Seymour Duncan Duality testing update and initial impressions.

Initial Testing:

So far my testing of the Seymour Duncan Duality pickups with the 24 Volt Mod™ is on schedule. 

Initial test results show good compatibility with the Duality pickups but I have a lot more testing to do but so far it looks promising.

My signal chain is only a MOTU m4 into my PC and using various amp sims such as Guitar Rig 5 and Amplitube.

About the Pickups themselves:

All of my testing starts with getting a feel for the pickups using a standard 9 Volt battery. This gives me a good baseline of how the pickups respond to different tonal settings and musical styles.

Testing with a 9 volt battery:

I first started with a clean tone switching between bridge, middle(both) and neck positions. The clean tones are very crisp in the neck position. In the middle position they lose a small amount of clarity. The bridge position lacks the same headroom as the neck pickup and begins to break at higher volumes but it still has a very usable tone.

When adding some overdrive the pickups become crunchy and can play really nice bluesy tones. When adding more overdrive you can achieve a very nice rock tone.

When moving to high gain the bridge pickup squeals very easily and breaks up due to lack of headroom depending on what amp sim I am using. You can very easily get the Swedish chain saw sound with very minor tweaking in guitar rig 5. The neck pickup is much more useable for a stable tone.

Overall the pickups are very good. I will discuss further below.

Testing with the 24 Volt Mod™:

Adding the 24 Volt Mod™ really made huge changes to the harshness of the bridge pickup during my testing. I was surprised to see that while the bridge pickup still has a very hot output but all the breakup from lack of headroom at high gain was smoothed out a lot more than I expected. 

Even with clean tones and tones with slight overdrive I felt like the pickups just sounded better although the affect on the neck pickup was minimal in comparison to the improvement in the bridge pickup. I still have a lot of testing to do with the 24 Volt Mod™ but so far it seems to be an improvement at least for the bridge pickup.

First impressions of the Duality set:

These pickups are good in a lot of ways. They feel a lot like passive pickups in most regards. The breakup with higher gain settings in the bridge pickup may be a turn off for some players. Others will absolutely love it. The clean tone from the neck pickup is very nice and they seem to be able to comfortably play a multitude of different styles of music with ease. Seymour Duncan really made something special here. These pickups just feel different than either standard passive or active pickups.