HeftyMetalGuitar
New member
It has been a while since I posted something on this forum due to a hectic work schedule and just spending a lot of time playing an building new guitars. Well by building I mean assembling since I didn't route any of the bodies or anything like that, just put together 3 part-o-casters and revamped a Charvel pro mod. I went through a several Duncan, Bare Knuckle, Fralin and Lace pickups trying to find the right combination for the selected woods. Here is a rundown of the builds:
BUILD 1: Koa body, 1 piece Rosewood neck
BUILD 2: Ash body, maple/ebony neck
BUILD 3: Alder/flame maple body, maple neck
PRO MOD REBUILD: Pro Mod body, roasted maple neck GD6100 frets
On paper I imagined the following descriptions:
BUILD 1: warm mid range tone with sizzling high end
BUILD 2: luxurious low end, balanced mids, snappy high end
BUILD 3: moderate bass, robust mids, smooth highs
PRO MOD: balanced bass and upper mids which stand out
To my delight, my descriptions were spot on with one exception: the ash body I received warmer than I expected. In fact I looked closely at what grain pattern could be seen in the routed cavities because knocking with my knuckles on the body seemed like I was knocking on alder. It was tempting to put the rosewood neck on this one instead to restore the sizzle you might expect from an ash body. It turned out to be a very fine piece of wood though and sustains beautifully.
It would be remiss not to consider pickups in the wood selections so I opted to go with HSH routes on all three. For the middle pickups: build 1 Fralin blues, build 2 Duncan SSL, build 3 Lace sensor gold. I bought a couple of used pickups like a Brobucker and a Fralin Pure PAF and had an old Duncan SSL from a Japanese strat and a Lace Sensor gold which I can't recall where I picked up. Here were the initial humbucker selections:
BUILD 1: Brobucker, Jazz
BUILD 2: Bare Knuckle Black Dogs
BUILD 3: Riff Raff, Mule
PRO MOD: JB, 59n
I was expecting the Brobucker to be a real PAF kind of thing possibly somewhere in the neighborhood of a Whole Lotta, 59b or Seth Lover maybe, but I didn't get any of that from this pickup. It's fairly dark and fat and wasn't a good match in the koa body so I put it the the Charvel which it took to much better. It's like it blended into the wood sound of the koa strat but sat better in the alder body of the Charvel. It doesn't track your pick attack as quickly as you would expect but you can hear the hotter output. In my mind the archetypical PAF sound has kind of an airiness and openness, especially in the high end, but what the Brobucker brings me to is essentially what I get out of a Dimarzio Air Zone. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that a blind audio test of the Brobucker and Air Zone would only be identifiable by people keenly familiar with the Tone Zone and Air Zone since they (it) has a particularly interesting harmonic content.
The Brobucker is a cool pickup so I decided to keep it and find a use for it somewhere down the line. The Fralin Pure PAF was an ideal match for the koa build and wasn't a bad match for the Jazz neck either but I opted to buy the Fralin bridge & neck PAF set and left the black covered Duncan SSL in the middle position.
Build 2 and 3 could not have gone any better on the first shot. I am totally blown away with the Bare Knuckles pickups. How do they manage to make loud, hotter wound PAFs that still manage to sound like vintage PAFs? The Riff Raff is an amazing pickup. It's loud and EXACTLY what you would expect from a Jimmy Page pickup, but it can do so much more. It doesn't get muddy at all with distortion so brootz is within the scope of what it can do well. The Riff Raff set comes with the Mule neck which is a whole other kind of pickup and they don't sound similar at all. It's cool though because you can have 2 very different sounds from the same guitar. The Mule is one of the best neck pickups there is period. It reminds me a lot of the Jazz neck but with a little more of everything. I don't know that it would be a favorite among the Gibson R(x) guys who have $4000 Les Pauls laying around because I wouldn't necessarily call it a classic sound. In a sense I consider the Mule a modern version of the Jazz. It seemed to struggle slightly at time to keep up with the Riff Raff but very careful adjustment of pickup height cured most of that.
Most of you probably don't want to hear general statements about pickups but I'm not going to say much more about the Black Dogs than that they are simply outstanding in every possible way. You can get anything you want out of these pickups. Even though I pretty much leave my guitar volume and tone controls wide open, Black Dogs give you a lot of versatility using them. If you want bark, bite, honk, woman tone, whatever, it's all there just in the guitar volume and tone.You can sit down with a fair amount of gain and play anything from blues to thrash without touching a single amp or guitar control. Black Dogs are quite unique and I feel almost like not telling anyone as if it's a secret that I don't want anyone else to know about.
Then there's the tricky Charvel Pro Mod. I don't know what it is about these guitars. Maybe they use inferior wood to what they use in the Charvel custom shop or who knows but even though the guitars are very good overall, it's really hard to find the right pickups. Maybe it's the thick coat of finish they use that doesn't let the guitar breath. It reminds me of one of those heavy poly finishes you get on a contemporary Japanese copy or something. I am reminded of the Highway one strats Fender used to make before coming out with the American specials. The Highway one was the predecessor to the American special and it had a thinner finish which I think was a different kind of finish. Nevertheless Highway 1's seemed to breath better and that's what I kind of get with these Charvel USA and Pro mods except a little more pronounced.
Nothing sounded right for me in the Charvel but I happened by a crappy little guitar shop on a long drive home a few days ago and picked up a Duncan Hybrid Custom/59 which I installed with the Jazz neck. BAM! That was it. I will never change the pickups in this guitar. A strat with a Floyd Rose trem + a Custom/59 hybrid cannot be topped. Before the Charvel seemed like it was stuck in the 80's but now it can not only do 80's rock better, it even gets great cleans too. Perhaps the Custom/59 hybrid is underrated or unrecognized as a great clean pickup. I sat around for hours on this little Princeton RI playing clean stuff like Fur Elise, Moonlight Sonata, and the Beatles!
I don't have much to say about the single coils. The Duncan SSL is a pretty good pickup. It's pretty good, not great, but not bad in any way so I will keep it because it works best as a middle pickup. The Fralin Blues is outstanding but seems more suited for bridge. The last is the Lace Sensor which I have a few things to say...
The first experience I ever had with Lace pickups had to do with these ugly, cheap Lace guitars. They looked cheap, felt cheap, and the headstock looked stupid, but one of them had Alimitones, another had Lace Sensors, and another had Holy Grails. The Alumitone was actually a good pickup even though it looks funky. The Holy Grails to me are love/hate pickups. The Holy Grail set was great switching around between clean and dirty sounds but at least part of the time left a bland taste. Then there were the Lace Sensors which I think were red, blue, and gold, and I probably liked them the least of all. They reminded me of the Samarium Cobalt pickups Fender used to use in their American Deluxe model. The output is high, there is no noise, and there is no muddiness, but at the same time there's a weird flavor kind of like what alnico gives to a pickup but unlike alnico it's sterile. I'm sorry to say that I hated the Lace Sensor gold even though it's actually a good pickup because there is an inherent flavor that repulses me.
Next step is to experiment with a ceramic magnet in the Jazz neck to see if I can keep the tone but increase the output. Well that is what I have been up to lately and my experience since I last posted. +1 for the Duncan Custom/59 Hybrid. It's a bright, 80's rock humbucker with lovely cleans and hotter output than a 59. Duncan doesn't seem to market it this way but it's clearly a shredder's pickup as far as I am concerned.
Ah yes and the 12 pickups were:
Lace Sensor gold
Duncan SSL, Custom/59 Hybrid, 59n, JB, Brobucker
Fralin Pure PAF, Pure PAF bridge/neck overwound, Blues single coil
Bare Knucle Black Dog bridge/neck, Riff Raff, Mule
BUILD 1: Koa body, 1 piece Rosewood neck
BUILD 2: Ash body, maple/ebony neck
BUILD 3: Alder/flame maple body, maple neck
PRO MOD REBUILD: Pro Mod body, roasted maple neck GD6100 frets
On paper I imagined the following descriptions:
BUILD 1: warm mid range tone with sizzling high end
BUILD 2: luxurious low end, balanced mids, snappy high end
BUILD 3: moderate bass, robust mids, smooth highs
PRO MOD: balanced bass and upper mids which stand out
To my delight, my descriptions were spot on with one exception: the ash body I received warmer than I expected. In fact I looked closely at what grain pattern could be seen in the routed cavities because knocking with my knuckles on the body seemed like I was knocking on alder. It was tempting to put the rosewood neck on this one instead to restore the sizzle you might expect from an ash body. It turned out to be a very fine piece of wood though and sustains beautifully.
It would be remiss not to consider pickups in the wood selections so I opted to go with HSH routes on all three. For the middle pickups: build 1 Fralin blues, build 2 Duncan SSL, build 3 Lace sensor gold. I bought a couple of used pickups like a Brobucker and a Fralin Pure PAF and had an old Duncan SSL from a Japanese strat and a Lace Sensor gold which I can't recall where I picked up. Here were the initial humbucker selections:
BUILD 1: Brobucker, Jazz
BUILD 2: Bare Knuckle Black Dogs
BUILD 3: Riff Raff, Mule
PRO MOD: JB, 59n
I was expecting the Brobucker to be a real PAF kind of thing possibly somewhere in the neighborhood of a Whole Lotta, 59b or Seth Lover maybe, but I didn't get any of that from this pickup. It's fairly dark and fat and wasn't a good match in the koa body so I put it the the Charvel which it took to much better. It's like it blended into the wood sound of the koa strat but sat better in the alder body of the Charvel. It doesn't track your pick attack as quickly as you would expect but you can hear the hotter output. In my mind the archetypical PAF sound has kind of an airiness and openness, especially in the high end, but what the Brobucker brings me to is essentially what I get out of a Dimarzio Air Zone. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that a blind audio test of the Brobucker and Air Zone would only be identifiable by people keenly familiar with the Tone Zone and Air Zone since they (it) has a particularly interesting harmonic content.
The Brobucker is a cool pickup so I decided to keep it and find a use for it somewhere down the line. The Fralin Pure PAF was an ideal match for the koa build and wasn't a bad match for the Jazz neck either but I opted to buy the Fralin bridge & neck PAF set and left the black covered Duncan SSL in the middle position.
Build 2 and 3 could not have gone any better on the first shot. I am totally blown away with the Bare Knuckles pickups. How do they manage to make loud, hotter wound PAFs that still manage to sound like vintage PAFs? The Riff Raff is an amazing pickup. It's loud and EXACTLY what you would expect from a Jimmy Page pickup, but it can do so much more. It doesn't get muddy at all with distortion so brootz is within the scope of what it can do well. The Riff Raff set comes with the Mule neck which is a whole other kind of pickup and they don't sound similar at all. It's cool though because you can have 2 very different sounds from the same guitar. The Mule is one of the best neck pickups there is period. It reminds me a lot of the Jazz neck but with a little more of everything. I don't know that it would be a favorite among the Gibson R(x) guys who have $4000 Les Pauls laying around because I wouldn't necessarily call it a classic sound. In a sense I consider the Mule a modern version of the Jazz. It seemed to struggle slightly at time to keep up with the Riff Raff but very careful adjustment of pickup height cured most of that.
Most of you probably don't want to hear general statements about pickups but I'm not going to say much more about the Black Dogs than that they are simply outstanding in every possible way. You can get anything you want out of these pickups. Even though I pretty much leave my guitar volume and tone controls wide open, Black Dogs give you a lot of versatility using them. If you want bark, bite, honk, woman tone, whatever, it's all there just in the guitar volume and tone.You can sit down with a fair amount of gain and play anything from blues to thrash without touching a single amp or guitar control. Black Dogs are quite unique and I feel almost like not telling anyone as if it's a secret that I don't want anyone else to know about.
Then there's the tricky Charvel Pro Mod. I don't know what it is about these guitars. Maybe they use inferior wood to what they use in the Charvel custom shop or who knows but even though the guitars are very good overall, it's really hard to find the right pickups. Maybe it's the thick coat of finish they use that doesn't let the guitar breath. It reminds me of one of those heavy poly finishes you get on a contemporary Japanese copy or something. I am reminded of the Highway one strats Fender used to make before coming out with the American specials. The Highway one was the predecessor to the American special and it had a thinner finish which I think was a different kind of finish. Nevertheless Highway 1's seemed to breath better and that's what I kind of get with these Charvel USA and Pro mods except a little more pronounced.
Nothing sounded right for me in the Charvel but I happened by a crappy little guitar shop on a long drive home a few days ago and picked up a Duncan Hybrid Custom/59 which I installed with the Jazz neck. BAM! That was it. I will never change the pickups in this guitar. A strat with a Floyd Rose trem + a Custom/59 hybrid cannot be topped. Before the Charvel seemed like it was stuck in the 80's but now it can not only do 80's rock better, it even gets great cleans too. Perhaps the Custom/59 hybrid is underrated or unrecognized as a great clean pickup. I sat around for hours on this little Princeton RI playing clean stuff like Fur Elise, Moonlight Sonata, and the Beatles!
I don't have much to say about the single coils. The Duncan SSL is a pretty good pickup. It's pretty good, not great, but not bad in any way so I will keep it because it works best as a middle pickup. The Fralin Blues is outstanding but seems more suited for bridge. The last is the Lace Sensor which I have a few things to say...
The first experience I ever had with Lace pickups had to do with these ugly, cheap Lace guitars. They looked cheap, felt cheap, and the headstock looked stupid, but one of them had Alimitones, another had Lace Sensors, and another had Holy Grails. The Alumitone was actually a good pickup even though it looks funky. The Holy Grails to me are love/hate pickups. The Holy Grail set was great switching around between clean and dirty sounds but at least part of the time left a bland taste. Then there were the Lace Sensors which I think were red, blue, and gold, and I probably liked them the least of all. They reminded me of the Samarium Cobalt pickups Fender used to use in their American Deluxe model. The output is high, there is no noise, and there is no muddiness, but at the same time there's a weird flavor kind of like what alnico gives to a pickup but unlike alnico it's sterile. I'm sorry to say that I hated the Lace Sensor gold even though it's actually a good pickup because there is an inherent flavor that repulses me.
Next step is to experiment with a ceramic magnet in the Jazz neck to see if I can keep the tone but increase the output. Well that is what I have been up to lately and my experience since I last posted. +1 for the Duncan Custom/59 Hybrid. It's a bright, 80's rock humbucker with lovely cleans and hotter output than a 59. Duncan doesn't seem to market it this way but it's clearly a shredder's pickup as far as I am concerned.
Ah yes and the 12 pickups were:
Lace Sensor gold
Duncan SSL, Custom/59 Hybrid, 59n, JB, Brobucker
Fralin Pure PAF, Pure PAF bridge/neck overwound, Blues single coil
Bare Knucle Black Dog bridge/neck, Riff Raff, Mule
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