Single coil devotees advice please

[wolf5150]

I've been given a mid and neck Suhr V60LP single coil as part of a deal and can't decide what to do with them.
My only experience of true single coils was a disaster, the noise in a live situation stopped me using the guitar.
That led me to Kinmans and I've used them ever since ( and still love them )

However, my Warmoth build has Anderson SC1 noiseless singles in the mid and neck and I really don't like them... The treble is sweet but the mid and bass are hard and toneless.

Anyone try the Suhr singles ??
Should I pay to get them installed or will I regret it ?
Is the tone from single coils really that much better than noiseless ?

[freefrog]

Suhr SC's have a good rep... and could be silent too if you mounted them with a Suhr backplate. :-)

Hard to tell if you'll regret it or not. I've already mounted famous pickups that I've found frankly deceiving and cheap models which have conversely surprised me.

On the real SC vs Noiseless stuff: you open a can of worms. ;-)

As someone who uses real SC's as well as noiseless PU's (including some Kinman's, among others), I'd say that real SC's might be interesting if you plan to use them for clean and crunch tones. If you play mainly with dirt sounds, keep your noiseless PU's because SC's won't bring many differences in this case (excepted the noise).

[Kam]

Yes, you should try them. No, you shouldn't pay to have them installed.

[Ashurbanipal]

They sound pretty good to me in this clip - 3:46-7:55.

[indie folk guy]

I tend to prefer true sc's but I will admit that most of what I play is clean-moderately crunchy (I don't really do high gain stuff)

[jeremy]

ive never found a noiseless single coil that is quite as nice as a good real single coil, which for me is the antiquity II type, early 60's fender strat tone.

that said the new duncan offerings are pretty sweet sounding. i have the classic stack + trio and i think the neck and middle are great. the bridge is great too but i feel like it doesnt match the other two as well as id like. i want to try the vintage hot in the bridge with the cs+ neck and middle. most of the time i dont care about noiseless but there are some situations where it would be nice

[Archer_of_Fish]

The V60LP single coils are my all time fav single coil. Excellent pickups

[wolf5150]

Archer, you have them ?
In what guitar ?
What styles do you cover ?

[Archer_of_Fish]

I have a set in a strat and a neck/middle combo in an old Floyd equipped Kramer.


They handle pretty much anything I throw their way from pristine cleans to pretty gainy fusion sounds.

[wolf5150]

Sounds like they're worth trying. Thank you

[octavedoctor]

No, you shouldn't pay to have them installed.

Yes he should if I'm going to be the one installing them

Not that I've ever charged you over the odds eh Mark?

You are always going to get hum with single coils and there will be inductive buzz with unscreened output wires. I think the reason you had so much of it with the Bareknuckles was because you asked me not to trim the output wires in case you wanted to change it, and because the screening on the Anderson is not fully complete you need to have screening on the output wires of the pickup, (which you have with the Kinman), but I can fix that, and it will be more robust than the crappy vinyl output wire on the Kinman...

Come and see me on Friday and I'll sort out the problem with the dry joint on the bridge earth and if you want me to install the Suhr as an experiment I can do that at the same time as the new volume pot if you've got them, but leave me to put the pickup in as I can take some noise elimination precautions when I do it. If you put it in first then I have to take it out to do that.

Remember Lee Dufty from Cranes? I fitted a Suhr single coil for him (actually I refitted it after the other guy he bought it off screwed up the relative polarity of all his other pickups in an effort to get it right). He's chuffed to beans with it.

[wolf5150]

Finally having someone local who's as fussy as me, does a great job for a fair price, has been a revelation.
I'm able to try different things in a guitar to finally get it perfect.

for 25 years, wanting to try a different pickup or have a faulty pot replaced meant a 60 mile round trip just to drop it off, same to collect it plus taking 2 days off work.
Now I can pop the guitar in on my way to work and collect on my way home. ;0)