Tele pickup project

[Djairouks]

Hi there,

I recently found an amazing tele of an unknow brand and I want to have a better sound suited to my style.
I'm looking mainly at seymour duncans, since I like the sound of their pikcups, but would need help on narrowind down to which pickups to select.

It's mainly to do rock with some delay and reverb, think david gilmour, the edge, the jezabels, I know you're going to say why a tele then, since most of them use strats. Well I love the warmer tele sound, especially when you strike the strings fast and am a big user of chicken pickin.

I will also want a solid distortion, not too modern, but not vintage either, so since I'm also a long time Iron Maiden fan, I taught of hot rails. They use it even for clean part which I love.

For the neck i'm pretty much lost, don't know wether to use a single or humbucker in a single housing, was thinking of a alnico II pro, but really don't know.

So if anyone can help me on this I would be really glad.

Thanks !

[Gypsyblue]

I have a Jerry Donahue and a Fralin Vintage Hot single coil in mine. Tried a lot of pickups in this guitar before settling on this combo. The Fralin is RW/RP compared to the Jerry Donahue so I have humcancelling when the two pickups are combined.

An APS 2 or even a SSL1 would have been nice too, but I already had the Fralin.

I think an APS 2 and a Jerry Donahue would be a killer set. Those pickups would smooth the ice pick treble of most Teles but still twang and have a fatter sound than vintage style alnico 5 pickups.

[Djairouks]

I don't know, seems to me the JD is too vintage and wouldn't have enough balls if needed, I will not do metal normally more on the prog rock side, but would it be enough for straight non vintage distortion ?

[G0lden]

I just put a set of the Quarter Pounds (custom shop tapped version) in my Tele. I set it up with a 500k push / pull volume pot and have both hooked to the switch such that down is full output and up is tapped. I then wired them to the 3 way switch like normal, so I end up with a tapped N / tapped parallel / tapped B and full N / full parallel / full B setup.

Anyways, with that aside, I ended up with my Tele either sounding really heavy (very P-90 ish), or almost stock. The twang is still there with the tapped bridge. It really sounds like 2 different guitars, depending on the position of my switch.

[Djairouks]

Dear G0lden,

Can you explain to me a little bit more about the tapped option, I always had humbuckers on all my guitars routed straight, so I understand that it lowers the power output of the coil, but how is that different from the volume control ?

I could test my tele further yesterday and the neck pickup is actually really impressive, I don't know if I'll change it I will try to make a sample and put the link here, so that you can hear it in action to give me your thoughts.

I ordered a hot rails for the bridge, because the bridge pickup is not that good and I have in mind trying also to split the coils, can anyone tell me if they have tried that and how it sounds ?
I ordered it because of this video which i think sounds really great http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeTdn7S1Iqk

Cheers

[SirJackdeFuzz]

If you want (((balls))) in your Tele tone, look no futher than these three mate !


http://www.seymourduncan.com/product...r/high-output/


. . . and one more !


http://www.seymourduncan.com/product...t_for_tele_le/

[G0lden]

Tapping is where they wrap the pickup just over half way and tee off an output. They call that one the tap. Then they finish wiring the pickup. In the case of my Quarter Pound bridge, the tapped output measured 6.8 k and the full output measured 12.1 k. So it's like having a pickup wrapped 2 different ways. I either use the first half of the coil, or the whole coil.
( I even thought about trying the second half of the coil :-) )

[Djairouks]

Okay thanks for this clarification, I think I was mixed up because a lot of people mix the coil tapping with coil splitting in forums and videos.

I decided to install the hot rail in the bridge, add a small 3 way toggle to enable lower coil, full, or upper coil use. Because I still like a good distortion that's not too vintage, hope it will be okay .

Then I will definitely make a small sound file and post it here, so you can hear the neck pickup and tell me if a seymour would be close but better, or if this one is allready good enough.

Overall thanks to everyone's insight !

[Djairouks]

I think I might go for a SSL-4 in the neck, my other guitars can handle all the nice knockin on heavens door and nothing else matters, so I guess I'm going here for a real single coil sound here.

Will see if it fares well with the hot rail full or split, but I think it will be a nice guitar, can't allready stop playing with the stock pickups !