Was Abigail having a bad day?

[kevinT]

Abigail's long suffering husband Terry Ybarra reckons that she always controlled her scatter pattern by creating a gentle breeze with her bingo wings

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She has since had brachioplasty which may explain the poor sound.

that is nasty.....looks like lipo without the nip and tuck.

[LeftyStrat]

the best solution to fix them is put them on Ebay and then go buy something else. This will fix the problem :-)

In fact, they're already out of the guitar, I'm getting ready to photo them and put them up on eBay. Maybe I should advertise them as the worst sounding set of pickups Fender ever made, then all you pickup makers could get in a bidding war over them.

Honestly, these pickups would lose in a side-by-side shootout with a cheap Radio Shack condenser mic taped on the inside of a cigar box guitar. They really are that bad. I played them one last time to get the auditory memory, pulled them and replaced them with the EMG-SA's, and ended up playing for a couple of hours through every amp in my shop. I feel like I just got my strat back after someone had stolen it.

I guess I now know why I walk away disgusted whenever I go into a music shop and see a new left-handed Fender and play it. My old '73 lefty Strat sounds and feels great even when it's not plugged in. I can't imagine comparing a pre-CBS Fender to today's guitars.

the Supercaster neck pickup is real unique in the way its done there's nothing normal about it, it definitely does a classic strat tone in a tele neck spot.

I have a telecaster I'm finishing up right now, just need to sand/polish the finish (Lake Placid Blue, nitro, a real beauty), and I'll get in contact with you when I have the cash. I'm leaning towards a Possumcaster in the bridge and a Supercaster Rhythm in the neck.

BTW, your web site looks great, and the clips are really well done. Sorry for sucking up so much of your bandwidth

[Possum]

EMG....

I had EMG as a client for about 12-14 years, did all their ad and design work, really boosted their business back in the 80s. They outfitted my Ibanez strat with EMG SA's and two of the tone active pots. I really liked them for a long time, but I was practicing with some guys on a band that never went live. I picked up my buddy's strat which had passive pickups in it and played it a little bit. Damn! I had forgotten what single coils really sound like, next day I ripped out the EMGs and told the guitar tech to throw 'em away or keep 'em. Give me noisy single coils, they just have more life in them when they're good...

[Possum]

another thought...

hey does your strat have one of those TBX controls in it? those things are tone killers, might have been a problem?

[LeftyStrat]

No, I just have the SA's with none of the active tone things. I'm not saying the EMG-SA's are great sounding pickups (well, they KILL those Fender Custom Shop pickups), they are good for the guitarist that uses a lot of effects and has to deal with the type noise that, say, David Gilmour might have to deal with on stage. But I would never use them when recording. They went in my number one strat when I was gigging.

But seriously, I could post two clips here with no indication of which was which, and *everyone* on this board would pick the EMG-SA's over this set of Fender Custom shop pickups. I'll hold off on listing the "Abigail" pickups on eBay (Spence's pic best describes their tone), if anyone is up for the comparison.

Though I agree with you, there is nothing like having no opamps/silicon between a strat and a good amp, whether it be a Fender, Marshall, Vox, or especially a Trainwreck or Dumble (never played a real one, but my clones are good enough to give goosebumps). My one exception is a germanium transistor based fuzz face between a Fender Strat and a Marshall amp (but hey, it isn't silicon). Something about how the circuit loads a pickup, combined with a Marshall can be amazing. If you want proof go watch "Like a Rolling Stone" from Hendrix at Monterey, believe it or not, the fuzz face is on for most of the song.

I repair, build, and design amps, and occasionally clone a customers vintage amp (when the value of an original gets too expensive to risk taking to a gig), so I need to be able to have enough "representative" guitars and pickups around to compare my work to the original amp. I thought I could "go cheap", because honestly, today's boutique pickup winder (hate that word "boutique") is probably putting out better pickups than Gibson or Fender ever made. Or at least more consistent examples of the best ones.

[Possum]

TBX...

TBX isn't an active circuit, its a fender mid control thing on some strats, its a tone killer too. Just wondered if how you wired the pickups in might have done something to them....

[David Schwab]

The TBX control places a large value resistor (1 meg I think) between the tone control and ground when the tone is at 10, thereby removing the tone circuit, and brighting up the tone. I think the original reason was to simulate the bridge pickup on a Strat (which has no tone control) on some of the newer Strat type guitars with master tones.

[GlennW]

I had a TBX (from a late 80s Am Std Strat) in a Tele for a while. It was good at getting the "Start Me Up" sound, but that was about it. It's in a little box on a shelf now.

[LeftyStrat]

Sorry, thought you were talking about some of the EMG tone controls.

In fact just to be sure there wasn't something wrong, I removed all tone and volume controls from the guitar, with the pickup selector going straight to the output jack, and then ran the other end of the guitar cable to a jack wired to a resistance decade box (between hot and ground) so I could hear what affect different pot values would have.

I also verified that there wasn't anything crazy going on at the pickup selector. I tested for stray capacitance between each pole of the switch, thinking that could be the source of the dullness.

I tried the pickups at every height from flush to stratitis in 1/8" increments.

I've uploaded a couple of pics, unfortunately my camera does do extreme close ups very well.

[Spence]

I may be wrong here but I seem to remember that the pickups Abigail Ybarra wound herself for the custom shop had her signature on. the one's she approved were wound by others and had her initials on.

[LeftyStrat]

I may be wrong here but I seem to remember that the pickups Abigail Ybarra wound herself for the custom shop had her signature on. the one's she approved were wound by others and had her initials on.

"Each pickup is created, dated, and initialed by Abigail Ybarra who has been winding pickups for Fender since the late 50's.'

http://www.fender.com/products//sear...tno=0992114000

Of course, who knows what the marketing team considers "created" to mean. Might just mean she stands over the machine winder and flaps her "wings."