Patriot54 said:
The only thing I'm still unsure of is pickups. At first I was considering the Fender 1954 set but my guitarist friends are talking me into doing Seymours or DiMarzios. I would prefer something as close to a real 54 as possible rather than Texas style Antiquities and DiMarzio seems to have more choices. Maybe something hum-cancelling like Area 58s or standard single coils like the True Velvet set? :dontknow:
Any suggestions?
I don't know what a "real" '54 sounds like (I'm only 54 years old myself), but I suspect it's pretty shabby. Most of those old guitars have a LOT more romanticism about them than any kind of quality build or sound. Even if you liked the sound of one you may have heard, chances are it was a fluke. They didn't even know how to
spell "quality control" or "repeatability" back then, let alone exert any effort toward it.
But, if you're interested in experimenting just a tad without taking out a second mortgage on the house, you might want to consider
a set of True-coils from GFS. I've played with a lot of different pickups from a number of different manufacturers over the years, and these sound exceptionally good. I mean, if you didn't know any better, you'd think you were playing single coils, but they're noiseless and they're very high-quality parts. It's not like you're getting some half-assed $2 Chinese knock-off. Icing on the cake is there's no marketing at all, so the price is down where if you don't like them, you can almost throw them away. A full set costs about what a single DiMarzio would.
Also, don't forget about Bill Lawrence's (the
real Bill Lawrence, Willie Stich) offerings. His stuff is often magical, but suffers the same lack of marketing so you don't hear about them. Again, a bargain price as a result for some very high-quality parts. Pay special attention to the "
MicroCoils" (page down a bit; site design leaves a lot to be desired). It's a similar design to the True-Coil, where the bucking coil is much smaller and mounted below the main pickup coil. For both designs, it means they're noiseless relative to a regular old single coil, but they're not truly noiseless. It's just knocked back about 90%. But, because of the low influence of the second coil on the pickup's performance, they just sound like quiet singles.
