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Post by Deleted on Jun 19, 2016 6:58:32 GMT
My Kustom amp has lots of low end hence I have not experienced any shrill tops as you. My pups sound lovely on their own but not so much in 2nd and 4th position.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 19, 2016 16:50:13 GMT
Agreed. Some folks say the SC-450Plus neck pup sounds muddy others like me like it a lot. Remember though we all play through different gear like speakers, pedals, headphones, even strings. My SC-450+ neck pup sounds muddy via me Kustom amp speaker but once I run it via NUX Drive Core it sounds awesome. Etc ...
There is also the option that this neck pup sounds "muddy" when played on its own but in a mix with other instruments could sound just right.
(Im off to insulate my roof now, glass fiber here I come).
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Post by salteedog on Jun 19, 2016 20:54:24 GMT
Played my ST20 again this evening. I gotta say I'm starting to appreciate those pups more and more - even the bridge. That low end is great for muted strings and giving a real vintage chug tone. Sure the high end needs to be managed carefully with tone controls on guitar, pedals and amp but having frequencies that can be cut to taste gives options that my other guitars dont give me.
I listened carefully for any B string volume problem and I'm not hearing it in my setup. Perhaps its related to the resonant freq of you particular guitar. Are you hearing it on all three pickups?
Also, before you ditch those pups you could experiment with adding another pot in parallel to your volume pot and see if you can adjust that to find the value where your ice pick highs are tamed sufficiently.
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DefJef
THBC Moderator
Due to musical differences I've decided I can't work with myself any more.
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Post by DefJef on Jun 19, 2016 22:12:52 GMT
Played my ST20 again this evening. I gotta say I'm starting to appreciate those pups more and more - even the bridge. That low end is great for muted strings and giving a real vintage chug tone. Sure the high end needs to be managed carefully with tone controls on guitar, pedals and amp but having frequencies that can be cut to taste gives options that my other guitars dont give me. I listened carefully for any B string volume problem and I'm not hearing it in my setup. Perhaps its related to the resonant freq of you particular guitar. Are you hearing it on all three pickups? Also, before you ditch those pups you could experiment with adding another pot in parallel to your volume pot and see if you can adjust that to find the value where your ice pick highs are tamed sufficiently. The worst balance is on the neck pickup but really it all sounds tragically bad. I've turned my American Sound trebles down and bass and mids up to proportions they've never been before and I even tried playing through my Peavey keyboard amp with its ruddy big 15" speaker, to emphasise some bottom, but it's still the nastiest sound imaginable. I used to not play this guitar because it had ceramic pickups and it couldn't compete with my other guitars, but it was at least reliably unimpressive across all three pickups with its typically ceramic too instant attack. But these pickups are uneven in their usability with no note bloom whatsoever and nothing that I would call 'typical bell-like chime'. They just sound nasty, plastic and pointless. I had a word with the ever-helpful Ironstone Pickups owner, Tony Partridge, about them: Me"I put a prewired Chinese strat pickguard into a Squier last week. It contained Alnico 5 pickups with really nicely spaced pole pieces that actually fell beneath the strings much better than a typical Squier one does. So it should sound lovely right? Wrong! It's horribly toppy, almost fizzy, and badly balanced between the B and E strings. For some reason Squiers come with 500K pots which probably don't help the matter but I'm sticking the ceramics back in. There's a lot more to the sound than magnets alone it would seem." Ironstone Vintage Tone Guitar Pickups"Indeed so. Magnets do of course come in all manner of purities, so even a generic Alnico V from one manufacturer may not be precisely the same as magnets from another. Then there is pole stagger, bobbin / coil cross section, wire gauge, overall resistance etc etc. Sounds like there may even be an issue with the level of pole piece magnet saturation there. We live in an imperfect world..."
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Post by Deleted on Jun 20, 2016 18:44:43 GMT
I must say this strat with these china alnico pups is my main to go guitar these days. And I have the TE-90QM and the L-450+ mind you. The sound Im getting from these pups via me NUX MG200 multi fx on the Fender Tweed setting is simply sublime (via me AKG 55 headphones). It is so inspiring that Im now working on another idea for our Bentonite Band Im sorry to hear your pups sound that bad
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Post by salteedog on Jun 20, 2016 21:17:14 GMT
Yes. It's a pity they aren't working for you. I guess one of the surest attributes of low-cost items is variability in spec. You must have got a poor set. Like papache mine work brilliantly in certain conditions - great for clean tones with effects among other things. If you get a chance can you measure the DC resistance? Would be interesting to see if they are close to mine. I know that is but one of several factors that contribute to tone but at least it'll be an indication of variability.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 21, 2016 10:40:46 GMT
Are you sure those are Alnico? (probably a stupid question). Sounds like you have ceramics and not alnico I will (as soon Im done with renovating the house) record the new tune with these pups and will play all pickups so you can hear how they sound in my guitar. I think its the tone wood of your guitar that is creating all the fuss
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DefJef
THBC Moderator
Due to musical differences I've decided I can't work with myself any more.
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Post by DefJef on Jun 21, 2016 11:16:43 GMT
Are you sure those are Alnico? (probably a stupid question). Sounds like you have ceramics and not alnico I will (as soon Im done with renovating the house) record the new tune with these pups and will play all pickups so you can hear how they sound in my guitar. I think its the tone wood of your guitar that is creating all the fuss Unless the Chinese have decided to pull a weird con and make ceramic magnet polepieces then these are definitely Alnico pups. Of course what sort of Alnico is beyond my ability to find out. I did try sniffing them but my nose is too old and frail to be able to tell. A clean comparison of your pups would be great to hear. I have managed to calm mine a bit with a lot of tone roll off (30 to 40 % rolled off) and the pups way down. This results in a very quiet guitar that sounds okayish. I don't want to be changing my amp setting just to suit this guitar. I like to have one setup for single coils and one for 'buckers. If I could just find one usefully unique character about these pickups I'd be delighted. At the moment I'm thinking that I need to discover if this guitar just can't make nice sounds whatever pickups are in it. If it can't then it might as well go. If it can, I might get some Danelectro lipsticks or some P90s for it. Or some weird amalgam. It would be a great opportunity for me to test that 'tone wood' theory that I am so cynical about. I have a favourite Squier strat with an Alnico neck pup and two ceramics. It's just the way I want it to sound. If I'm very bored I may swap the entire pickguards over to see whether I transfer all that loveliness to the nasty guitar and all the nastiness to the lovely one. If things still sound very amiss I will supplicate myself before the great Lord Tonewood and ask His humble forgiveness.
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Post by salteedog on Jun 21, 2016 22:43:40 GMT
Well well.... 30% to 40% rolled off. That's not too far off how I usually have the bridge pup. (Although I usually prefer positions 2 and 4 anyway). Plus I have the pups set low. So maybe yours match mine after all. And perhaps it's my propensity to set my amp/pedal setting to suit the guitar that is the reason I can live with them but you cannot. My initial thoughts were that they were too bright but I've moderated my opinion since.
Regarding tonewood...I don't have much truck with those who argue for one species over another. However I do believe the resonant qualities of the body (and theres as much variation within pieces of the same species as there is between species) is important, as is the mechanical fit of the neck and the bridge.
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DefJef
THBC Moderator
Due to musical differences I've decided I can't work with myself any more.
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Post by DefJef on Jun 22, 2016 8:10:54 GMT
Well well.... 30% to 40% rolled off. That's not too far off how I usually have the bridge pup. (Although I usually prefer positions 2 and 4 anyway). Plus I have the pups set low. So maybe yours match mine after all. And perhaps it's my propensity to set my amp/pedal setting to suit the guitar that is the reason I can live with them but you cannot. My initial thoughts were that they were too bright but I've moderated my opinion since. Regarding tonewood...I don't have much truck with those who argue for one species over another. However I do believe the resonant qualities of the body (and theres as much variation within pieces of the same species as there is between species) is important, as is the mechanical fit of the neck and the bridge. You might want to moderate it back again then saltee. That 30 to 40% is rolled off on the NECK pickup. As I said earlier, the neck one on this is as bright as the bridge on the other strats I have. This is the only strat that I haven't put a jumper wire to the tone for the bridge because I'd fitted 7 way wiring and when it had the ceramics in I would just pop the neck one on along with the bridge to tone it down. This now, of course, has no improving effect since the neck is as bright as a bridge pup normally is and the bridge sounds like radio Luxembourg. I'm interested in how you adjust your amp settings for each guitar now that you are using the American Sound pedal. Up until now I've been happy to set my amp to a not-very-inspiring neutral sound, just removing any boxiness and then using the American Sound as my amp's controls. This has meant that when I swap from one guitar to another I've only ever had to tweak the three eq knobs a bit on the American Sound. But this guitar won't have that and I end up having to juggle the AS pedal AND the amp to make anything even vaguely acceptable. This then means that if I plug in a tele or a strat or an ES335-alike I've got to try and find the right amp settings again before adjusting the American Sound too. It's all too much faff just to play one guitar that sounds only meh after all that and certainly rules it out for live use. On the plus side these pups are very quiet in the hum department...it's probably only audible to dogs.
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Post by salteedog on Jun 22, 2016 10:18:04 GMT
Crikey... I indeed will row back my assessment - yours does sound way too bright.
Well to tell the truth I usually don't touch my amp tone settings at all and just adjust the American sound pedal like you do. The tone controls in that pedal have a long span and do the job nicely. (I typically set my character/whatever_its_called knob to about 1:00 for tweed type tones) I often run a drum loop from my zoom pedal through the amp also for practicing - and the only amp adjustments I do are to make those drums sound decent.
One question I guess as to whether those pups can be salvaged or not is whether there is any proper (not snappy) low-end at all. If there is then some combo of resistors to filter out the high end might save the day.
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DefJef
THBC Moderator
Due to musical differences I've decided I can't work with myself any more.
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Post by DefJef on Jun 22, 2016 10:42:09 GMT
Crikey... I indeed will row back my assessment - yours does sound way too bright. Well to tell the truth I usually don't touch my amp tone settings at all and just adjust the American sound pedal like you do. The tone controls in that pedal have a long span and do the job nicely. (I typically set my character/whatever_its_called knob to about 1:00 for tweed type tones) I often run a drum loop from my zoom pedal through the amp also for practicing - and the only amp adjustments I do are to make those drums sound decent. One question I guess as to whether those pups can be salvaged or not is whether there is any proper (not snappy) low-end at all. If there is then some combo of resistors to filter out the high end might save the day. There is a bit of reasonable sound to the bottom E A and G. They sound like a piezo equipped acoustic so, if I could get my top end less fizzy, I guess I could end up with a suitable strat to play acoustic numbers (I hate playing acoustic guitars standing up on stage). I think I may look at the pots and caps. Money could hardly be wasted on those things anyway, I might try a 0.1uF (yes it's THAT serious). I wouldn't mind trying out some flatwound strings anyway. They'd darken the tone but I don't think it's really a solution on this guitar and an expensive one at that. It's such a pity because I've never come across pickups that have pole pieces that actually sit beneath the neck strings before. About 47.5mm centres here when they are usually 50mm to 52mm.
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