I have a soloist with a neck strat pickup and a bridge humbucker. My original design was an SCR-1n (cool rails) at the neck and a TB-5 (Duncan custom) at the bridge. The switching was neck series, neck split, neck and bridge series, bridge split, bridge series. Axe had 500k vol with stewmac treble bleed and 500k tone with a .022 mF cap. Problem: Not enough stratty spanky character in the neck, not enough output when neck was split, and splitting humbuckers just gets you back to Humville. Also the tone cut was unuseable, instant mudbag with those values. So, I went through Cruiser bridge, Fast Track 1, and finally a Vintage rails neck, with 1 meg vol and tone pots, and switching that did parallel instead of split. It is now f****** awesome sounding.
So my experience with the cool rails was that I loved the overall tone but I feel it needs the brightest control harness possible to allow for some typical strat sparkle and spank. I am also curious about the parallel performance. Hoping it will be a chameleon like the vintage rails.
I have never tried a hot rails but hear a lot of 'smooth n dark' comments about it.
Of course fully 75% of the misinformation out there is just that, misleading.
Due to what I've learned concerning the importance of potentiometer values and how they load the high end, I'm hoping that the cool rails will redeem itself with the 1 meg vol and no load tone. (I really want the shortest, most transparent i.e. brightest signal path possible, but he tone cut is kind of valuable with different amps, rooms, etc.)
Cagey, I use 1 meg volume pots on most of my guitars, and I have noticed that most of the cut happens late in the spin, although the effect isn't preventing me from using the volume as a gain reducer. I typically control gain with amp channels/pedals and not the volume knob. I have two OD's and a boost stacked up after a compressor so there's lots of textures available there. Anywho it depends on how the natural resonance of a particular guitar translates through the amp; I have a 1pc alder strat with a roasted maple/pao ferro boatneck that is plenty bright with a 500k, and the aforementioned soloist, flame over mahog with flame/kingwood neck, that didnt really come alive till the 1 meg pots were installed. I use audio taper CTS emerson pro or Fender pots which are brass shaft CTS anyway. Wish they made 500k and 1 meg no-load pots with solid shafts. And I wish for a 1 meg solid shaft dpdt push pull from emerson! So nice, those push pulls... Should I be using linear taper, or whatever other taper may exist? And I take it you just stick with 500k volume pots?
As for pickup combos with the three mini switches, yeah its 3x3x3 combos possible, one of those being all off, so yeah, 26. MOSTLY this axe will let me try different rails designs and find out which ones are more versatile using series/parallel options. So far, vintage rails is king there, in parallel giving a hifi, quacky spanky sound that also distorts well, and a big hot beefy series tone that has nothing in common with the parallel setting. Quite impressive really. It IS the only unique rail design between Duncan and Dimarzio, with the 3+3 sensing arrangement. Will NOT work split! Only hears three strings. I guess similar to Fralin split rails, sort of, when almost all the other designs out there are miniaturized side-by-side coil designs that hear all six strings with both coils.
