[mmmguitar]

Hi, fellow tone chasers. I've had Satch Tracks in the neck position of several HS and HSS guitars; and am itching to compare it to other single-sized 'buckers.

For reference: I shoot for a throaty PAF tone in the neck position for clean jazz (I do a mediocre Joe Pass impression), and also need the option to split or filter it for a passable single coil simulation. For my full size humbuckers, I use the Bluesbucker, Air Classic, and PAF Master to this end (I filter the series connections of the latter two so they're not anemic).

Despite being hotter than any of those, I find the Satch Track fits my needs if I just back it off from the strings. At the end of the day, however, my impression is that it's just a single version of the PAF Joe (which I'm also experienced with).

So: Prescriptions from the peanut gallery? I've also been looking for an excuse to try a Zexcoil ZTM4.

[gregr]

I found the Satch Track too weak and too warm to split. I will usually do a partial split using two resistors and a capacitor but that wasn’t adequate. I think I tried as much as three capacitors and four resistors but there just wasn’t enough top end to support the amount of body I thought was necessary to get a usable single coil tone by itself or to quack with an Injector Neck in the middle which I already had working well with a Chopper in the bridge.

Before that I had tried it in parallel mode with an Area 61. It was brighter and produced a useable tone once the height of each pickup was dialed in. It didn’t have a lot of quack which could have been ok but it didn’t really fit in with the rest of the tones and the height adjustments had negative effect on the other tones as well.

I had a JB Jr Neck in a different guitar and liked it a lot in standard series wiring but traditional split and parallel modes weren’t useable. I tried the same with a Hot Rails Neck which provided only a small improvement but at the expense of brightness in normal series wiring.

I’m not a Jazz guy by any means but I like the tone of a traditional PAF humbucker with the tone rolled back a bit. I think I would prefer the JB Jr over the Satch Track but that was too long ago for me to remember. The JB struck me as sounding more like a PAF but with a smaller aperture, whereas the Satch Track is even more focused, sounding more like a single coil in comparison.

Any of the three pickups I mentioned will do the job, really. Even though it won’t provide the phase-free, bell-like quality of a single coil that you can get from splitting, I think filtering is the better way to go.