anyone try a quarter pounder tele pup?

[twotimingpete]

I got this midnight wine standard tele a few weeks ago and the love affair continues.

 

I love the tones, I love the feel, I'm getting that experimental itch though -- and I like the stock pickups, I just want something similar but "more". not sure what that means.. maybe a tighter bottom and "ruder" in general. This is also the first guitar where I'm really using the neck and middle positions a whole lot -- I really like these positions on a tele. on humbucker or p90 guitars I mostly use the bridge and virtually never use middle. on the tele I use them all like crazy! that tele middle sound is something else. put it into a vox amp and.. {censored}.

 

anyway, I was looking at the seymour duncan quarter pounder neck/bridge, as well as the "hot for tele" neck and bridge. anyone try these before? any thoughts?

[vintage clubber]

I have a friend I jammed with years ago who had one in the neck of his tele. Sounded awesome. However, I'd be willing to bet the GFS Fatbody tele neck would get you really close at half the cost.

[clay sails]

I bought a Classic Vibe tele about 6 months ago. It had a clean but pretty boring neck pickup (no quack, just a decent clean tone).

 

I bought a SD Quarter Pound "lipstick" pup and had it professionally installed and...

 

...as much as I hate to say it...

 

...I was underwhelmed.

 

It was sort of a heavier bass sound, but still didn't quack much. I didn't hate it, but it didn't blow my mind, either.

 

So I swapped it out for a humbucker at the neck and hot damn: that was the sound I was looking for -- fat, with oozing harmonics and tons of presence.

 

I can't generalize about all Quarter Pounds obviously, and I usually love Seymour Duncan, but the pup I bought just didn't cut it for me.

[cratz2]

Quack on a neck tele pickup by itself?

 

Don't think that's likely, man. :poke:

 

I will say that in general, I'm not a big fan of Quarter Pounders. I had a Blackmore-wannabe strat back in the day with Quarter Pounders in the neck and bridge positions, wired to the 5 way switch kinda funky... basically the neck and middle reversed so you could play the bridge, bridge+neck, neck, neck+middle, middle. And I recently had a strat wired with Dimarzio HS3s neck and middle and a Quarter Pounder in the bridge.

 

I guess I like a more subtle pickup. It was thicker sounding than most single coils... and I thought it sounded pretty decent with heavy-ish gain for a single coil, but for cleans, it was not exceptional at all.

 

Never played a Tele with Quarter Pounders that I can recall... or maybe I did and I wasn't overly impressed.

 

Probably my favorite neck tele pickup ever is the GFS Fatbody. Freakin all kinda of cool. Never heard the Fatbody bridge though. I used to have a strat with a Duncan Vintage Rhythm that I think sounds pretty great though in general, I think it's not very well received. Personally, for my tastes, I don't mind hot-ish bridge pickups, but I definitely have found that I prefer relatively low output neck pickups. They almost always sound more complex.

 

Having said all that, I don't know that I'd steer you away from the Quarter Pounder bridge pickup. Might be just what you are looking for. More output, more bottom end, but still very much a single coil. And yes... the middle position on a Tele is pretty tits. Lots of nice chime through a Vox. Somewhat similar to the bridge+middle position on a strat, but still distinctively different than that sound.

[doc oc]

They are delicious.

[twotimingpete]

for the neck, I want to retain the jangly rawness, just get a big ruder...

 

bridge could stand to be tighter and hotter for better crunch tones.

[doc oc]

I had a hot rail in the bridge and QP in the neck of my "rocker" tele and it sounded great.

I would not match the QP neck with a standard tele bridge though.

Is this going into the rude vox pete?