Unusual Tele pickup swap

[bek]

I have an excellent Washburn Tele, US-made. It's ash/maple, good hardware, stock with the highly-desirable Duncan Broadcaster pickup set. Recently, due to the remarkable generosity of a fellow TDPRI member, I replaced the Duncan set with a Rio Grande Big Bottom set. My conclusions: the Broadcaster set is great-sounding. Very detailed, articulate, vintage sound with a very big, hot-sounding bridge pickup. There was a bit of a feedback problem, as the whole guitar was made as a vintage recreation and the body cavities were completely unshielded, as were the pickups. The neck pickup was annoyingly microphonic, "tick"-ing loudly when I touched it with my pick (frequent, as that's where I play most of the time). The Rios: a bit more in-your-face, but mostly because of the neck pickup. The bridge pickup sounds almost identical to the Broadcaster one. The Rios are fully-shielded and do not feed back at all, even though I did not shield the guitar at all when changing over. The neck pickup has a bigger, more powerful sound, and the two pickups together have a much more humbucker-like sound than the Broadcasters. The neck pickup is not at all microphonic and my picking idiosyncracies are no longer audible. Overall: The shielding is the biggest difference, but the more aggressive neck pickup makes the next biggest impact on the sound. Both pickup sets are very, very good. The Rios are more powerful and modern-sounding, the Duncans are powerful but more vintage-sounding. Both are just what their makers intended.
BIG NOTE: Remember, I'm not much of a player, and I don't have the widest experience of instruments. These pickups were played through the same amps (one solid state, one tube), with both fingers and picks, no effects but the built-in drives and reverbs of the amps. I played the guitar with and without the drive and reverb.

[Jim Collins]

Actually, shielding has little affect on microphonics. Microphonic behavior is frequently a result of trapped air vibrating. In the case of your old neck pickup, there was plenty of trapped air underneath the cover.

Proper, or more thorough, potting the is solution to microphonic behavior, as it squeezes out the trapped air, and also prevents anything else from moving around. Shielding inhibits interference, but it does not address the problems of microphonics.

Frequently, even well potted pickups can exhibit microphonic tendencies in a Telecaster. The pickup cavities in a Tele body can trap air, and this can create some conditions that are very much conducive to microphonic feedback.

I once had a Tele that was annoyingly microphonic. (I actually like my Teles to be somewhat microphonic, but this one was too much.) Repotting the neck pickup took care of a lot of the problem, but not enough. I lined the pickup cavities with some foam rubber -- not enough to prevent the pickup from being set at the proper height, just enough to eliminate large pockets of air. This solved the rest of the problem.

[bek]

Very interesting. Thanks for the info.