Lace Sensor Hot Gold - Impressions

Silence Kid

New member
So I picked up a set of Hot Golds for (what else) my Hot Gold Strat. A few observations:

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-They really do quack/twang! Granted this wasn't my primary reason for wanting the pickups - I had experience with a Red/Silver/Blue sensor set in a Strat Plus Deluxe a while back and wanted to capture a bit of that flavor, yet happened across a set of Hot Golds at a good price instead. The Strat Plus had a very mellow, rolled-off sort of clean sound so that would have been acceptable to me. These could almost pass for standard noiseless singles. I sort of understand why Lace talks these up so much on their website.

(I might have to do an A/B recording with my STK-S4n Strat as well as with a traditional Alnico strat I have, but it wouldn't be a straight-up comparison due to some unsurmountable wiring/guitar differences. There are comparison videos on YouTube where I think the Hot Golds don't stand up very well IMO.)

-They still do the focused, bouncy, compressed 'Lace' thing too. And they still have the Pumpkins sort of character if I put any sort of distortion on them; the sustain-y sort of 'sing' with very little mess.

-They need to be set quite high to get the most out of them; contrary to my usual preference to set pickups quite low. Guess the magnetic field is too focused for that. Also - I have the 13k bridge, and there's a HUGE output difference between that and the other pickups. I don't know why I didn't expect it to be so severe. It's more than the difference between the Duncan Hot singles I had in the neck/mid before, and the Duncan Designed rail pickup. In fact- the Hot Gold bridge can clip my crappy Audio Interface quicker than the Duncan Designed Hot Rail.

Pretty satisfied- these are sticking around for now (Some before pics... I did sort of like the black pickguard look, but mint isn't so bad either. Glad I didn't match the headstock to the pickguard as I planned.)

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Re: Lace Sensor Hot Gold - Impressions

Here's that clip I was talking about! Very Quick & Dirty, GarageBand - so not the most representative thing:

https://clyp.it/pv3yy0nc

One thing that didn't quite get captured is just how noisy the true singles are compared to the Lace Sensor or Duncan Stacks. Guitars as follows:

Guitar 1 - Gold Parts Strat
(Lace Sensor Golds - Clean Neck/Distorted Bridge)
00:00 - 01:26
Guitar 2 - $50 Parts Strat
(Rose Mariposas; A5 singles - Clean Neck/Distorted Bridge)
01:27 - 02:53
Guitar 3 - American Deluxe Strat
(500k no tone - Clean Duncan Classic Stack Neck/Distorted MJ Screamin Demon)
02:54 -
 
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