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Here's Realtone Music's specs for the Tonerider Rocksong pickup they sell:
http://www.realparts.com.au/toneride...ker-black.html
Here are the specs for the Kent Armstrong Dual Blades:
http://www.realparts.com.au/kent-arm...kup-black.html
Hopefully they'll turn out to be a good match.
Yes, that's the right Tonerider.
It's very hard to tell from specs what a pickup is going to sound like. The dual blades aren't going to sound quite like vintage Strat pickups, due to the ceramic magnets and the much higher inductance figure of 7.69 Henrys (which will change their resonant peak compared to the lower inductance figures of more vintage voiced pickups). But they probably won't sound like more traditional mini-humbuckers like the SD Little '59 or JB jr. But they do have 4-conductor wiring, which means that you have series and parallel wiring options for the two coils, plus a coil tap option for a much thinner sound if you really need it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Simon Barden
I'm actually not too worried about the Dual Blades not sounding like vintage Strat pickups, I can easily live with that, I'm more concerned about eliminating hum-noise, and if they don't sound like traditional mini-humbuckers I can live with that too, I might consider adding the coil-splitting options at a later date, so I'll keep that in mind, I'd only have to replace the pots with switching push-pull pots to implement the coil-splitting options, which will be easy enough to do, cheers for those suggestions, much appreciated.
I was just thinking that if the normal series mode did sound a bit thick, you could try just wiring them in parallel, which should still be hum- cancelling (I think) but get you closer to a true single coil sound. Obviously, having the two modes switchable gives you more options, but sometimes I find its easier to stick with basic sounds and swap to another guitar if I want a different one (also give you an excuse for having a lot of guitars). My Jimmy Page model LP has 21 possible switching combinations, but I've only ever used seven of them.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Simon Barden
I guess the sky's the limit when it comes to series/parallel pickup wiring, my mate's Bird guitar has tons of options with regards to pickup wiring, he got me to replace a 4PDT toggle switch on it for him, that was a job and a half, fortunately I had the foresight to draw a wiring-diagram before de-soldering the switch, otherwise it would have been a nightmare to sort out, my LP Studio has coil-tapping incorporated in it so that when you pull the two volume control knobs up from the body, the two humbuckers become single-coils, to my ears the tone becomes a bit Fender-like, but what is surprising is that there doesn't appear to be a substantial drop in signal-level, which I would have expected.
I think my white Ibanez RG350DXZ incorporates Series/Parallel pickup wiring in some of the selector-switch positions, they sound a little different to the stock Fender tones, I think it's more a case of experiment till you find something that sounds good to your ears, but the thing is, what sounds good to one person may not sound good to another, but that's the great thing about our modern society, no two people will like the exact same thing, just imagine how boring the world would be if we all liked the same thing?, that's basically my attitude, besides, it's way more fun coming up with your own sound anyway, Brian May did it really well with his home-made Red Special, funny thing is, the guitar was made of bits and pieces he and his dad managed to scrape together cause he couldn't afford to buy a factory-made guitar, and now commercially made copies of his Red Special go for a fair few pounds, he and his dad obviously got something right, I always wondered how he managed to get that tone out of those Bourns pickups on his Red Special, he was obviously a smart cookie, and I think his dad was an engineer.
The next thing I'm going to have to figure out is how to make a headstock logo for the HotRod Strat, been looking in a few places in Darwin for the Waterslide Decal film I need for printing-out custom decals, no luck so far, but I'm not about to give up yet.
I buy most of my stuff like that off the web these days. This is such a relatively small island that delivery from almost anywhere can be next-day if necessary.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Simon Barden
I wonder how big the UK is in comparison to Australia, in terms of land-mass, that is, my mum was originally from the UK, a place called Nottinghamshire, which is well-known for being Robin Hood country, it would be cool to come to the UK and visit the place where my mum came from, she reckons that one of her ancestors had ties to Royalty, whether that's true is open to debate, I have met my mum's sister and her daughter, they were nice people from what I can remember, my Dad was originally from Budapest, Hungary, and he told me once that the family surname comes from a village where he was from, my family surname has been Anglicanized from it's original spelling.
Well a web page says Australia has 34.1 x the area of the UK. And that includes Northern Ireland, so the main island of (now not so) Great Britain, is even smaller. It's got crap politics and mainly bad newspapers (though that seems to be pretty universal these days), in most areas the roads are over-crowded, and there are far too many people all trying to live in London and the south-east. But there's a lot to like about it too (especially when the sun is shining). Obviously it's got a lot of history to it, lots of historic buildings, loads of quaint villages with olde-worlde looks and thatched roofs, lots of green rolling countryside, lots of quite quickly changing countryside. All the designated 'national parks' are great places to visit. Wales has lots of rugged countryside hills and mountains, The Scottish highlands have lots of rugged hills and bigger mountains and big lochs and some quite spectacular views (especially when it's not raining or foggy). East Anglia is generally flat farmland, but has a beauty of its own, especially around the coast (and especially North Norfolk) and rivers (the Norfolk Broads are great to explore by boat). The south-west, Devon and Cornwall are less densely populated than a lot of the country but are very beautiful with sometimes very rugged coastlines and open moors. Small fishing villages located up winding creeks or in small valleys in the rocks. But as a result they become very busy indeed during the summer.
Basically, the really nice places to be are either full of 2nd homes or holiday cottages and it now costs a fortune to live there, or very remote with few facilities and not much work. Most towns are mainly of bad post-war construction (an awful lot of town and city centres got bombed during WW2) but rather than redesign whilst they had the chance, kept the previous chaotic road systems, so that most places now take a long, frustrating time to drive through. They almost all have the same chain stores, so you could easily interchange most town centres and no-one would know the difference. But there are some lovely exceptions, made lovelier by being different.
And of course in Guildford there's Andertons (though you'll rarely see Captain Lee or Chappers or Rabea there unless they are making a video) plus a few miles away there's Guitar Village - a super guitar-only shop set in a really old building in the generally lovely small town of Farnham.
The weather is generally variable, we don't often get the same conditions for more than a few days (unless you go to Wales or Scotland on the north of England where it does rain a lot). It rarely gets very cold (except up in the north of Scotland and other mountainous areas), -4°C would typically be a very cold day in winter, though winters are normally on the cold site and damp or wet. Summers can be pretty hot at times - maybe up to 32°C on a few days, though it's generally in the low-mid 20's.
My wife is from Lincolnshire, which borders Nottinghamshire to the south-east. Nottinghamshire is a place I've travelled through, rather than travelled to. It has some nice countryside and towns mixed-in with some less-pleasant and more industrial areas. I'm from Surrey, which is a mixture of bland interconnecting commuter towns coupled with some amazingly lovely green areas. There's still a lot of the UK I've yet to visit myself and keep finding nice surprises where ever I go.
Yes the UK is certainly worth a visit, it's just a long trek. The main reason I've never made it to Australia, even though I've got quite a few friends over there (and I could never persuade our Sydney office that they wanted me out there that badly). To make it worthwhile, you need at least three weeks, which isn't always easy to organise with work.
Plus, we've only got one (rare and not that deadly) poisonous snake and no poisonous spiders!
That's why I love to go home to NZ, you can crash about in the bush and you don't really have to worry about anything killing you apart from your own stupidity. I always love going to The UK, the fact that you can sit yourself in an old pub and have a pint in a place that has been serving beer longer than the combined settled history of both the countries I call home puts a great perspective on things.Quote:
Originally Posted by Simon Barden