Hello,
I recently bought a Harley Benton Fusion III HSS and I plan to change the pickups, which are supposed to be the worst part of it.
I really like how people like Lari Basilio or Jack Thammarat sound with that neck pickup and I know for sure their sound doesn't come (just) from the pickup but I wanna try that. I use very often positions 2 and 4 so I'd like the middle pickup to complement well with the STK-S7 and whichever Humbucker I finally pick, but having bought the guitar plus the pricey neck pickup, my budget is a bit tight.
Any recommendation from people like GFS, Irongear, Tonerider, etc...? I mean decent pickups but not very expensive?
PS. By the way, I haven't bought yet the neck pickup but even if I'm convinced about it I would obviously consider other recommendations that sound similar
Thanks in advance
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdGoFq6yKjk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7PucVv-5t4
Comments
NOTE: Many of the Duncan Stack models employ neither flush rod magnet polepieces nor the vintage-style "stagger" pattern. Instead, the pole lengths follow a gentle curve designed to match modern fingerboard radii.
Arguably, a more important part of the sounds of Basilio and Thammarat comes from their choices of amplification and effects.
AFAIK, Tonerider does not offer noise-cancelling replacement pickups for Stratocaster.
IronGear has the Smoke Stack II. I would match a pair of these with a Blues Engine humbucker in the bridge position.*
Don't be misled by the published DC resistance statistics. The lower coil of a Stratocaster-sized stacked coils pickup contributes very little to the signal.
I'm also not super-keen on the Toneriders and Irongears I've tried, but admittedly I haven't tried that many. Not saying they're really any worse than the Roswells (and the Toneriders may be a little better), but not enough of an improvement for the money.
I think Entwistles are quite a bit better but they're hard to come by at the moment. And the build quality is arguably a bit worse (but sound is a lot better, at least on the few I've tried). They also do a noiseless one (which I haven't tried).
What I would actually do is keep an eye out on Ebay for UK-based handwinders who often sell off stuff for quite cheap. E.g. Toltec and Catswhisker often have stuff going for little more (or even less) than the likes of Tonerider, and their stuff is a *lot* better, at least in my opinion. That actually would be an upgrade (it would be a massive upgrade over Duncan, quite frankly, let alone Irongear/Tonerider, at least in my opinion), the only (admittedly pretty big!) problem being it's a bit up in the air whether they'll ever put up for sale the exact type of pickup you want.
Agreed, and arguably as much if not more from how good players they are!
I think the original Smoke Stack might have been noiseless, but the new version isn't stacked at all, it's a tapped genuine single coil. I thought it was a bit middling... it does give you massive versatility, but at the expense of tone basically, I thought. It sounded a bit bland, for want of a better word. I haven't always been completely happy with pickup swaps I've done, but that's probably the only swap I've done where I thought the original pickups sounded better!
The default Roswell HBs are disappointing: neck is always too mid-heavy, bridge too thin and weedy
Years ago I bought SD stacks, must say I thought they weren't good enough, lost a bit of crispness, whereas the Kinmans don't.
I agree about the HBs, pretty much exactly with your tonal assessment- I still think they're "pretty good for the price" (I think my HB SG sounded better with the stock Roswell humbucker pickups than my Gibson SG did with the stock 498T/490R set!), but they definitely could be better, and they're a bit unbalanced tonally, as you said.
The Roswell P90 in my SG Jr is very good indeed, without any qualifier needed for price. It's the neck version, so it's pretty low output (around 7k) but apart from that it sounds really good indeed. I really don't think- as long as you like underwound P90s!- that there'd be any need to swap it at all, even for boutique stuff, unless you're incredibly picky.
I've got a vague recollection of trying some of the Duncan stacks in a Jackson ages ago and being really underwhelmed. I'm not that fond of any stacks, as I said above, but I think they were particularly poor. (I haven't tried Kinmans, but the Dimarzio ones I've tried- the older Virtual Vintage ones- weren't too bad, but still not as nice as "real" singles to my ears.)
I polished the guitar, and set it up properly.
It plays like a PRS SE mostly. The neck is pretty chunky but I like that.
Not impressed with the pickups though
https://www.thefretboard.co.uk/discussion/comment/3800791/
Maybe an HB-sized P90 or similar, for the neck, or a Kinman Twangbucker I have already
Humbucker – Page 2 – Roswell Pickups
The HAF-N and HAF-B
The bridge one has more treble and less mids than the neck
?????
But they still sound more mismatched tonally to my ears than they should be, even being as close as that in output. I have other pickups (better ones, admittedly) which are around that resistance apart, or even a bit less, and once the heights are adjusted to compensate for the volume difference they work a lot better tonally as a set.
It must be something to do with the wind, though- I think you would expect the lower output one (the neck one) to have more treble and less mid if everything else were equal... I'm not a fan of having a warmer neck pickup and brighter bridge pickup. That exacerbates the tonal difference already there from the positions in the guitar and basically makes it too much of a difference to dial in a sound which works for both, at least for me.
EDIT: Also I'm kind of inclined to take a lot of their figures there with a pinch of salt- look at the figures for the covered version of that same pickup, the DC resistance is virtually the same as the uncovered ones, but the "output" figures are massively different!