Having always fought with humbuckers in the neck that sounded too muddy on the low strings for my taste I read this thread with great interest:
http://www.dimarzioforum.com/forum/index.php/topic,4434.msg34291/topicseen.html#msg34291I simply had to have one and I put it into my in my double cutaway LP Special/Hamer style guitar. Body and neck wood are mahogany (according to the builder swietenia macrophylla), the fingerboard is rosewood (probably Indian). Bridge is a Tone Pros AVT-II. The guitar has a 3-way toggle, one volume and one tone control (nominal 500k log each, volume about 520k, tone about 490k). The tone control is a push-pull which is used to series/parallel switching for the DLX Plus. Tone capacitor is a Xicon MPP 0.0022uf.
I also bought a DLX Plus for this guitar. That review is here:
http://www.dimarzioforum.com/forum/index.php/topic,4976.0.htmlI tested this through my self-modded Marshall and a Bassman converted to a D-style circuit for the clean tones.
I had to modify the guitar slightly to get the DP240 low enough to not overpower the DLX Plus in the bridge but with some careful Dremel routing it worked perfectly. I used a black GFS mounting ring (they have mounting rings for minibuckers in black and cream) which fit perfectly into the P90 slot. It looks very good on that guitar, not strange at all.
Tonally this pickup is bright, brighter than any big humbucker and also brighter than any 'tron humbucker. It has lots of treble and clarity, even with the 500k volume pot. I have not played a Firebird pickup in this guitar but that definitely cannot be much brighter! Mids are there but they are rather controlled. Bass response is very good but not muddy. This tone lends itself well to clean or mildly overdriven playing but it can also hold its own in a high gain situation with a bright, cutting tone. And here, the 0.0022uf tone capacitor comes into play very nicely: with the tone pot down the DP240 almost sounds like a big humbucker but without the mud on the low strings. Very very cool.
Together with the DLX Plus in the bridge you get a very clear middle position sound, which will get even clearer with the DLX Plus used in parallel mode.
I am still contemplating to change the volume pot in this guitar to 1 meg to make the DP240 even more clear and use a 1 meg resistor for the DLX Plus to bring the load for it down to 500k. But for now I will keep the guitar as is and play with it a little more.
It's great that this pickup exists. I think we should have more pickups between the humbucker and single coil food groups, such as Minis, Firebirds and Filtertron types.
Cheers Stephan
