleep on it and gather my wits before I commit to a hasty solution.

[Dave Sloven]

The alnico Black Hawk is unlikely to disappoint if you like the alnico Warpig.

It is tight but also has that alnico quality, a throaty purr.  It is an excellent lead pickup (you can probably hear this in Josh's lead playing on our album linked above, where he used bridge, middle, and neck positions at various times, with a bit of reverb.

The sound is pretty much the Black Hawks straight into the Ultra channel of my JSX for the leads, no boost, fat switch off, and reverb added. The 'narrower' sounding reverb is a Mooer Skyverb, the wider one is some kind of stereo reverb plugin that Tim used in post. We recorded wet and dry versions of each lead section and compared the wet version with the dry one with the stereo reverb and chose which sounded best.

Both left and right clean tracks were done on the Clean channel of the JSX and the Weber cab, with the left channel at the start having a Boss MO-2, MXR Carbon Copy and a Slow Gear type plugin for that synth effect, the right just having reverb.  The clean intro to track 4 was done down the middle like a lead track with the same settings as the right clean guitar on track 1.

The right dirty rhythm is an alnico Black Hawk set in my C-1 Blackjack ATX (the same guitar was used for all the leads), no boost, into the Lead channel of my 6534+ and an upper V30 in a Orange PPC412 slant cab.

The left dirty rhythm is another alnico Black Hawk set (yes, I bought two sets!) in my Stiletto 6-FR into an MXR/CAE MC401 set at 9 o'clock into the Crunch channel of my JSX, then a lower speaker in another straight front 412 with Weber Legacy speakers.

The C-1 is mahogany body, mahogany set neck, ebony fretboard, Gotoh SG381 MGT tuners, Black TUSQ XL nut, and (then) TonePros tune-o-matic bridge, string-through-body.

The Stiletto is mahogany body, maple bolt-on neck, rosewood fretboard, Gotoh SG381 MGT tuners, Gotoh GE1996T tremolo and FGR-2 locking nut, 33mm brass block.

Both guitars have the 550K CTS pots and 0.022 Jensen PIO caps from BKP.

Despite the differences in construction the sound of both guitars is remarkably similar, which is one reason why I replaced the alnico Black Hawk set in the C-1 with the Impulse set after installing a Gotoh 510FB bridge (the brass saddles on that bridge did warm up the sound a bit, so I knew I could afford the more cutting sound of the Impulse). They sound a bit different now. The Black Hawk set has been moved into a 2007 Gibson SG Special Faded Worn Yellow, which used to have an alnico War Pig set.  In that guitar the Black Hawks are tighter and more aggressive sounding compared to the War Pigs, but the guitar still seems to have a lot of bottom end, especially compared to when I had the Impulse set in that guitar briefly. The Impulse set has a lot less bottom end because it is intended to work in setups that have a lot of inherent bass.  The Impulse sounds great in the ATX with its new bridge, and will give us a little more difference between left and right if we choose to use them both on a recording again.  Josh tends to do more of the faster tremolo riff stuff over my slower doomy stuff at times, or when we are both doing the tremolo stuff together the Impulse will give added top end.  But I really like the sound of the alnico Black Hawk, it is tight but I can get real doomy stuff out of it with 11-56 strings in C standard on a 25.5" scale.  I don't think I would install a ceramic Black Hawk into the Stiletto but it would be fine in the ATX, which is darker (despite the ebony board ... I think the bolt-on maple neck has more of an effect on the sound).

Sorry if any of this confuses you, but I can recommend the A-Hawk, it is probably that perfect middle ground you are looking for.  It certainly smokes the EMG set in Josh's C-1 Hellraiser, and even more so the SD Blackout set that came in the ATX, which sounded pretty bad with the JSX.

[LesPaul70]

...so I pulled the trigger and jumped off the deep end. Sort of.

Just placed an order for Abraxas neck and Black Hawk (alnico) bridge. Thank you again for the excellent advice you've given me, it really helped me finally make up my mind! And with reasonable certainty that the pickups will not let me down.

Now it just might take a while before I can hear/see the pickups in action. The guitar might take a while to complete. In fact, I haven't even got the mahogaby yet (working on that right now, though).

I'll let you know how it all turns out - maybe in a year or so, realistically speaking. 

[Dave Sloven]

All the best, I'm sure you will love the Black Hawk.  I've just picked up a Schecter Sun Valley Super Shredder FR so I'm going to put the War Pig set back in the SG Special to put it on the market and put that alnico Black Hawk set into the SVSS.  Planning to hook up a push-pull master tone for a kill pot for just the neck pickup so that I can do the old Randy Rhoads stutter trick with the pickup toggle selector.  Should be fun.  You can't have a shred guitar without the capability to do that!

I seriously love the Black Hawks and the Impulses.  One day I would like to try the Cobras, preferably in some kind of Telecaster style guitar with a flatter radius fretboard.

At this point I have:

alnico Black Hawk set x 2
Impulse set
ceramic Black Hawk bridge
Stockholm bridge
Miracle Man bridge
Cold Sweat set
alnico War Pig set

I've also had an alnico Nailbomb set but recently sold it.

They are all great pickups.  The trick is to find something they work well in.  The Black Hawks seem to be the least finicky about the guitars you put them in so you should be fine.

EVERYTHING sounds different when you put into an SG.  SGs always sound like SGs, and SGs always sound best with P90s.  That is probably the most important thing I've learned.