Kent Armstrong Floating Single-coil

Single-coil floating arch-top pickup with adjustable pole-pieces. (7K) *The pickup was designed with a coil tap for 11K, but the tap was damaged on installation.

Replacing an active EMG-91 on my Tacoma AJF-22CEF archtop. I wanted a single-coil because I feel they retain presence when the volume is rolled off. The EMG lacked character and wasn't appropriate for jazz.

For a single-coil, it's not particularly noisy and pretty hot. It's hotter than the active EMG humbucker, though the previous pickup was further from the strings. With the same level of clean gain on my Mesa/Boogie Studio .22 the amp would start to break up, which is exactly what I wanted it to do. I put in a lower gain pre-amp tube in the amp, and now it bites only when I pick double-stops hard.

The highs are and it still hears the snappy acoustic attack of the guitar without any harshness even with the treble full-on. It sounds loud and bright, but smoky and diffused. The lower mid-content is slightly less than the highs and bass. I don't know what a vintage P-90 should sound like, but with flat-wounds and a tube-amp, it does sound like guitars from old jazz and blues records. Rolling the tone-control all the way down gives hollow-body tone ala Jim Hall and Pat Metheney.

It sounded boomy on the lowest string, so I lowered the pole-pieces until they were far below the pickup's face, then I raised all the others, but the problem didn't change until I remounted to give a little more clearance. This is really important because otherwise you have to reduce the bass on the amp making the guitar sound thing and brittle. Sure the pole-pieces have a positive effect on the sound, but the most important thing is mounting it correctly initially.

Mounting the pickup proved very troublesome. In order to make it fit tab fit under the pickguard my tech sanded so much off that he actually damaged the pickup making the 11K mode completely unusable. This is mainly because of the unusual mounting hardware.

Fortunately the pickup still sounds great at 7K. I can imagine that it would only get too powerful and muddy at 11k, so I really don't need it. Still I would have liked to have heard it and have it available as a second option, like a second pickup for leads.

There really aren't any other floating-single coil jazz pickups on the market. Fortunately this is very close to what I needed. This pickup is the best I can hope for with this guitar and configuration. The sound I was probably really looking for was a body mounted pickup, and so this pickup gives more of an electric sound than an acoustic sound.

If I had to replace it, I might try the Kent Armstrong humbucker, or try to find a Shadow Atilla Zoller pickup, but I don't think I could do any better than this.