Re: Just heard Texas Hot demo on YouTube,,and,,,,WOW!!!!
WOW!! What an amazing sounding neck pup! Now my decision to go with the Surfs or the Hots is all the more harder to make. Bottom line, am I going to lose those sweet & quacky middle pos. sounds that I've heard from the Surfs by going with the Hots? When I hear the Hots being described as "not so much hot as they are dark"
I think it was me who said that.
Please, try the APS-1 first, or the Surfers. I don't have insider info, but I suspect the Surfers sell better than the Texas Hots based on internet searches results. They haven't been around as long, and yet they garner more mention. I just removed a set of Texas Hots after not getting tonal satisfaction from them after a year.
The deal is that the SSL-1, APS-1, Ant I and Ant II all seem to have roughly the same coil, with the major difference being the magnet's strength. The full charged A5 in the SSL-1 can be a little aggressive and bright, the Ant II Surfer is a little degaussed down to around 40 from 50, and that seems to be a sweet spot. Lollar and Fralin degauss their magnets to about this amount as well, based on my own measurements of pickups I have bought from them. The Texas Hots are likely A2, and they're degaussed down to about 30 (it can vary from pickup to pickup since AlNiCo isn't the most stable, and stability decreases as the magnet becomes weaker). IMO, Texas Hots go too far down to the point of losing high end sparkle and having mushy dynamics, or "feel". I believe you need a lower wound coil to pull off this weak of a pole piece, and 6.3K is simply too hot of a wind for 30 gauss. I have Lollar Tweeds with similarly weak magnets, but they are wound to 4.9K to 5.3K IIRC, and it just works out a lot better.
You can't really trust YouTube clips, the differences between nearly all these Strat pickups deals in frequencies and nuances that are easily destroyed by the recording and YouTubing process, or the difference is more felt than heard, and you can't feel a YouTube demo. You might have been more impressed by the player and his good technique, than the pickup, in other words.
