[alexh9]

Wondering if anyone has tried a DP103 neck 36th in the bridge, and if so, how did you like it? I'm wondering how it would match up with a DP103 in the neck.

[Guitar74]

At least on paper, it looks to be pretty balanced. What it would sound like in your particular guitar may be another story altogether. I have a breed neck that works great in the bridge of one of my RGs that is for some reason VERY dark. The brighter neck pickup combined with the lower output is just what I like about it in the bridge. As time wears on, and I get older, I gravitate more towards lower output, or slightly hotter than vintage output as my amps have plenty of gain.

I know that's not a lot of help on the 36th, but it is my experience with "sets" that the neck will be a tad brighter to compensate for the darkness of being closer to the fretboard.

[darkbluemurder]

All Gibsons in the 50s had pickup sets that were spec'd to be identical (in practice they were not due to human effect, i.e. the turn counters were stopped manually - or they were not, and then the pickups had a few more turns of wire on them). Strings vibrate more over the neck pickup so more signal is generated. Setting identical pickups at the same distance to the strings will result in the neck pickup being louder than the bridge pickup. Whether this is a problem depends on how you use the pickups. E.g. if you regularily use the bridge pickup for rhythm and switch to the neck pickup for solos it may work fine. Or if you use the neck pickup for cleans only and switch to the bridge for crunch and lead. Problems likely arise when you want to switch between pickups and not change any settings at the amp or not adding/taking away pedals - in that case if you set the rig for the bridge pickup, the neck pickup may be muddy, and if you set it for the neck pickup, the bridge pickup may be too bright. Therefore many people (myself included) prefer a hotter bridge pickup.

Bottom line - I would not use a set of DP 103s but I want to be able to switch between pickups and not having to change settings. If that is not important to you, my concern would be irrelevant.

Cheers Stephan