P-Rail FYI moment.

Sanford

Sanford

New member
For the better part of a year I've had a set of P-Rails in a Sheraton. Stats: Maple body, maple neck, rosewood fretboard, 24 3/4" scale, 2 mini-toggles for rail/parallel/90 switching. All has been well. Today for giggles and a little curiosity I decided to flip the neck pickup so that the rail is closer to the fretboard. Nice! Before I would mainly use the neck rail in conjunction with one of the bridge coils, but now it stands out on its own. I don't know if I would call it more "strat-like" per se, but it is definitely more pronounced in sound. As if it started lifting weights after school roughly 3 weeks before the homecoming dance. Anyway, thought I'd share.


Now back to our regularly scheduled threads.
 
Re: P-Rail FYI moment.

Great idea, will have to try that. Only about a .25" change in the placement of the P90 coil. Might try a double-switch by flipping the bridge too.
 
Re: P-Rail FYI moment.

I did consider doing that a while back with mine, but why do today what you can put off til tomorrow, or next week, or next month? :lol:

Nice to see that someone else did it and had a report :friday:


That said, I wonder if they can do a Rail-P90-Rail setup? Like a Rail on either side of the P90 coil (smaller, of course, to still fit in the slot) so you've got both outer and inner rails?

Hmmmm.
 
Re: P-Rail FYI moment.

I like the Rail coil on the neck-side on the neck pickup sometimes, but in an H/H guitar, the most versatility comes from mounting them Rails-inward. I have a couple guitars with 2 P-Rails and a middle single coil. I haven't gotten around to redoing the logos on one of them so I can flip it, but I will do that at some point. When there's a middle single coil, the two rails coils don't have to produce Stratty 2 & 4 tones together, they can do so combined with the middle pickup, which is pretty great. Then the neck pickup's rail coil, when used by itself, is even more bluesy than when it's toward the inside. Also on a Tele with a neck humbucker, I think the P-Rails would be great flipped around. You can order them as Shop Floor Customs with the logo on the "other side".

We've done the Rail/Screw coil/Rail design in the past. There's no room for it to be a P90, though. You can't fit the wire in there. It's an expensive pickup to make because there are 3 coils, but the Custom Shop has made them.
 
Re: P-Rail FYI moment.

Switching the bridge should have a more pronounced affect. The changes in pickup position alter the the sound in an exponential manner the closer you get to the bridge. The closer you are to the bridge the more of a change will occur when switching the rails position.
 
Re: P-Rail FYI moment.

I'll probably try flipping the bridge pickup at some point, but so far I like the sound of the flipped neck rail and standard bridge rail. I was looking at my mounting rings and noticed that when I flipped the pickup the rail was elevated slightly. I'm thinking this might be one of the factors as I noticed that switching to the rail had less of an effect on volume as it did previously. The bridge mounting ring is thicker and would raise the rail even more when flipped. Now I want to try it just to test the theory....hmmmm.
 
Re: P-Rail FYI moment.

Ok, so I decided to flip the bridge, too. There's definitely more zing on the rail coil now. After playing around with both pickup heights I think I have a good balance happening. One thing I noticed after flipping both the neck and bridge P-rails is that the parallel humbucking mode seems a little more alive than before. Before switching from humbucker to P-90 didn't make much of an apparent change in sound, now it does. I think I like this configuration better, all three modes of each pickup have a more distinct tone.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top