Tweet
Almost Ultimate Strat Tone
Hi all,I've browsed this forum for some time, but this is my first post. Yay for me.
I play a Jeff Beck Strat that I recently loaded with a pre-wired pickguard consisting of some slightly used Duncans; Peary Gates in the bridge and SSL-2's in mid & neck. I had intended to make such a swap when I bought this axe about 7 yrs ago, but have endured a love-hate relationship with the original Lace Sensors for most of this time.
I like to run the clean channel on my Mesa Boogie in the "boost" position for that real glassy, bluesy over-drive sound (which cleans up warmly when rolling back the volume a tad). This sounded sweet with the single coils but a bit harsh with the PG. I spent some time tweaking the pickup heights and found that by keeping the N & M pu's fairly close to the strings and the PG bridge rather far away, I get some nicely varied yet compatible tones. They all sound great in the dirty channel, too.
The one thing I miss about the stock set-up is the tone control on the neck pu; with the Lace Sensor I got a smooth, singing sound by putting the tone pot on about "6", and the pot was actually very useful throughout it's entire range. With my current setup, the tone pot has no effect until you're down at about "3", and then it just doesn't sound good. Lifeless.
Both setups use 250K pots, but the capacitors look different. The current setup has a disc-shaped cap. with "503" marked on it, while the original setup has brown-orange rounded-rectangle cap. with "ic msr.022k 250h" marked on it. Is this what's making the difference?
Thanks in advance for your responses.
-Cen
Comment