Suhr Thornbuckers in a PRS Custom 24

Sixstring said:
@nathan_393 did you buy the guitar new? I'm wondering if there might be something wrong with the electronics. You might want to have the guitar looked at just to rule out that part of the equation.
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He said he was running the PRS through a different preset, so he’s comparing one guitar through one preset to a different guitar with a different preset.

I would try both guitars through each preset before anything else, I bet the issue lies in the preset.
 
Frodebro said:
He said he was running the PRS through a different preset, so he’s comparing one guitar through one preset to a different guitar with a different preset.

I would try both guitars through each preset before anything else, I bet the issue lies in the preset.
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More than likely that's probably the case! He didn't really clarify if he was using a different amp sim for the PRS preset but that he had to add a lot of treble for the PRS implying that he is using the JTM45 sim with different settings... IDK!

Either way it doesn't sound right as you have posted! You have also posted that those pups have more high end than most of your humbucker equipped guitars! That's why I was saying maybe he should look at the guitar as well just to make sure it's not a contributing factor.
 
nathan_393 said:
I appreciate all the input folks! Ask 20 guitarists about their pickup preferences and get 20 answers, but I love the feedback. I’ll take a gander into Bareknuckle and give it a bit more time before I bite the bullet. Maybe the 85/15 will grow on me like they did for @Frodebro.

Had to queue up a bunch of low-gain sounds tonight in prep for worship in the morning and it just sings with this guitar. But as soon as you add a bit more gain I find it gets muddy? I don’t know how to describe it. Maybe I have too many effects stacked or something (darn praise and worship with their delays and verbs).
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Are you cutting the lows out of your reverbs and delays? They can build up making any guitar start to muddy up.
With that said, I have two 594’s with the “Holy Grail” 58/15LT pickups. Not a fan. I put Thornbuckers in my double cut 594 and couldn’t be happier. I did use the + bridge pickup.
I feel the overall sound is clearer in all pickup positions on my guitar. The neck pickup was a huge improvement.
 
These are all good ideas, folks. I will play a bit with low cuts on the delay and verbs, but this happens with every amp. Even on the SLO100, I need treble on something like 8.5 or 9 with the bright switch engaged and the master at 8.5.

I know it’s hard to believe, but this is just a very dark guitar. I might have to play with the pole pieces a bit, but I don’t think anything subtle like that is going to help much (I’d love to be proven wrong).

I have a Custom 24 SE as well. That guitar is so bright that it’s nearly shrill and ice picky. This PRS is the opposite: it’s so warm that the mids don’t have a ton of clarity when even low gain is engaged. This is true with Marshalls, Mesas, Soldano, etc, with any number of different IRs (mostly from York Audio) and gain stages. If it’s clean, it sounds amazing. Mid gain and up is very dark.

It sounds better than the Custom SE, by a landslide, but the wood in this instrument is just darker somehow.
 
two guitars from the same tree will sound different.

Worth trying 1meg pots first too before big bucks on pickups.

Got a recording program? Whip up a quick a/b sample between your les paul and cu24.
 
Budda said:
two guitars from the same tree will sound different.

Worth trying 1meg pots first too before big bucks on pickups.

Got a recording program? Whip up a quick a/b sample between your les paul and cu24.
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I’ll do that! Good idea. I’ll record some clips tomorrow with factory presets so other folks know the baseline.
 
I have 2 S2 Custom22's a hollow body and a solid. The solid has Thornbuckers in it and I like them. The hollow body has Bare Knuckle Emeralds and I like those as well.

Another setup PuPs I have in another guitar that I love is Arcane Triple Clone bridge and 57 Experience neck. Very true to old PAFs IMHO.
 
nathan_393 said:
I know it’s hard to believe, but this is just a very dark guitar. I might have to play with the pole pieces a bit, but I don’t think anything subtle like that is going to help much (I’d love to be proven wrong).
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You might be surprised how much you can do lowering the neck pickup 1/8" to 3/16" and raising the pole pieces can help with trimming the mud.

20231008_133644_0.jpg

My red Tele's neck HB ^^^^....

On a Lester, you might end up with the pickup flush with the mounting ring or even a smidgen below it, and just the pole pieces up closer....
 
Joe Bfstplk said:
You might be surprised how much you can do lowering the neck pickup 1/8" to 3/16" and raising the pole pieces can help with trimming the mud.

20231008_133644_0.jpg

My red Tele's neck HB ^^^^....

On a Lester, you might end up with the pickup flush with the mounting ring or even a smidgen below it, and just the pole pieces up closer....
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See, I don’t know if it’s mud that I’m looking to fix. It’s like I want more upper mids. Would this help with that?

I also wonder if buying Ernie Balls instead of NYXL might be a better fit for me. I tend to like brighter guitars, and I recall EB strings as being pretty bright. But my SE 24 is strung up with NYXLs and is very bright, as I mentioned above, so who knows.
 
nathan_393 said:
See, I don’t know if it’s mud that I’m looking to fix. It’s like I want more upper mids. Would this help with that?
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It'll help dial back the lows and mudrange, which will accentuate the other frequencies. It costs nothing but time to try. The height screws are 40 threads per inch and the pole pieces are 32 threads per inch, so start off roughing it in 5 turns lower and up the poles 4 turns. That ought to give you an idea of the difference in sound, and if you don't think it's heading the right way, you can easily restore it, having spent nothing more than 5 minutes turning screwdrivers....
 
Budda said:
Yep always try free first.

EB’s die way too fast for me to recommend them. Try regular XLs?
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I much prefer NYXLs to regular XLs in feel, and to my ear, they’re brighter. I agree the EBs die very fast. They last about seven minutes with whatever battery acid my finger oils contain.

I’ll try lowering the pickups and raising the pole pieces too and A/Bing with the recording. @Joe Bfstplk you had a great way of describing how you’d normally finesse that in another thread. If I like the direction it’s going when I follow these first steps, is it best to follow your instructions there to get string balance?

FWIW, I have adjusted the pickup heights to high heavens and already found the sweet spot for me, so this would really be about trying to correct whatever is off otherwise.
 
Theres a great thread on MLP about pickup height and iirc i pasted it into a thread here.

Post your clip and hopefully i can find time to make another version. Simple g-c-d chord structure suggested for a better comparison (or pick a pentatonic minor for a lead tone).
 
Hi everybody! I've got some recordings in a Soundcloud playlist here:

Some information so we're all on the same page:
  • I recorded the same G-C-D-G progression on each guitar's neck, middle, and bridge pickup positions.
  • There is a clean version of each, and a crunch version of each.
  • I also recorded an "attack" version, which is just some low E jugging to demonstrate the pick attack sound of each instrument.
  • The instruments are as follows:
    • CU24 = Custom 24
    • CU24 PP = Custom 24, with @Joe Bfstplk's recommendation: 5 turns lower on the pickups, and 4 turns up on the pole pieces.
    • SE24 = Custom 24 SE. It's not an apples-to-apples comparison, but I wanted to add a little proof that I also have a very bright PRS in the room too.
    • LP = Les Paul, Slash model. I mention the Slash model because the pickups are overwound, so if you hear more gain or mid honk than you'd expect, that's the pickups. (I also really like these pickups.
    • The LP and CU24 have fresh NYXL strings as of the past couple weeks. The SE24 had a string change early in the year. Also NYXLs. I rarely play it, though, and they haven't rusted, so they still sound fresh. I am using a red (nylon) Jazz III pick in each sample.
  • The presets are as follows:
    • Brit Pre factory preset, S06 Clean 1 for Cleans. The only change I made was disabling reverb.
    • Brit Pre factory preset, S01 OD1 for crunch. The only change I made, again, was disabling reverb.
My assorted thoughts:
  • I think it's obvious how much brighter the other guitars are by default than the CU24.
  • Joe's suggestion to raise the pole pieces makes a huge difference and gets me closer to what I want on the bridge pickup. There's much more air in the high end now.
  • With the pole pieces raised, the neck pickup now sounds too bright to me. It sounds a little too similar to the bridge for my liking, and I wonder if I would be better to reset it to its original state, or if I should lower the pole pieces somewhere in between? Do the original recordings of the neck pickup sound too dark to you?
  • My ears tell me I might benefit from lowering the neck pickup and raising its pole pieces on the LP, but leaving the bridge as is (maybe even lowering it a turn). Would love your thoughts on this (but it is not related to the principle matter at hand, I know).
  • I'm going to include a picture of how high the pole pieces are now. They seem very high to me, but I've never done this before. Does this look right to each of you?
Thank you everybody for your time and help. I'm off to keep trialling these raised pole pieces.
 

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nathan_393 said:
Hi everybody! I've got some recordings in a Soundcloud playlist here:

Some information so we're all on the same page:
  • I recorded the same G-C-D-G progression on each guitar's neck, middle, and bridge pickup positions.
  • There is a clean version of each, and a crunch version of each.
  • I also recorded an "attack" version, which is just some low E jugging to demonstrate the pick attack sound of each instrument.
  • The instruments are as follows:
    • CU24 = Custom 24
    • CU24 PP = Custom 24, with @Joe Bfstplk's recommendation: 5 turns lower on the pickups, and 4 turns up on the pole pieces.
    • SE24 = Custom 24 SE. It's not an apples-to-apples comparison, but I wanted to add a little proof that I also have a very bright PRS in the room too.
    • LP = Les Paul, Slash model. I mention the Slash model because the pickups are overwound, so if you hear more gain or mid honk than you'd expect, that's the pickups. (I also really like these pickups.
    • The LP and CU24 have fresh NYXL strings as of the past couple weeks. The SE24 had a string change early in the year. Also NYXLs. I rarely play it, though, and they haven't rusted, so they still sound fresh. I am using a red (nylon) Jazz III pick in each sample.
  • The presets are as follows:
    • Brit Pre factory preset, S06 Clean 1 for Cleans. The only change I made was disabling reverb.
    • Brit Pre factory preset, S01 OD1 for crunch. The only change I made, again, was disabling reverb.
My assorted thoughts:
  • I think it's obvious how much brighter the other guitars are by default than the CU24.
  • Joe's suggestion to raise the pole pieces makes a huge difference and gets me closer to what I want on the bridge pickup. There's much more air in the high end now.
  • With the pole pieces raised, the neck pickup now sounds too bright to me. It sounds a little too similar to the bridge for my liking, and I wonder if I would be better to reset it to its original state, or if I should lower the pole pieces somewhere in between? Do the original recordings of the neck pickup sound too dark to you?
  • My ears tell me I might benefit from lowering the neck pickup and raising its pole pieces on the LP, but leaving the bridge as is (maybe even lowering it a turn). Would love your thoughts on this (but it is not related to the principle matter at hand, I know).
  • I'm going to include a picture of how high the pole pieces are now. They seem very high to me, but I've never done this before. Does this look right to each of you?
Thank you everybody for your time and help. I'm off to keep trialling these raised pole pieces.
Click to expand...

You can definitely adjust the neck poles and height in between original and current. Try dropping the poles 4 half turns and raising the pickup 5 half turns to split the difference, and see where that puts you. :)

If it sounds right, it's right. The poles aren't so far out of the bobbins that you can see threads underneath, so you're fine.

The same tricks will work on the Lester.
 
Thanks Joe! I still feel like there's not a lot of low-end aggression in some of the other presets I use, but I'm realizing that I need to keep scooping mids. So I guess I'll add that, with these pickups lowered, I can really tell the difference between these pickups (which feel quite low output) and my LP, which just screams with gain at 3 or higher on any Marshall. And the mids on these pickups are quite honky too, in general. Still tempted to swap out the pickups for something a little more to my tonal preferences.
 
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