howto check if lil'59 install is OK

[jorismak]

Re: howto check if lil'59 install is OK

I know I'm a bit late to the party, but do you know of the "Tap Test"?

I didn't know it as an official test, but yes, I did it . Only way to test if there is signal coming from it while your strings are slacked .
But it's connected OK, it measures OK, there's no hum. So that all seems fine. But I can check if there is some sort of signal coming from my middle pickup even when the 5-way is all the way in the bridge position. I'll check that when I get home.

If both coils wouldn't be working, it wouldn't 'buck the hum' as good as it does.

As far as your Little '59, you may want to play with the pickup height. Some pickups are finicky about how close they are to the strings and work better closer or farther from the strings than typical.

Haven't tried this yet as good as I should. Good point, will play around with it on some extreme low and high heights and see how it affects it.


The thing is. 'Distant hollow'-ish sound means for me instantly that there is something that's slightly out of phase if I'm mixing. So I'm afraid that the middle pickup (or neck?) is still somehow affecting the signal?. I'll tap-test it to see what's happening, but it might just be pickup height, or it might just be the sound of the lil'59 .

[jorismak]

Re: howto check if lil'59 install is OK

Ok. I tapped around. Every single coilpiece of the lil'59 is working OK, and none of the other pickups respond while the 5-way is in the bridge position. This seems OK.

I tried raising the pickup height to a level I wouldn't normally be comfortable with (there is like 3 mm between the pickup and the strings) but it does seem to give the tone more body and I don't get any weird sounds or effects added, so it seems it can't hurt.

I tried lowering the pickup, but here I discovered a problem in my mounting. I think one of the pickup-cables (sleeved set of the 4 wires) is kinda stuck under my lil'59 bridge pickup. So I can't lower the pickup real low (it won't drop any lower because a cable is under it).

I did lower the middle pickup some more so it's now only raised +/- 1 mm from the pickup plate, just like the neck pickup. Pretty low. But the neck-pickup (hotrails) is pretty high output for a neck so it doesn't hurt it to lower it, and I use the middle single-coil for when I want to do clean sounds with that single-coil twang, and not having it to high also helps here.


It sounded better yesterday, but that could also be that my sound settings were just better . I'll try to do a proper compare with my other guitars to see if it still sounds hollow.