Kramer Quad Rails

[Antihero]

They seem kinda interesting,anyone have one and love it? Hate it? Other?

[frank falbo]

Oh boy do I ever have experience. Where do I begin? I tried it as-is in the bridge position, and I didn't like it. It wasn't very dynamic, and it didn't have a good "hot rails" sound when I "tapped" it. See, you can't get at the individual coils. You can only split it into two rails. I would've wanted to try things like the outer coils in parallel, etc. and those are things you can't do with the wiring as it is. There's a Kent Armstrong quad rails type pickup that has 4-conductor wiring from each set of rails.

The quad rails is wound to about 3.15k per coil. That makes for a real glassy-clean sound if you're able to just use one coil by itself. So if they had all the wires available I would've wired it in strange ways, like 2 coils in parallel feeding the second rails in series, etc. But I couldn't so since I was already going to have to do surgery to it anyways, I came up with a new pickup entirely. I actually took the pickup apart, and removed one rails and replaced it with a Chandler rails that I have that's wound real hot, like a Duncan Hot Rails. So now I have like one vintage rails and one hot rails in the same chassis. I did some fun wiring with it so I could have one hot coil and one vintage coil, or all four at once for the monster sound (which is much better than the original quad rails sound) and it's kind of more like having 4 pickups in the same guitar. Then, I took the baseplate from the Chandler rails, and used it to make a single rails pickup out of the leftover Kramer coil. That pickup is in the middle position of another guitar and sounds great, especially because I installed 4 conductor cable on it. So it can be split to a single coil for a very glassy, vintage strat sound.

If it had two 4-conductor cables on it, it would actually make a great neck pickup. Not necessarily for the "all 4 coils in series" sound, but because you could wire it for just the one neck side coil, to get a vintage stratty sound, the outside coils in parallel for a stratty in-between clucky sound, and other series combos for various humbucker imitations. You could also try all 4 coils in parallel. That'd be a pretty interesting neck pickup sound.

If you're handy with an iron and you can tap into those coil joins without damaging the pickup, then I'd say try it. But as a full on bridge pickup I thought it sucked. Another mod I'd do if I was using it stock would be to remove the center magnet. When I did the surgery on mine I left out the center magnet. I wanted the Chandler rails to have whatever magnet strength they designed it for, and I think the sound of the Kramer coil was greatly improved. That center magnet adds too much power for those low wind coils IMO.

[Kyle Cavanaugh]

I bet having one pair in paralell and the other in series and having the option of having them in series with other and one pair at a time. A normal 3-way Tele switch would git 'er done!

[thedoctor]

I am glad I didn't pay for em. Customer gave me two (?) to put in a rather nice Jackson and I was even depressed with the result. I don't know what their target-market is but it ain't me.

[Antihero]

Hmm,kinda sucks that you cant split em into singles,as that is one of the things i wanted to try,but i guess i will see how it works as a motherbucker in the neck for metal tones.

Thanks for your responses.

Edited April 30, 2005 by Antihero