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Flatwound vs round strings and staggered vs flat pickups

Posted: Wed Apr 24, 2013 10:16 am
by hydra19
Hi,
I've been switching back and forth between flatwounds and roundwounds on my Jaguar with flat pickups and I noticed the volume difference.
I know staggered pickups were meant for vintage radius fretboards and strings with a wound G. Does anybody play flatwound strings with flat pickups or are you meant to use staggered pickups with flatwound strings?

The E strings are louder, and the plain strings ring out more too, I know the plain strings have more output than wound strings and i guess there is no solution for this other than staggered pickups or using roundwound strings.

I just got new SD pickups in my Jag and am loving them, i'm using roundwound nickel 10 gauge strings and it's great, but I often play it along some Bogle ventures tunes, and already have a Hallmark with 9 roundwounds that sounds great for the nokie era ventures, so would love to have this Jag with flatwounds but am not looking to change the pickups.

I also got a Startrem bridge and it's great, now the polepieces on my bridge pickup line up perfectly but on the neck the low e string is just below the polepiece, which looks like it's sitting on top the string if looking horizontaly, and this doesn't sort itself out until the G string, could this be causing the volume difference as well? Right now with the nickel roundwounds it doesn't bother me, looks weird but string can be heard.

So do you have flat pickups on your Jazzmaster or Jaguar and use flatwounds? Maybe that sound is just a characteristic of flatwound strings? thanks

Re: Flatwound vs round strings and staggered vs flat pickups

Posted: Thu Apr 25, 2013 9:05 am
by hydra19
Bump, anybody play flatwounds or am I really the only one here?

Re: Flatwound vs round strings and staggered vs flat pickups

Posted: Thu Apr 25, 2013 11:54 am
by MiHu
Hi,

sorry, I can't help you with the pickups question.

But concerning the string to string volume differences, using all-steel wound strings solves the problem IMO. (If I understood correctly that this is one of your concerns)

I use fender 13 flatwounds on my jag and these strings are perfect for me on this guitar.

Re: Flatwound vs round strings and staggered vs flat pickups

Posted: Fri Apr 26, 2013 8:00 am
by josheboy
I'm a bit of a switch hitter.

I do keep flat wounds on my Gretsch Pro Jet with T-Armand pups. I love the twang of flat wounds, and I love that you dont get the squeal when your fret hand slides and how easy they are to play. But their tone is best, imo, for clean guitar sound. To me they sound rather flat and dull when distortion is on, but it could also be my setup. But my main guitar (my JM) has rounds on it pretty exclusively.

As for flats volume and brightness, it seems my flats twang way way brighter on the higher and mid strings, and are duller on the bassier side. Again, that could be my setup at home. My T-Armands poles are lined up pretty well with my strings, and each pole position can be adjusted, so I can easily tone down the really bright strings. So I can get a pretty even sound out of it. But its not really doable on my JM with fixed pole heights on the pups.

Of course, when I say "I", I mean my guitar tech. I let him do that for me :p