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The Pickup Place / Re: Advice on a HSS set up

« on: November 19, 2020, 05:07:13 PM »

Cheers for the suggestion, I just looked up that wiring and the diagram is intense, but does sound like it would be great. I'm discussing getting a 5 way selector and using one of the following set ups: position 1 - bridge humbucker
position 2 bridge humbucker single coil (can decide which coil in the wiring)
position 3 - middle single coil
position 4 - split neck pickup
position 5 - neck humbucker
or position 2 could be bridge split coil and middle single coil together and position 4 could be the same thing with the neck pickup. Honestly there's too many options, haha

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The Pickup Place / Re: Advice on a HSS set up

« on: November 19, 2020, 11:52:53 AM »

So today I found out from the luthier I'm working with that we can route the neck pickup cavity to potentially create a HSH setup. I know this now changes the question, but it adds another level of struggling to choose, haha. I'm thinking now of going with the Crunch Lab/Liquifire combo (John Petrucci is absolutely my idol and I love the tone on Black Clouds and Silver Linings, which I understand was recorded mainly on these pickups) and then the true velvet in middle position. I'm more likely to just use the middle pickup in conjunction with the humbuckers to flavour their tone rather than playing much with the middle pickup alone, so thinking this is a decent solution.

Any thoughts on this set up, are these 3 pickups a sensible combo?
Thanks,
Jon

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The Pickup Place / Re: Advice on a HSS set up

« on: November 18, 2020, 02:49:43 PM »

Hi Stephan,

Thanks again for your help and suggestions. I'm not buying anything until next month now so I'll explore everything you've suggested and try to remember to let you know what I've gone for and how it turns out!

Cheers,
Jon

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The Pickup Place / Re: Advice on a HSS set up

« on: November 18, 2020, 01:01:18 PM »

Hi Stephan, thanks for the really helpful information!

In all honesty I rarely play with the middle pickup in any guitar I own, I'd say 80% is rhythm playing on the bridge and 20% lead/legato in neck position. Then again I rarely play a guitar that isn't just two humbuckers which is why I'm straying a bit into uncharted territory here! From a little bit more research and listening I'm liking the sound of the Injector (doesn't hurt that I love Paul Gilbert) or the True Velvet, but I see that both are relatively low output compared to my other two chosen pickups, and also recommended for a 250k pot. Will these fall victim to using 500k pots because of the other two pickups? If these would be too low an output, what would you say is a baseline figure to be looking for on the Dimarzio site in terms of output?

Thanks,
Jon

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The Pickup Place / Advice on a HSS set up

« on: November 18, 2020, 07:00:26 AM »

Hi All,
I'm currently working on a project of renovating an old strat copy, with an HSS set up. I'm pretty much settled on a crunch lab in the bridge and from a bit of research I'm thinking of the Air Norton S for the neck pickup as it is supposedly tonally similar to the Liquifire, which is normally paired with the crunch lab but won't fit with my HSS set up. My question is, with this set up in mind what would be an appropriate middle pickup? I've read that mixing single coils with humbuckers can compromise the tone of both, and if I'm understanding correctly the Air Norton S is really a Humbucker, just in the size of a single coil pickup, have I got this correct? Does this mean I should mainly consider other single coil sized Humbuckers when looking at middle pickups, or is the change in tone from mixing H and S only marginal?

Apologies if these are obvious questions, I'm an experienced player but never got much into the tech side of things before so have never had to consider pickup combinations.

Any thoughts, opinions or help very much appreciated.