Re: Pick up suggestion for LP Peter Frampton
If it were up to me, I'd get the whole lotta love bridge pickup and the sentient in the neck: I love the clean, 'flutey' tones of the sentient and I love how it responds to the tone pot. You can easily 'fatten' up the tone with the tone pot without it instantly going to mushy territory.
As for the middle, I'd pull out whatever's in there and install the stag mag, hook each coil up to a push pull pot which engages one coil of the stag mag + coil splits the respective pickup (so you'll need two push pull pots). That way, you can actually get really useful tones out of that middle pickup. If you need me to draw up a schematic, let me know
P.S.: there are two options for this.
Option 1: use one push pull pot to split both neck and bridge simultaneously (that's a well known schematic) and combine that with a second push pull pot to add one coil of the middle humbucker to the circuit.
Option 2: you still have two push pull pots but one works for the bridge, the other for the neck: it splits the outer humbucker plus adds a coil from the middle pickup.
The downside of option 2 is that you can't choose per pickup what you want and that you always get the middle pickup automatically when split. The upside is that you always get a fairly usable tone. Conversely, the downside of option 1 is that you need to pull out two pushpull pots if you want split + middle pickup. It's a bit of a tossup. Personally, I am in favor of option 1, to be honest, but that's because it gives me the most tones under my fingers.
I devised this schematic because I love the look of a 3 pup LP but feel the middle humbucker is always underutilized and is, to be honest, a stupid pickup choice but a decent middle singlecoil with the looks of a humbucker are rare. I finally, FINALLY found one that works really, really well but they're 100$ a piece OEM pricing. Compared to 50$ OEM pricing for Dimarzio, EMG and many others, that's a bit of a stretch.
