clever system for testing pickup swaps!

[kludge]

One of the problems of swapping pickups in a guitar is we can only remember what the old pickups sounded like, so it's easy to be fooled. Last night, I did something clever that's probably a good idea for anyone experimenting with pickups.

Before a swap, I recorded the old pickups direct and dry. I used some typical riffs covering different parts of the neck and playing styles, for all three pickup combos. Then after changing pickups, I recorded the same riffs. I put a copy of Pod Farm (any amp sim software will do) on the track and tried different amp models, seeing how the new ones compared to the old ones. It was very helpful!

The swap in question was original 1980 Tokai pickups for an EMG Tele set I had lying around. The results were about what I expected... I think the EMG neck pickup is WAY better than the original Tokai, but the Tokai bridge is somewhat better than the EMG. Given my observation that the Tokai bridge was far superior to the Tokai neck, and previous experience that the EMG neck was far superior to the EMG bridge, I'm not surprised.

I think I'll probably get by with the EMGs for a bit until I can settle on a set of real single-coils...