Mixing G&L Vintage with Hot Rail. Too much contrast?

[MJ Slaughter]

I prefer a hotter bridge pickup than the stock vintage Alnico V currently installed so I am considering the Hot Rail. Do you think that would be too unbalanced in terms of volume differences?

[SouthpawGuy]

I have a couple of Legacy Specials with the Gotoh rail pickups, one with the pickups set low and the other with them much nearer the strings. They sound quite different to each other. The one with them lowered sounds much more like a typical Legacy or Strat. I'd say you shouldn't have too much trouble getting a balance between the G&L alnico Vs and a rail in the bridge, just experiment with pickup height.

[louis cyfer]

i would recommend a klein s8 bridge pup or a fralin steelpole 43. i have tried the hotrail in the bridge with vintage alnicos and it is quite a contrast.

[Boogie Bill]

I have an S-500 with a Duncan JB Jr in the bridge. The JB has a hard time keeping up with the hot MFDs, but it has the thicker humbucker tonality, great for rock. I bought the guitar with this pickup, and I'm thinking I may go back to the original pickup. I think the JB Jr could also work very well as a neck pickup in this guitar, an intriguing idea.

The JB Jr sounds very close to the Trembucker version of the JB that I have in my ASAT Deluxe. Likewise, the Lil' 59 and the little Pearly Gates sound like their big brothers.

I love the Gotoh Blades in my Legacy Specials. I don't have any experience withe Duncan rails, but if you like the rail design, the Hot Rails should work well in your Legacy.

Good luck!

Bill

[Philby]

Like Louis, I've tried pairing a hot rails in the bridge with vintage alnicos in the middle and neck and came to the same conclusion - they're way too high output to get any balance when switching positions. I had to go to Seymour Duncan's highest output single coils, which were Quarter Pounders at the time, to get the outputs roughly matched.

[MJ Slaughter]

Thanks for the suggestions. As a test relative to each other I took 3 of my guitars and did a rough measurement of the output. I say relative because with the input trim lowered or raised the numbers would be different.

Legacy Special with dual blades bridge PU about -9 db with PU lowered, -3 db with PU raised to what I think is the maximum hight.
PRS with JB bridge PU about -7 db
Legacy vintage PU bridge -12 db, neck -16 db

So what does this tell me? Nothing really that I didn't already suspect other than I was surprised by the output difference with the dual blade PU on the Special from just lowering it a little. Maybe a dual blade/hot rail would work by keeping it lowered.

[louis cyfer]

how are you measuring the output?

[MJ Slaughter]

how are you measuring the output?

Guitar>interface (Firewire 410)>PC using a simple db meter. Very off the cuff and certainly not very controlled. I strummed an open E chord and set the meter to mark the peaks. On my interface I set it with the hottest pickup to just below red-line and left it at that.

[louis cyfer]

how are you measuring the output?

Guitar>interface (Firewire 410)>PC using a simple db meter. Very off the cuff and certainly not very controlled. I strummed an open E chord and set the meter to mark the peaks. On my interface I set it with the hottest pickup to just below red-line and left it at that.

you'd want to actually put a voltmeter and measure the output in mv, before any electronic component. there are many different dB scales as well, it is just a ratio scale, it can measure power, amplitude, rms, spl etc. remember it is a logarithmic scale, 3dB difference is twice the power, 10 dB's = 10 times the power. without knowing what kind of dB you are measuring, the results are not meaningful.