Klein 61 tele pickups

[StevieC]

Has anyone tried these ?

[yugnat]

Originally Posted by StevieC

Has anyone tried these ?

Anybody tried these? I'm considering them...

[cobaltu]

I caved and ordered a set. They'll be here tomorrow (Friday) and I'm going to wire them in then. I'll let you know my initial impressions.

[teleman4u]

No but I have an Epic '52T bridge waiting to be installed at home.

[cobaltu]

Well I'll tell you about the neck pickup because it's the only one I've installed (installing tele bridge pickups is always a pain). The neck is quite good. It's not a really high out put pickup so if that's what your looking for look elsewhere. Because of this it doesn't have a really heavy hitting bass - which I think is good. They also seem to prefer higher volumes on the amp because they sorta firm-up and their mids come in a bit. Like most tele neck pickups though, they're kinda broad sounding and don't have that piano-like attack like a strat does.

That being said, I haven't installed the bridge one yet so I don't know how that sounds or how they sound in conjunction with each other. I'll install that soon and give a more in depth analysis

The amp I'm using is an Allen Hot Fudge with Nuts with a Weber Legacy speaker in it.

[cobaltu]

Okay, I promised that I would wire in the bridge and let you know my impressions. Sorry I took so long, I wanted to get better acquainted with them be for I reviewed.

As I said about the neck, these are not high output pickups. I had Lollar '52Ts in the guitar before it which were both a little higher in output as well as brighter. Don't let that scare you though, these pups are pretty quiet (60 cycle hum) so you can goose the amp for the extra volume and still have a little less background noise-in the middle position you get about the same amount of background noise from the amp as the the pickups!

As I touched on, these pickups don't hit your am really hard so if you like slamming your amp for early distortion I'd look elsewhere. These pickups are touch-responsive but the transition to overdrive it subtler. The highs and lows both have a slightly velvety quality, they are clear and crisp but aren't highly aggressive which is good for those of you who like to dig-in without getting punished for it. The mids are sorta strange, they're pretty backed off which which give the pickups a somewhat airy quality but turn up the amp volume and they fill in more. To me these pickups almost sound like really low-output humbuckers. Their mids are suffused but lend a nice sorta swirly quality. These pups are also staggered on the G and D string -as well as slightly raise on the rest of the pole pieces- lending pretty good note separation.

One thing I have noticed with these pups is that they work really well with the tele's controls. Rolling off the volume doesn't kill your highs very much and the tone control gives you a usable sweep- even on the neck pup. I always thought these qualities were more amp related but apparently not.Also they're really good with a 4-way switch, the pups are low output enough they don't get overly muddy when combined.

The only real complaints I have are: the neck pickup and bridge differ quite a bit on brightness and that the neck pickup cover is a little small which leaves a noticeable space between the pickup and the pick guard (this is a really minor quip). On the former point the bridge is quite a bit brighter than the neck which almost makes it sound like the pickups were from an unmatched set if they weren't similar in other ways.

This is all off the top of my head. If any of you have specific questions about the set, I'll gladly answer them.