RiverCityRockerThis month we’re doing a feature on Seymour Duncan P-Rails Pickups & the Triple Shot Switching System. I first became interested in these pickups because I play a wide range of music styles, but I like playing just my one guitar & wanted a little more versatility from it tone-wise, so I grabbed a set of P-Rails & the mounting rings with the switching system & dropped them into my Gibson ES-339. The installation was a breeze & the pickup rings actually make the install so much easier. I was a little concerned at first because of the very high DC resistance of the pickups in series as I was quite used to playing on vintage style pickups that seldom weigh in over 8K, but I was actually very pleasantly surprised to find that they really don’t push the front end of the amp as hard as I would have thought. In fact, I find them to actually have a much wider usable dynamic range & while I had a bit of a readjustment period, I much prefer them now. They sound great live, record really well & are so versatile.
The recording signal chain for this video started with a Gibson Custom Shop ES-339, the Seymour Duncan P-Rails (with the Triple Shot switching system) running into my pedal board, then a vintage 1976 Fender Twin Reverb. Only the Marshall BluesBreaker pedal was on to give just a touch of drive, & the 2 outside tubes are yanked from the Twin to run it at 50 watts. We used a Sennheiser e-906 to mic it from just a couple inches away on axis, halfway between centre & edge. We didn’t spend any time adjusting the mic, just put it up & plugged it in. The mic was feeding a Chandler EMI TG Channel at +25 dB, with the EQ engaged. EQ was flat except for 90 Hz rolloff. That fed a Chandler EMI TG1 Compressor/Limiter with very light limiting & then the signal went straight into an IZ Radar recording system. The mix was done on our MCI/Sony MXP 3036, with no other effects or processing added & was mastered in Logic Pro X using T-Racks CS Plugs. For those of you who would like to hear the original .wav file, you can do so by visiting:
http://soundcloud.com/tonekingrecords
All questions, comments & suggestions are welcome, & if you’d like to see/hear a review of something, just drop us a line & we’ll do our best to make it happen! Thanks for watching & if you dig it, subscribe! Peace – J.
