Installing The Spoils Of Rock!

In my last post I wrote about the items I picked up at the Orlando Guitar Expo.  Now it was time to install some of the pickups I bought.  I was really curious about the 59' reverse polarity and Pearl Gates Plus set I bought.

The first thing I knew I was going to do was flip the magnet in the 59'.  I didn't want it to be a "reverse polarity" either.  Actually, I got to thinking, and remembered what the players on the Seymour Duncan User's Forum talked about.  They said that an Alnico 2 magnet in a 59 sounded great.

In my Dean Icon I changed the 59's Alnico 5 magnet out for an Alnico 4, and really liked it.  So I was more than enthusiastic about changing the Alnico 5 for an Alnico 2 in this pickup.  So I took the pickup apart, and ended up getting hostile.  You know why?  Look at this photo.  Do you know what is wrong?

That magnet is black.  That means it's a ceramic magnet.  It is NOT an Alnico 5.  This could mean a few things.  First, someone changed the magnet.  This pickup looked to be wax potted after the fact, so I am leaning this way.  The other possibility is that, they came this way from Seymour Duncan.

For those wondering what an Alnico pickup looks like, here is a side by side comparison.

Notice how the Alnico pickup looks shiny like aluminum?  That's what the magnet that was in the 59' should look like.  Not jet black.

It got me to thinking, I should check the Pearly Gates Plus.  Now a standard Pearly Gates pickup has an Alnico 2 magnet.  A Pearly Gates Plus has 200 more winds per coil, and comes with an Alnico 5 magnet.  I opened it up and found this.

That's another black ceramic magnet.  It should not be there.  I ended up changing it out for an Alnico 5 magnet.  So I ended up putting everything back together, and installed it in my Honeyburst Plaintop Epiphone Les Paul.

After getting everything straightened out it sounded amazing.  I mean it was just awesome.  The 59' with an Alnico 2 magnet sounded like a true blues pickup.  It still had the slightly mid-scooped PAF sound, but it just sung.  

The Pearly Gates Plus just screamed.  I could see someone could have just this pickup in a single pickup guitar, and be happy with their sound.  This pickup has "Texas Tone" written all over it.  I'm going to have to break out a slide, and try playing it that way.  

The next thing I wanted to try out was the Rio Grande "Muy Grande: Stelly" pickup.  I was still ecstatic about picking it up for $15.  

So I installed it in my black MIM Stratocaster.  The Rio Grande website said it was a cross between a Tele bridge pickup and an overwound Stratocaster pickup.  Once I tested it out I could see what they meant.  

When over-winding Strat pickups they tend to go one of two ways.  The first is they tend to become more overdriven.  The highs come down, and the mids and bass come up.  Think of Dimarzio's Red Velvet.  

The second is that they become "bigger."  They will still stay clean, but the sound is bigger and louder.  Again, the highs come down a bit, the bass goes up, and the mids stay just a hair scooped.  A good example of this would be Dimarzio's FS-1.  

This pickup was definitely the second type of pickup.  It was big and clean like a Tele bridge pickup.  It was fairly balanced.  Again, the highs came down, the bass came up, and the mids were slightly (very lightly) scooped.  

Unfortunately, it's just not my sound.  I liked the Artec rail humbucker I had in there before much better.  No problem.  I can sell this one on Reverb.com.  I can actually make a pretty decent profit on it too.  

So I was glad to test all these pickups out.  You win some, you lose some, but overall I'm happy with everything I did today.  Any day I get to work on guitars is usually a good day.  So I had a good day.