Beefier pickups for Tokai strats - suggestions?

Hi all

I've got a Springy with Us and a Goldie with VIIs. Both sound amazing clean (esp. the Goldie), great with mild breakup, pretty good with light distortion, but mushy and thin with any significant level of distorion. Using a TS-9 rather than than a high gain setting on the amp itself (Blues Junior) seems to improve things.

I'm considering changing the pups in the Goldie and was wondering what other forum members had tried and what seemed to work best...

In an ideal world I'd have the basic tone and clean sound unchanged but better handling of higher gain. Though having said that, I'm kinda tempted to try something more radical like these: http://www.vintagevibeguitars.com/windows/sc_90Win.html

I don't want a strat that I can play metal on, just one that holds its mid/low clarity & balls with a fait bit of gain.

Any suggestions about improving gain handling without actually changing the pups will be welcome too!

Which Springy do you have? I'm guessing an ST50 if it has Us? I'm curious if it's ash or alder.

I would suggest that one option is Fender Texas Specials, which have the advantage that you should be able to pick some up cheap on eBay. My Springy ST80 is ash, and had Es, & I found them too thin and brittle. Texas Specials seem to have given the sound more body, mid range & punch - the output is a bit higher too.

They're controversial though - read the reviews on Harmony Central. Some people love them, some hate them. They seem to be very sensitive to the height they are set at - raise them too high, and you can mess up the tone. I hated them on my Fender - muddy and indistinct - but they seem great on the Springy.

Another option is to fit a smaller cap in the tone circuit (I use a .022) and just back the tone off to 5. This takes just the top end away without messing with the mids in the way that a bigger cap does. It seems to fatten the sound up by emphasising the mids.

Finally, are you sure about your amp? I'm really not impressed with my Blues Junior, certainly when compared to my Blues Deluxe. Even setting the bass and mid up full, the treble right down and the fat switch on, it sounds thin and lacking in grunt to me. Unless I have a duff model, I can't understand why people rave about these amps. Maybe this is part of the problem?

Good luck, & keep us posted.

Mike

Thanks for your thoughts.

My Springy is indeed and ST-50, but I'm not planning on changing it - it is totally stock and in great condition, and as it is 57-style I don't really expect it to rock out anyway. My Goldie, on the other hand, I bought cheap(ish) to be a workhorse, and is a RWB 60s-style.

As for Blues Juniors - I love 'em. Been playing an old green-board one since about 97 and recently bought a newer cream-board version, which has a lot more top end but doesn't lack bottom end at all. The drive on it is a bit less creamy than the old green-board version though.

I think the problem is that he pups are quite low output, so I have to have the Junior's gain up high and that causes a bit of compression and hence loss of clarity and lows.

I swear by GFS I28's - boutique overwound vintage staggers. Cost you around ?35 the set of 3 and are easily a match for the major names in pickups. I have them on both my '57 and '63 replica Fernandes strats. Altogether beefier sound without losing authentic Strat tones.
From Guitar Fetish shop on ebay. You wouldn't be disappointed.
Beats Fender pickups hands down.
Regards.
Barry.

I had an 1976 Ibanez Small head Strat a few years back, I bought the guitar from Michael Jacksons guitarist- I'll never forget that Guitar-It was set up with Seymor Duncan Single Coil Pups-
The trick was he had a two Push Pull POTs that would switch two or three pickups to play together-or out of phase-it was a killer sounding strat with a Killer humbucking sound-Or if you liked single coil sound-Sold that Beatch - Kinda regret it but ya know...... it was just an Ol Jap Strat :roll:

Are all three pickups a problem for you, or is it particularly the bridge pickup?

Cheers for the replies guys. Sounds like GFSs are worth looking into.

Actually, the bridge pickup is handling gain better then the middle or neck at the moment. I always favour the neck pickup (regardless of what type of guitar I'm using) for soloing, and the neck pickup on my Goldie sounds great with the gain backed off but with higher gain it seems to mush up with more than the middle or bridge.

I rarely use the bridge pup on strats - I prefer the middle with the volume backed off a bit for chord work. Maybe there's a good bridge pup out there that would make me change my ways...

I was going to suggest the Kent Armstrong STH1 hot bridge pickup. It's powerful - mine measures 7.8k - and it's "beefy". It's ceramic, which I wouldn't usually go for, but it gives a sort of compressed sound when overdriven, a little bit like a Tele bridge pickup. I find it works nicely with their STV1 vintage or STV4 tweed tone middle & neck pickups.

Or there are Voodoo ST60s. Or the new Seymour Duncan 5-2s

http://www.seymourduncan.com/products/electric/stratocaster/progressive/fivetwo_for_str/

I have a set of these, & they are higher output than a typical Strat pickup, but without any top end harshness. Hard to find second-hand though.

Hi Guys
Just to follow up this thread I have posted an article (under General Topics - Guitars) from an old Fender Frontline magazine that gives Fenders setup specs for Strats - hope you find it of interest.
Regards.
Baz.

blake375 said:

I'm considering changing the pups in the Goldie and was wondering what other forum members had tried and what seemed to work best...
...
I don't want a strat that I can play metal on, just one that holds its mid/low clarity & balls with a fait bit of gain.

Any suggestions about improving gain handling without actually changing the pups will be welcome too!

Click to expand...

Hi,
have you ever considered to add a stomp box instead of swapping the whole pickup stuff ???
I've made excellent experiences with the Fulltone OCD or the German Made OKKO Diablo ...
I own 2 Strats ... a MIJ Fender 54-120DMC - which means that it has DiMarzios Vintage on board - and a Partsocaster with VanZandt Blues model pickups ...
With both of them and using the pedals (especially the Diablo) I'm able to get a more hard rock distortion ... promised !!!
The VanZandt use to have a more 'soft' tone - but when this Diablo is on ... the pups are screaming ...
I'm sure Fulltone has an equal thing ... if you're US resident - so you wouldn't have to buy German ... :wink:
Roger

yeah i have a similar problem as that.. pickups are sweet clean, but there's something extra i desire from it when playing with a higher gain setting (hard rock, not metal territory)

i believe a mid focused distortion box like a rat or one of the marshall copies will do fine, but i do not have the privilege to try..

i think i belong to one of the unimpressed-by-blues-jr groups too.. it was my primary target for a first tube amp but it had no desirable tone at the volumes i managed to test it on in the shop.. went for a small ceriatone instead..

Here is a link to a very good Swedish pickupmaker. He also has soundclips that you can listen too. Price is on the higher side, around $240 for a set of 3 pickups. Maybe you can find something there that you like.

http://www.lundgren.se/index.asp?folid=19&micid=18

Cheers

/Peter

Thanks for all the suggestions guys.

I've decided to try a set of the GFS pickups - they're nice and cheap and if they don't work out in the Goldie I've got another strat copy that needs a new set anyway. The GFSs are pretty high output, so I think if they don't do the trick I'll be looking into a clean boost box - maybe an MXR micro amp or such like. I'll also solder in a .022 cap while I'm at it.

A little update in case anyone's interested:

After doing some research on GFS pickups I got hold of some GFS I28s for not much money. Looking at them, I can understand why people think the QC is a bit inconsistent - the beveling was different on every polepiece and there was a bit of loose coil on one pickup, but the bobbins looked very good quality.

I decided that instead of breaking up the old electronics I would use new components (CTS pots, CRL switch, Switchcraft jack, Sprague orange drop, cloth wire) and mount the thing on a new scratchplate.

The result was a big imporvement. Clean sound was pretty much unaffected (maybe a little brighter and punchier, but subtly so) which is good because I was really digging the clean sound I had from the original electonics. Tone controls a bit warmer, though they seem almost to add bass when turned most of the way down - quite boomy.

The GFS pups seemed to handle gain a lot better and don't sound so mushy, but they (curiously) don't seem to drive the amp any harder either - so the overall result is better performance without radically altering the original tone of the guitar. Thanks to born2boogie for the recommendation.

Doing a bit of soldering (first time in a while) has given me the Mod-bug! So I thought I'd experiment with installing an EMG SPC circuit. EMG don't make a big deal of advertising the fact that you can use the SPC with any pickups - I guess they sell more sets of SAs this way! The SPC control works fantastically with the GFSs and really beefs up the tone. I'm very impressed with it actually - you don't really lose the strat tone, you just gain extra balls.

So I'm very happy with the mods I've made... next time a string change is due, I'll install a load of microswitches. I've just got decide what they'll do first... :wink:

You removed the scratchplate, and the wonderful Tokai 5way/3way switch for a new switch?

Interesting stuff Blake, at that price I'll have to gove some GFS pickups a try!!

You removed the scratchplate, and the wonderful Tokai 5way/3way switch for a new switch?

Click to expand...

In preference to disassembling the original Tokai electronics, yes. I wanted to keep the original parts altogether so that I could just drop them back in whenever I wanted.

I've got a Springy that looks the part and has the 3-way/5-way switch (which I agree is wonderful) that I can play on anytime.

The Goldie I've modded is now more useable - I'm even using the bridge pickup, which I never usually use on strats at all. A slightly whiter scratchplate and a switch that doesn't enable you to pretend it's an old 3-way (but conveniently lets you use it like a 5-way) is a small price to pay for the improvement in tone an versatility. I don't really consider this Goldie as collector's-item material.

BTW, if anyone wants to swap their nice vintage/olympic white Tokai strat body with this Goldie's shiny black one, let me know. Any condiditon considered :wink:

Demo of SPC here: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=VrbFYIcLB7Y

I'm not normally such a w@nker on the guitar but the chords I was jamming to sent me on a bit of a Lydian (I think, not that good on scales) trip and before I knew it I was reaching for the whammy bar and it all got a bit silly... :roll:

Not a great tone on the recording I'm afraid, but it does show how much difference the SPC makes.

Loved the vid, the tapping at the end made me smile the EMG SPC certainly gives some exrta balls to the strat, might have to look in to one of those!

I have a set of Kinman woodstock on a homebrewed strat with allparts neck and a hosakawa body. They sound terrific. I think there are some soundclips of those on youtube.