pickup matching?

[methodofcontrol]

ok, so..i have an old ibanez roadstar II w/ a SC in the neck and a HB in the bridge. the guitar FEELS great to my hands, when i pick it up i just want to keep playing, but when i plug it in the bridge pickup just plain annoys me.
one thing i love about the guitar is the volume balance between the pickups. there's no huge volume difference between any position on the selector switch.
the bridge pickup is quite hot, (maybe 11k ohms if i recall?) and in my experience this usually yields a sound i'm not into. i don't have a problem w/ the neck pickup sound, so at one point i changed the bridge pickup out for a 70's gibson T-top. i wasn't thrilled with the sound but it was much better. however, something about the interaction between the T-top and the stock neck pickup made it so that when my selector switch was in the middle position i lost most of my volume. this presented a problem for me, so i put the stock HB back in the bridge.
so the question is: why do the stock pickups work so well w/ eachother? but i get these volume issues when i change the bridge pickup for something that suits me better?
for the record, my favorite pickup is a 57 classic. that's the sound i'm used to and so far, the only way to achieve something close w/ this guitar is to use an EQ pedal to tame the annoying peaks and harshness of the stock ibanez bridge pickup.

[Robert M. Martinelli]

.....at one point i changed the bridge pickup out for a 70's gibson T-top. i wasn't thrilled with the sound but it was much better. however, something about the interaction between the T-top and the stock neck pickup made it so that when my selector switch was in the middle position i lost most of my volume. this presented a problem for me, so i put the stock HB back in the bridge.
so the question is: why do the stock pickups work so well w/ eachother? but i get these volume issues when i change the bridge pickup for something that suits me better?

Hi,
Are you sure you didn't have an out-of-phase issue after throwing in the T-top? That would explain the loss you heard when paralleling the two pickups (selector in the middle position).

The T-tops are in the 7.5 KOhm range (inductance around 4 H, stray capacitance around 30 pF) and thus aren't to be considered "hot" pickups, their output level is mild and they're rather bright sounding, so the volume and tone balance with the existing SC shouldn't be a problem, and the same can be said about paralleling them IMHO, unless the two pickups are out of phase.

You can't swap the phase on a T-top (unless you open it ), which has a "single conductor plus shield" wire, but, AFAICR, the old IBZ SCs had a 2 wires(red+white)+shield cable, so it should be pretty easy to throw the T-top back in and then swap the SC's two wires, hopefully this will fix your problem.

Hope this helps

Best regards

Bob

[Magnut]

Did you try switching the hot and ground on one of the pickups? That is always a good place to start with these types of issues.

*Edit- I see another post while I was writing this one...

[methodofcontrol]

hmmm....interesting. i never thought of the pickups being out of phase. i don't usually F* around w/ pickup swapping, so my experience and knowledge about such things is pretty limited. i've only had one guitar (my gibson "the paul") for the past 7 years, i pulled the T-tops in favor of 57 classics and never looked back. but, yeah...that makes total sense to swap the red and white wires on the ibanez pickup. for the time being, i'll stick w/ my EQ pedal trick because i'm one of those guys that doesn't like to replace OEM parts on a vintage guitar that would otherwise be 100%. thanks for the quick responses.
are there any other tricks i can do inside the guitar to change the pickup flavor? like maybe w/ caps or resistors? something easily reversible like piggybacking on the tone cap, maybe? thanks again.