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anyone removed a pretzel neck pickup cover?

Discussion in 'Just Pickups' started by fender4life, Oct 19, 2020.

  1. Oct 19, 2020 #1
    fender4life

    fender4life Friend of Leo's

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    Just installed it and it sounds kinda odd. The wound strings sound muddy and at the same time almost out of phase. (the pickups ARE in phase) While the plains are literally as bright or brighter then the bridge pickup. Before i remove the cover and make it un returnable if that doesn't help, has anyone done this? I mean on a pretzel....i've removed lots of neck pup covers but this seems like it;s not going to do what i want since it usually brightens things which would be the last thing i want on the plain strings. Yes, i've adjusted it and no, that doesn't help. Just wanna hear from anyone who's done this with a pretzel.
     
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  2. Oct 19, 2020 #2
    Bootstrap

    Bootstrap Tele-Meister Vendor Member

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    I’m sorry that you’re having trouble with that. If the pickup is unbalanced across the strings, it sounds like one or more of the poles may be degaussed. This can happen when alnico magnets of the same polarity poles (that would normally repel) are pushed against each other. That happens very occasionally during shipping or packaging when two pickups of the same polarity are pressed against each other. Or it could be that somehow not all of the poles were fully magnetized during that step of building them.

    The easiest solution is to replace the pickup. If you’d like to send me a private message with your order number, I’ll be happy to ship out a replacement tomorrow with express shipping.

    If you’d like to try removing the cover, that’s okay too, that won’t invalidate your return. It has some wax in between the cover and coil, but there is tape on the top of the bobbin and around the coil, so the pickup should not be damaged by removing the cover. I would not recommend removing the tape as this could damage the coil. Removing the cover probably won’t help this issue though as our covers are nickel-silver material.
     
    Last edited: Oct 19, 2020
    Theorage, emisilly and El Tele Lobo like this.
  3. Oct 19, 2020 #3
    fender4life

    fender4life Friend of Leo's

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    Thanks. But at 30 bucks with shipping cost about 1/3 of that i'll just eat it if i can't make it sound right. I'll probably remove the cover see if that helps. I know the dimarzio twang king i removed to put the pretzel in also uses nickel silver and it is said not to affect tone but it does and i always remove them. Not a huge difference but enough to make the wound strings less muddy and more crisp which the pretzel needs to sound like i wanted. I bet it'll help with the wounds but if the plains get much brighter it's not gonna work 4 me.

    In any case i may think about a return if i can find something else u have that i feel i might like to try, but i'm pretty happy with everything else right now. (tho if u have a nocaster bridge clone that might interest me) I'll PM u if i do. Thanks.
     
  4. Oct 20, 2020 #4
    fender4life

    fender4life Friend of Leo's

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    Well, i pulled the cover and with that and lowering it quite a bit it sounds much better. Not sure whether i will keep it but i prefer certain things about it over the twang king and certain things i prefer in the TK over the pretzel. So i have to give it time and get used to it. But it's definately not defective and definately a good sounding pickup even if i go back to the TK. Just different flavors and i will have to see which i prefer. I actually did not buy it for this guitar because i have been happy with TK's for years., But i bought a cheap squier tele i thought i would keep because i loved the neck, and bought the pretzel for it because it's neck pickup was total cr@p and didn't wanna spend $70 for another TK. Long story short, i came to realize i could never be happy with the sound of that tele and returned it before the pretzel arrived. So into my 69 ash thinline reissue it went.
     
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  5. Oct 23, 2020 #5
    TX_Slinger

    TX_Slinger Tele-Meister

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    Not sure how some winders get such good tone from a covered neck PU. My tonerider hot vintage neck PU WITH the nickel silver sounds very, very close to the neck PU in my 97 SRV Sig strat. $65 for set. Let that sink in.
     
  6. Oct 23, 2020 #6
    T00DEEPBLUE

    T00DEEPBLUE TDPRI Member

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    Because there's nothing magical about how they're made. Once you know what they're made from and how they're wound, it's not a difficult task to make your own replicas and to scale them up to mass production in China. The rest of it is just marketing guff to make your product the talk of the town on message boards and influencers on YouTube.

    Also nickel covers produce WAY fewer eddy currents than the brass covers found on normal tele neck pickups which would otherwise severely darken them. By far the biggest tone-determining factor on a tele neck pickup vs. a strat pickup is the cover itself.
     
  7. Oct 24, 2020 #7
    fender4life

    fender4life Friend of Leo's

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    That and the fact most are 43 gauge wire which IMO even when would to the same output as a 42 thats otherwise the same just doesn't sound the same. Thats probably why the twisted tele and certain other necks that use 42 are said to sound strat like.
     
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