Got the Aldrich pickups put in the '02 PRS Singlecut

[fearhk213]

We all hear things differently. The main reason I like the Suhr Aldrich and SSH+ is because they have more upper mids and are not dark. I find every Seymour Duncan pickup to be dark vs any Suhr pickup I’ve owned. Keep in mind that I don’t set pickup heights up to what the consensus says… l use my ears and actually use a marked screw driver to make adjustments. For example, I set a pickup to where it sounds good. Then I do adjustment typically in 1/2 turns and will use little stickers to mark each screw side for any changes after. This way I can determine changes in a somewhat scientific way. I even measure and check after truss rod changes, bridge height changes, etc. yeah, it’s obsessive, but I’ve been doing it a long time and it works for me. I rarely need to make changes once things are set. Another thing I do is change out pickups with their rings when testing so that I don’t lose that sweet spot in height. ?

I could not agree more with how important pickup height is. I get obsessive about that too. My process when I first install something is I set the height right around 1/16-5/64 for both sides. I also line the screws up straight up and down. That's simply so I can make 1/4-1/2 turn adjustments that I can track by eyeballing it. Of course I won't typically end up with perfectly lined up screws once everything is said and done lol, but it helps tracking things when I'm initially dialing in the height. Once I'm generally happy with the sound in the room at a moderate volume, I'll do a high volume check, a check through a couple of different amps, and a check under the mic. Once it's all said and done, it usually takes me 2 or 3 days of playing the new pickup before I stop messing with things. Occasionally I nail it that same day, but I still like to check things the next day incase my ears got fatigued the day prior. Once I can check the next day and I'm still happy with everything I put the screw driver away. I've started writing down the heights. I've never considered keeping the rings on when comparing stuff. I did a big comparison of my stash last year and that would have made things go so much faster had I grabbed a bunch of rings lol.

As a side note, I find it interesting how some pickups are less sensitive to height changes while others seem to change much more dramatically. I also find it interesting that a pickup's output isn't necessarily indicative of how far it will like to be set - the guitar they're going in and of course the rest of the chain plays a factor. I have a set of MCP T-Wrecks, which are pretty low output, but they sounded best around 7/64 to 1/8 away from the strings in one of my guitars. Then in another guitar I had some Super Distortions, which are way hotter, and they sounded best right at 1/16. Got to use the ears lol.