Bridge Pickups in the Neck

[Chistopher]

Anyone try a pickup from the L500 series in the neck?

 

[jeremy]

the l500r is a great neck pup

 

[freefrog]

Anyone try a pickup from the L500 series in the neck?

I have a Wilde L500L in the neck slot of my Steinberger Spirit. Works very well in a 24 frets guitar like this, without much body resonance... In a bigger instrument, I'd not hesitate to mount the 500R mentioned by Jeremy or even a 500C.

 

[fretburner]

Anyone try a pickup from the L500 series in the neck?

I have an L500L in the neck with L500XL in the bridge in a Les Paul. Bright and clear pickup in the neck position.

 

[fretburner]

I've intentionally mounted a Cool Rails bridge in neck position of my main Swiss army knife stage guitar. It has a series parallel switch. Series = P90 territory. Parallel = Fender single coil vibe. Really useful to me these last decades. YMMV.

I think this works for moderate output single coils and single coil-sized humbuckers.

For full size humbuckers, a bridge pup would sound significantly darker when you put them in the neck position. Happened to me 2x with a 59b.

 

[RanchManSandy]

I think this works for moderate output single coils and single coil-sized humbuckers.

For full size humbuckers, a bridge pup would sound significantly darker when you put them in the neck position. Happened to me 2x with a 59b.

And yet Paul Gilbert uses an X2N in both neck and bridge

 

[Rex_Rocker]

And yet Paul Gilbert uses an X2N in both neck and bridge

Does he run them in parallel, though? I know he does that with Super Distortions.

 

[freefrog]

For full size humbuckers, a bridge pup would sound significantly darker when you put them in the neck position. Happened to me 2x with a 59b.

Personally, I've mounted bridge P.A.F. replicas in neck position several times without issue...

My strategy in such situations is to make a conscious and rational use of the parameters involved: if a pickup seems too dark in the neck slot, I fit it with a short + moderately or low gaussed magnet, for instance... and/or I pair it to high resistance pots / low capacitance wiring: weak magnetism avoids boomy lows... high DCR pots make the resonant peak pointier while low cap wires shift it up in the spectrum... non limitative list (shortened screw poles can be useful too, as well as non metallic baseplates avoiding eddy currents like in Bill Lawrence pickups, and so on)...

With too bright pickups in bridge positions, I do the contrary if necessary.

Many times, I've also put or simply played strictly the same pickups in all positions without real problems: as long as the neck pickup is far enough from the strings and the bridge pickup close to them, multiple iterations of the same humbucker in a given guitar can sound fine IME. The LP Custom that I played in the early 80s had three times the same T-Top and sounded just right.

For all these reasons, I see the idea of "b" and "n" models from a relativistic perspective. YMMV. ;-)