NPD! SH-PG1n and SH-16b Shop Floor Custom

Natman

New member
Hellz to the yeah! Gotta love it when your pickup choice works out. I have a Hamer Newport Pro which is a lovely axe on its own, very alive acoustically. It came with Seths, but I have tried a bunch of other sets in there including P-Rails, Invaders, TV Jones Filtertrons and Manatrons. I was never 100% happy but my feeling was that the Seths were the best. I wanted the bridge pickup to have a little more guts but keeping the basic tone. The neck pickup was almost perfect IMO.

Getting to the point, I got a Pearly Gates for the neck and a SH-16 Hybrid for the bridge, both unpotted from the shop floor. Then I put A2 in the hybrid right away because I didn't want to stray too far from the Seth tone. Each got a cover and I wired them for series-split-parallel.

I am so happy with these pickups! Somebody said the PG neck was pretty much the perfect neck pickup and I'm inclined to agree. There is a tad less bass than the Seth and that bite people talk about to cut through with dirt, but overall the sweetness of the Seth remains. Excellent.
The Hybrid spreads the resonant peak and loses the honk (a good thing IMO). It has enough bass, enough mids and enough highs; very balanced but not sterile! Under gain, look out! It rips and sings. It's fluid and dynamic. There is NOTHING I can fault about it really. Responds extremely well to the tone knob! (so does the PGn!)

Oh -each pickup does really well in split and parallel too, better than most buckers I have tried. I split to the slug coil on the hybrid and the screw coil for the PGn. Parallel tones are kind of gretschy.

I only have about 90 minutes on the set and I can tweak the heights some more, but so far it's ALL good. I think this excellent guitar finally has the excellent pickups it needs to shine.
 
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Re: NPD! SH-PG1n and SH-16b Shop Floor Custom

Never would've guessed that a DD with an A2 is "not too far" from a Seth.
 
Re: NPD! SH-PG1n and SH-16b Shop Floor Custom

Very cool, Natman. Even after using Duncan pickups for about 15+ years, I've only recently discovered the Pearly Gates, and it does indeed kick ass. Sounds like a great set you got there, especially with the A2 in the Hybrid.
 
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