NPD: Dimarzio EJ Customs in my Schecter Corsair Bigsby

[Chad]

The Dimarzio EJ Custom pickups I had ordered finally arrived for my Schecter Corsair Bigsby. Ordered them both with nickel covers. An f-spaced bridge model for the bridge. And a standard spaced neck model for the neck. The poles line up near perfect on both pickups.

 

Wow, that was my first wiring job on a semi-hollow guitar. It was a bit of a pain, but I had read enough in advance that it wasn't too bad. I fed everything through the treble side f-hole. Had to undo the 3-way switch to get enough slack to pull everything out. To fish the pots/wiring assembly, I used some old speaker cab connection wire with spade connectors that I had laying around. The stiffness of that wire worked really well in fishing everything. I snipped the connector off one end and wrapped the bare wire through the split in the pot shaft. I left the spade connector on the other end and that made a real nice fishing device.

 

As far as wiring, I went ahead and wired the pickups with splits. The neck splits to the screw coil. The bridge splits to the slug coil. I did this for two reasons: 1) a low output pickup with the split next to the bridge can sound really thin. Splitting to the side closer to the neck adds a little more string energy and thickness to the sound. Same deal with the neck pickup and also I like the split to lie in a position along the string path that is as similar as possible to a Strat neck pickup. 2) splitting to the slug coil on one pickup and screw coil on the other is humbucking in the middle position on the selector switch.

 

One other thing of note: the bridge pickup kept wanting to lean towards the bridge end. I spent more time troubleshooting this than anything. After eyeballing it over and over, I found that there was a ledge of paint buildup on the top, back edge (nearest the bridge) that the pickup was hitting. What a pain. I worked with some 320 grit sandpaper and smoothed the paint down flush with the rest of the rout. That did the trick. Apparently the dimensions of the Dimarzios are a bit different than that of the stock Duncan Designed pickups because I didn't have that problem with those pickups.

 

So far the pickups sound great, but I'll have to spend more time with them.

 

Here's a couple pics with the pickups installed. I also removed the pickguard and think it looks better that way:

 

[Chad]

I just realized those pics illustrate how much darker the ebony fretboard is after applying some fret doctor. When the guitar arrived, the fingerboard was brownish in color and was really dry. It drank up fret doctor unlike any other fretboard I've ever seen. Much darker now and looks great.

[Chad]

Ok, spent a bit more time with the pickups. They certainly added clarity and that was the goal. I LOVE that neck pickup. It sounds great split as well. I might raise the bridge pickup a hair to get a bit more output, but it sounds good too. The bridge split is probably too thin to be useful, but it's there if needed. I must say the middle position sounds really good in both normal and split modes. These pickups do indeed border on having Filtertron-like chime, but with a PAF flavor there too. Overall, my early impression is that these are great pickups. And I'm not normally a Dimarzio fan.

[koti123]

I had a set of those in something...can't remember what now. They seemed a bit cold and lifeless. I sold the whole guitar.

OK now I remember, it was a japanese Ibanez shredder from the mid eighties...nice guitar suck pickups.The EJ's didn't help it much either but were better then the ones replaced.I think they should do better in a hollowbody.