hot rails neck pick up mod?

Hey guys,

If this has been asked before, I apologise. I haven't found the thread...

I'm just thinking about dropping a hot rails pickup in the neck position instead of the lipstick pickup that was supplied with a squier affinity tele. Will it fit? Also if these pickups do fit without any additional routing and I installed hot rails in both neck and bridge positions would it limit the 'pallette' of sounds?

Any advice appreciated...

Pargecaster.

Yes, it would limit your pallette of sounds to dark, nasal, loud mud. What are you looking for that you think the Hot Rails will give you?

Sure you could do it. SD makes hotrails neck pups.. and GFS makes less expensive knock-offs (little killers or punchers of some such ****e.) Now, as to why you'd want to, I'm sure that you have your reasons.


That said, a staggered vintage-wound RWRP Strat pickup in the Tele neck position is ear-gasmic.

I am a fan of quite a few bands that sound like dark loud mud, I guess.... The Melvins and Sabbath type stuff. Sludgey slow and doomy. On the other hand I like blues and Dylan, so I don't want to JUST sound like a whale swimming through an ocean of mollasses. It's be nice to achieve both sounds, is it possible to do that? Perhaps it would be best to leave that to the pedals, eh?

...I don't want to JUST sound like a whale swimming through an ocean of mollasses. It's be nice to achieve both sounds, is it possible to do that? Perhaps it would be best to leave that to the pedals, eh?

If you get a high-output rails based pickup fitted with four conductor wire, a simple SPDT toggle (or push-pull pot, if you're into that sort of thing) would enable you to easily switch between brutal humbucker raunch to cleaner brighter single-coil chime.

It's a simple mod. I did it on a full archtop (through the F-hole) the first time I ever picked up a soldering iron.

Thanks for your help Hoopermazing... I will definitely look into doing something along these lines... X

There are two things to try for the brighter tone: firstly, as mentioned above, you can split to a single coil.

Secondly, you can switch the humbucker from series connection to parallel. This retains hum-cancelling and still provides you with a brighter, lower-output sound - though not quite the same as the single coil sound.

It's actually possible to use an on/on/on mini toggle switch to get all three of those sounds, but that would mean an extra switch rather than using a push/pull pot. You could choose two if you wanted to use one of those.