Dialtone Pickups—installed and awesome

A little while back I mentioned that I had my Dialtone Pickups set and would get them installed. Well I followed through—It’s just taken me a while to prove it and then write about it. Today you’ll not only see them installed, you’ll hear their tone through my own terrible guitar playing.

I think that’s a positive outcome.

I had Guitar Sauce—sadly no longer around—do the major installation work because initially the wires scared me. Not because they’re complicated (they’re not really), but because I had no idea how to feed wires through a guitar body. That’s not my area of specialty.

To be fair, nothing guitar related is my area of specialty.

We had a few setbacks initially, but that was mostly due to a misunderstanding I had around the wiring configuration. With a little bit of technical support from the crew at Dialtone Pickups I quickly worked out how to get the pickups working as they should. I believe I’ll make one change to the neck pickup before I say this project is complete, but for now, I’m really happy with the outcome.

The pickups look amazing in my Kramer Pacer and more importantly, they sound very cool. Very, very cool in fact.

These pickups do everything I’d hope they’d do and are incredibly sturdy too. I’ve read quite a bit from people online as Dialtone Pickups has promoted their product in regards to the potential to knock the dials inadvertently while playing. I’m yet to do that—and I’ve intentionally tried to play in a fashion much wilder than I normally would. I believe it also helped that I positioned the dials on the outside of each pickup in relation to my own picking hand position. That means the bridge pickup has the dials closest to the bridge and the neck pickup has the dials closest to the neck. The inside picking or strumming area is dial-free.

It also looks cooler. But that’s my own opinion.

The setup I’ve gone for on my Kramer is all volume and gain. I no longer have a tone control and that makes me very happy. I never use that on a guitar. Volume and gain controls though … those I’ll use.

The proof is in the pudding though some people say. Me, I’m not much of a pudding fan, so instead I decided to quickly put together an audio file to showcase the tones I’ve managed to get out of my new Dialtone Pickups. That’s a more impressive piece of proof and it has fewer calories.

The entire recording that is embedded below was done in AmpliTube (iOS) including the drum track. I used one simple distortion preset and then record the guitars you hear in the track below using three different settings on the bridge pickup. That’s it. No other effects and no other guitars. The SoundCloud audio file includes notes/markers to highlight when the dials were adjusted during the track.

I plan on making a better recording, a better song and a better video* in the coming weeks. Then you’ll hopefully see and hear what these pickups are truly capable of. Stay tuned and cross your fingers. I’m really struggling to keep my word these days.

I’ll work on that too.

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* There currently is no video, so a better video is almost a certainty.