Lipstick Tube comparison in Strat

[BluesyStrat]

I recently built a strat with 3 GFS 4.9K neck lipstick tube pickups. I wired it standard 5-way switching with 1 volume and 1 tone control. My problem is these pickups are really weak in volume output. I originally wired it with a 250K volume pot and it was far too weak. I decided to try a 1 Meg pot and it is still really weak. For comparison I have a strat I built several years ago with the Seymour Duncan lipstick tubes. I built it using three of the 4.3K neck pickups. The one with the SD pickups sounds pretty good, not quite SRV Charlie worthy, but good (I have never tried any other volume pot values other than 250K in it though). The one with the GFS lipsticks is just too weak to push my amp enough clean and sound pretty bad overdriven. I have to crank my amp a lot harder with the GFS lipsticks to equal the volume level of the SD lipsticks.

Has anyone else had any experience comparing both these pickups with the same findings?

I really wanna keep the GFS lipsticks even if I have to have them rewound. I built this strat with gold hardware and put the gold lipsticks in it. If SD offered lipsticks in gold I would have surely went with a set of them.

This leads me to my next questions. Why are the GFS lipsticks weaker? Is it the alnico 2 magnets? I ask because the GFS lipsticks are a little hotter wound than the SD lipsticks.

I am willing to have them rewound if someone can do it with the alnico 6 bar magnets. If that will fix my problem. Will it?

 

[BluesyStrat]

Re: Lipstick Tube comparison in Strat

Thanks for your opinion, but I don't much care for mids. That is why I like SRV's strat Charlie so much. Also the reason I don't like most humbucker tones. Pretty certain it isn't the guitar. I have built several Warmoth strats over the years and this GFS lipstick equipped strat is a quarter sawn maple neck with an ebony fingerboard. The body is alder. The strat with SD lipsticks is a lesser/softer tonal flat sawn maple neck with a Brazillian rosewood fingerboard. The GFS pickups sound good with the amp clean cranked very hard, but then the amp is in preamp and power amp distortion with light attack. Overdriven they suck compared to the SD lipsticks. I am left guessing it is the magnets because the GFS lipsticks are wound a little hotter than the SD lipsticks. It is just too much of a volume drop to lay it off on the wood. It is certainly electrical. I have wondered if some signal is shorting to ground, but doing an ohm test at the output jack shows each pickup to test nearly the same as they did before I installed them. Before installing the neck was 4.66K, the mid was 4.68K and the bridge was 4.86K. That is how I placed them in the pickguard anyway. All were supposed to be 4.9K, but the output varied a bit.

Has anyone else compared the SD lipsticks to the GFS lipsticks? Is the volume difference normal or do I have some resistance somewhere? The only place I imagine there could be interruption is in the switch, but all three pickups are equal in volume output. Positions 2 and 4 are normally slightly lesser due to the parallel wiring.

The wiring is simple. I could track it down, but I don't like taking necks on and off to troubleshoot, especially when I think the problem is the pickups. It wears the screw holes out. Just wondering if anyone else has experienced this same thing?

 

[Funkfingers]

Re: Lipstick Tube comparison in Strat

Thanks for your opinion but I don't much care for mids.

Banjo it is, then.