Matching Pickups To A Recto

I've been experimenting with OD boost, EQ boosts around 400 Hz to 600 Hz, and other things. I use a JB pickup with modified wiring to offset the coils and to roll off some highs. I've been thinking about eventually swapping out pickups to fit the amp's voicing.

I have primarily used Seymour Duncan in my guitars if I swap pickups (JB, Jazz, Cool Rails, Hot Rails). Those are my points of reference. I was looking at the SD site with the idea of pickups with a lot of midrange or less bass compared to mids to add definition to the sound. I noticed these Alnico pickups:

59/Custom Hybrid http://www.seymourduncan.com/pickup/59custom-hybrid
Custom Custom http://www.seymourduncan.com/pickup/custom-custom
Alternative 8 http://www.seymourduncan.com/pickup/alternative-8

I also noticed the P-Rails, which are voiced evenly, but can be single coil Hot Rail, P90, or both for a Humbucker sound. http://www.seymourduncan.com/pickup/p-rails-bridge

Has anyone had experience with any of these into your Recto?

I've had the JB, Custom Custom and the Alt 8 in my Les Paul running into my Roadster. The JB has a frequency in the upper mids that just annoys me. I liked the buttery high end of the Custom Custom but the low end was tubby and loose. The Alt 8 just sounded grainy and bad in general. It was removed an hour after it went in. I ended up with a Rio Grande BBQ bucker and never looked back. That said any pickup is going to sound completely different depending on what guitar it is in. I also have an Ibanez RGA121 which is mahogany and maple but was really bright. I put a Dimarzio Breed in that guitar to fatten it up and it sounds great through the roadster too without changing my settings. Just much hotter than the LP with BBQ.

What guitar? What wood (body, neck, fretboard)?

I put a pair of BKP Cold Sweats in a PRS SC245 and it is unbelievable. (SC245 is a Les Paul style guitar). I believe that the Cold Sweats are similar to Dirty Fingers.

I've found the JB to work really well for what I do, but I've had it for over 10 years in two guitars. One was an alder body with maple/rosewood neck. My LTD AX-2E is mahogany/ebony with a neck-through maple/ebony neck with two walnut stripes. No matter the wiring scheme, it cuts through really well in either guitar. I only want a change to try something new and perhaps something closer to a medium output.

I figure that with the ample bottom end in a Recto, a pickup might not need to provide much bass.

I have variety of guitars with duncans. 3 of my Les Paul Customs have the JB\59 combo. On my classic custom w the baked fretboard it has the gold covered pickups and its a bit dark. I think I picked that one because its what i have had in all my other LPCs but I kinda wish I had picked differently now. It still sounds very good but can tend to go muddy. Now on my 1998 Showcase edition ruby LPC I have the same combo but not with the metal covers. This guitar sounds the best of all of them and I can think of no better pickup combo especially clean. It sounds great distorted but this guitar and my rk2 combo sing together in perfect harmony. I also have this combo in a Florentine LPC with gold covers and its clean and buttery and great for a smooth sound. Its particularly good for clean and I dont really play distorted on this one but it sounds quite good also if a bit too buttery for my tastes. My newest LP is a traditional 2 with a flame top that I replaced with a Duncan Custom and a Slash humbucker in the neck position. I think this may be my new favorite combination. It just rocks, particularly on the distorted channels. If I were to buy today, I would stick with the Duncan custom as it sounds to me more balanced than the JB. I also have a 1987 strat that i have the JB with a pair of 59 single coil sized humbuckers. Many of my friends think this is the best sounding of all my guitars. Its great but I like my LPs better. But it took the country twang out of the strat and gave it some hombre balls!

That said one thing you need to consider are the pots. Gibson for example I think uses 300 ohm pots and my tech always replaces them with 500 ohm pots. This makes quite a difference on the output and sound of the pickups. I highly recommend changing all your pots when you change out the pickups. The nice thing about duncan is I think they give you 3 weeks to feel out the pickups and if you are not grooving on them you can exchange them for others and I have done this in the past. You still pay for labor but its a nice guarantee, especially if you do your own work.

Hope that helps. Peter

One of my favorite pickups is the Jb but I have found with my recto that it has a little too much low end and makes the low end of the recto too loose and tubby. At least in my guitar it has a lot of bass. The JB is great with my mark IV because I can roll off some of it in the amp.

I also play emg 81's and that is much tighter on a recto. I know you are looking for passive pickups but just to give you an idea of my impression of the JB and Recto.

Well, I've begun to just change wiring in the LTD with push/pull pots and a new toggle to throw the JB and Jazz into series or parallel humbuckers. I accidentally broke a wire running to the toggle switch, because the toggle switch was broken and I rigged it to work a couple of years ago. I was going to wait until I was healthier, but now I'm just doing it as much as I can at a time.

For the spin a split I had, I'd sacrificed the tone pot, which made the JB brighter :shock:, and was tamed with further mods. I'm re-instating the tone control with a 47n cap. The pots are 500k. Since both pickups are bright, I'm doing the modern wiring. If it's too bright in the end, I can either make the cap 68n, reduce the volume pot with a resistor, or just tilt the pickup away by a hair or lower the slugs. I haven't been able to play much for the last week and a half, because of pain, but I'll suck it up and try this out when I'm done.

Call me old fashioned, but i'll take my Les Paul with stock 490r/498t pickups any day with my Mesa. Sounds great!

For a dark sounding guitar like a LP, etc., I'd highly recommend a Bare Knuckle Rebel Yell as a pickup which will match well with a Recto. It has a lot of upper mids and a very even and rich harmonic response along with a tight and somewhat rolled off low end.

The pickup is perceived as being bright because of the controlled lows, but it is also very even sounding and extremely open. It remains clear, even under a lot of gain. It is pretty much the best rock / hard rock bridge pickup for high gain rhythm tones and scorching solos when matched with a Recto.

(In general, I prefer Bare Knuckle pickups to Seymour Duncan when playing through a Mesa. Seymour Duncans are thicker sounding so they tend to work really well with something like a marshall. The more open, clear, detailed, and articulate voicing of Bare Knuckle pickups removes a great deal of the mud one can encounter with a dark and low mid focused amp like a Dual Rectifier. )

For the most part I'm pretty happy with the Burstbuckers in my Gibsons (BB1, BB2, BB3, BBpro) but I put a Duncan Custom in my Explorer for heavier tones and it sounds fantastic. I have a Shechter with a JB and I just don't like the way that sounds nearly as much. The Custom isn't quite as hot and has a pretty good balance across the tonal range. It's also nowhere near as loose in the low end as the Custom Custom.

I played a PRS Custom 22 with \m/ pickups today. Two things that stuck out were that they had a lot of low end, and that despite the low end they were still tighter than the alnico pups I normally use.

Thoroughly impressed.

screamingdaisy said:

I played a PRS Custom 22 with \m/ pickups today. Two things that stuck out were that they had a lot of low end, and that despite the low end they were still tighter than the alnico pups I normally use.

Thoroughly impressed.

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Sorry to stray off topic a bit, but I am curious about those \m/ pickups. I've been wanting to pick up a PRS Floyd Rose, but those pickups have me on the fence. I'm glad to hear you were impressed screamingdaisy, you're common sense and knowledge makes you one of my favorite posters on here, so I respect your opinion. I'm glad to hear about the tight low end, but I'm curious to know if they have that sweet high end that the 50's series PRS pickups have. That velvety smooth high end in those pickups is very addicting. Do they still sound kinda like PRS pickups? I wonder what that special wire they use does to the tone, as the \m/ pickups do not use it. Anymore thoughts on those pickups would be interesting for me. Anyone else digging the \m/ pickups?

SamuelJ86 said:

I'm glad to hear about the tight low end, but I'm curious to know if they have that sweet high end that the 50's series PRS pickups have.

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I have a Custom 24 w/ Floyd on loan to me for a few days.

Short answer is no, the top end isn't particularly sweet and the clean tone is IMO very mediocre. Kind of stiff and bland. They're clearly voiced for high gain.

The bridge is fat yet reasonably articulate, I wouldn't call it tight (ie, EMG 81), but it's not loose either. I felt it was well balanced and a good choice for high gain rock/metal. I liked that I could get a lot of pick attack without it being overbearing. I feel as though it's designed for modern high gain amps, rather than something that was originally meant to push an old Marshall.

The neck (in a 24 fret guitar) shreds well without sounding too fat, so good clarity with note separation.

One thing I'll point out about that specific guitar is that the Floyd's vibrato bar is in the way of the controls. If you're an all knobs on 10 and rarely come off the bridge pickup type player that may not be an issue for you, but for me it was a deal breaker.

The pickups sound totally different from the tinkering I'd done with caps and resistors to tame the high end after removing the tone control for a spin-a-split. I'd also dropped the output of one coil of the JB for a permanent offset.

Now the pickups are wired much like Gibson or Epiphone would do with their newer guitars and the sounds are as intended by Duncan. This is a 1 volume, 1 tone, and three-way toggle guitar. Both pots are push/pull.

The Good: The JB makes pinch harmonics easy, notes have tons of overtones, and it sounds great as a dual single coil (parallel). Parallel wiring has more volume than the spin-a-split ever did and the treble is smoother and pleasant. 8 available combinations of sounds, 6 of which are great, practical tones for my tastes. This wiring makes a guitar go really, really far towards covering a lot of sounds. Also, the Jazz sounds better with a tone control in the circuit.

The Bad: The Jazz pickup in parallel can sometimes be too quiet. It may not be practical unless a channel is dedicated to it, but then any other pickup setting is probably too loud, unless you want that dynamic. With a bluesy amp-tone, it does sound good, but I may not get much use from it. Also, I miss my monkeyed JB a little, but turning down the tone control can almost get it.

The Ugly: This tone pot can short out, because the wiper actually leaves the edge of the resistive material at zero and remains shorted until MacGyvered back into working correctly. I might be able to adjust the inside if the case can be reassembled. Otherwise, if I just stop rolling it down to zero after testing, it would be ok or I'll use another pot.

I still have adjustments with pickup height and pole pieces to do and a fresh setup wouldn't hurt. This will take time as the weather is already 100 degrees outside and the humidity has dropped under 10%. This affects the guitar neck and makes my health/pain worse.

I have to say that a parallel wired JB is totally awesome in its own right and shouldn't be overlooked if a person has one and wishes to have a brighter and slightly lighter tone. I am finding myself loving it for the Clean channel and for Classic Old-Fogy Rock. It does a great "Good Times Bad Times" tone and loses some compression from whatever the phase difference is doing to the waveforms.

firmani99 said:

I also play emg 81's and that is much tighter on a recto. I know you are looking for passive pickups but just to give you an idea of my impression of the JB and Recto.

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I had EMG 81/85 with the 18 volt mod. I later swapped them out for the Het Set and never looked back for that guitar (still have it). I tried Blackouts at the same time. If I played brutal, unrelenting metal exclusively, the Blackouts would win. The Het Set has a lot of merit for use with a larger variety of genres, the neck pickup is lovely, and I feel like it's actually passive pickups with a built in boost, instead of a hi-fi sort of thing with a boost. Rolling back the volume and tone a little gets a good Stoner kind of thing going on and the neck pickup makes me want to slick back my hair and wear a biker jacket, Daddy-O.

BTW, EMG claims otherwise, but 18V mod makes the Hets sound better to my ears. I should put that back in at some future point.

afu said:

firmani99 said:

I also play emg 81's and that is much tighter on a recto. I know you are looking for passive pickups but just to give you an idea of my impression of the JB and Recto.

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I had EMG 81/85 with the 18 volt mod. I later swapped them out for the Het Set and never looked back for that guitar (still have it). I tried Blackouts at the same time. If I played brutal, unrelenting metal exclusively, the Blackouts would win. The Het Set has a lot of merit for use with a larger variety of genres, the neck pickup is lovely, and I feel like it's actually passive pickups with a built in boost, instead of a hi-fi sort of thing with a boost. Rolling back the volume and tone a little gets a good Stoner kind of thing going on and the neck pickup makes me want to slick back my hair and wear a biker jacket, Daddy-O.

BTW, EMG claims otherwise, but 18V mod makes the Hets sound better to my ears. I should put that back in at some future point.

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Good to know. I'll have to try them at some point

deeman said:

Call me old fashioned, but i'll take my Les Paul with stock 490r/498t pickups any day with my Mesa. Sounds great!

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Agreed! My stock pickups in my Les Paul were a great match for my Multi-Watt Dual Rec

https://youtu.be/RjDwjXN9auY

An excellent video series on guitar wiring. This video is for tone controls. I used the recommended 47n cap on my tone control. I'm soon going to drop that to 22n-10n. With the control turned down, it creates a resonant peak for a cocked wah sound.

For those who don't have 12 minutes, the 47n makes the tone control a treble roll off with very little resonance. With the control on 3, I get a small peak at about 215 Hz, which is kinda cool, but turning it down further kills that small peak. With 15n, the control on 3 would make a taller resonant peak at a higher 675 HZ frequency. When the control is turned down, the peak remains, but all the frequencies above the filter are killed.

The way the guy shows differences between part values and wiring through the whole series could help someone who is looking for specific sound, by changing the wiring and components. In the case of a Recto, it could be about killing frequencies beyond 2 kHz, getting resonance in a particular range, or preventing muddiness.

Installing a Dimarzio Dominion bridge tonight in my Carvin SC90 (Alder, neck through, maple neck, Floyd). I play a Roadster. Will let you know how it turns out.

In case anyone cares, I finally played live with the new Dominion bridge pickup and my Roadster. It is just as advertised....mid heavy but I feel more of a lower mid. I did put just a touch more high end in the eq but not much. Overall very happy with it. Nice big thick tone. Easier to pull off pinch harmonics. Seemed very responsive but definitely not a crazy high output.