In my guitars:
1980s Fender Stratocaster 57 reissue.
Stock standard Strat pickups. Gotta take pickguard off and see if there's anything special about them. In the in-between positions of 2 & 4 they are great sounding for that Texas Blues sound.
1990s Epiphone Casino.
Stock P90s. In bridge position it rocks out but overall I can't get into this guitar, feels so sterile to me. My guitar repairer thinks it's a great guitar. I've been thinking of swapping out P90s for the Kinmans to see if that changes my mind.... It gets The Beatles tone for sure, but my overall experience with this guitar has made me wary of looking at ES styled guitars in future. Just the feel of it...I can't explain why, sorry. Neck? Body shape? Body thickness? I'm not sure.
Warmoth #1 Telecaster. First Warmoth I assembled. Has an
old Tele L series bridge pickup & a 1970s Guild Humbucker in the neck position. The huge disparity in the balance of the pickup outputs has been resolved by incorporating an
EMG ABC blend pot (buffered inputs) instead of 3 way blade switch. A 3 knob Tele... No blade switch. I have had these pickups since 1970s & NO WAY will I part with them. The bridge pickup can squawk and bitch on in high gain amp configurations and twang with the best too. The Guild humbucker is the closest I have to a PAF sounding humbucker. Will melt your face off with buttery goodness on high volume lead applications.
Warmoth # 2 Jazzmonster.
Bill Lawrence L500 neck & bridge positions. All sorts of issues with this assembly. Picked the wrong body wood and neck combination and it made the natural reflective sound too brittle and tight. Maple body, maple neck & ebony fretboard.....I wouldn't recommend that. I went down the path of using active EMGs to control the tone & use active EQs but the EMG pickups were too sterile adding to the problem..... Used EMG 89s too, which also had issues with what height to set the pickup - for single coil, operation or humbucker operation....unless there's plenty of natural harmonics flying around to smooth out the inaccuracy of the pickup height these pickups aren't the best for a job of solving issues with a guitar....I needed a flat response, QUIET type of pickup. I did ask here & got told Bill Lawrence L500. I already had one from years before so I got another and the consistency of the build of the pickups between the 2 eras is uncannily close. With Bill's finest thrown in, I added an
EMG ABC Blend Control and a EMG Treble & Bass EQ active system and that enabled me to set the pickups up well and now very workable. Underneath the pickguard is a DaVinci Code's worth of puzzling wiring that is not professionally wired up. But it works and I am reluctant to delve back in there again!
Warmoth#3 Carved Top Tele (see avatar pic).....
Kent Armstrong Firebird Mini Humbuckers, neck & bridge positions.Saw the neck on Showcase, had to have it (we've all been there, right? :icon_thumright: ), got the body built custom.... looks like a real princess of a guitar but again, there's issues. Warmoth routed the control cavities in the traditional Gibson Les Paul style and not the more open shape. As the CT Tele body was new to Warmoth at that time, I'm not sure if I didn't spec it out for the more open cavity or they just routed the trad shape in. I'm not blaming them but the reality caused issues.The routing channel between the upper bout of the body (where the switch is) and the control cavity is incredibly narrow and if you start using active electronics, it becomes a nightmare trying to engineer ways to get the wiring through. Anything more than 3 wires requires some magic and a heap of lubricant....swearing helps too. By the time I got to this instrument,
Seymour Duncan had got around to releasing the Blackout Modular Preamp. This means you can run the pickups of your choice into the BMP and then make the system active. The BMP has an EQ'd tone shaping preamp section... You have to have four conductor wired pickups and two pickups only. If you have a Strat you have to forget this option or engineer some crafty way of getting 3 pickups to work in a buffer/preamp that is designed for two. I had 2 Kent Armstrong Firebird Mini Humbuckers and ran that through the Seymour Duncan BMP. These Firebird pickups are very close to authentic sound of original Firebirds (I once owned one of those) but here's the rub. If you want that Heavy Metal djent sound that you often seen associated with Seymour Duncan Blackout systems, you really have to crank the snot out of the amp preamp stage to get it. While the Firebird pickups are inherently mild humbuckers, the BMP system doesn't alter it too much unless you go into heavy gain applications. I feel SD made a marketing mistake when they released this BMP by having all these hard rock & HM videos promoting the system. It does just fine on clean guys.... I am considering swapping out the BMP for a 18v Bartolini system if I can ever make head or tail of their website as to what system is best for a guitar.... With the two other Warmoths using 18v EMG systems, it makes sense to use 18v across the board in all active loaded guitars. The BMP does NOT like 18 volts. 9 volts ONLY.
As you can see, my pickup selections are eclectic and I have detailed the reasoning behind it so folks can see that sometimes there is not just a case of slapping in any ole pickup and it sounds instantly great. It's quite funny seeing the Jazzmonster cranked up, the L500 can blow doors off cars, especially if you scoop out the Bass & Treble EQs & place the boost into +6dB territory.....but it looks like a surf guitar :icon_biggrin: .
