Help Derby 10 lap steel vs. Remington S8 tone advice needed

[Sven Kahns]

edited

[Roman Sonnleitner]

As you already noticed, the PU on the Derby sits much closer to the bridge, that's going to give you more treble.
Also, apparently the Derby doesn't have vol./tone pots - that's also going to make the tone brighter; you could try bypassing the pots on the Remington; check what values the pots in there have, if they are 250k, they are taking off quite a bit of bite, if you don't want to bypass them, try changing to 1M pots.

[Sven Kahns]

Thanks

[Roman Sonnleitner]

One more thing you could do:
That GeorgeL is a humbucking pickup, I presume? Does it only have hot and ground wires coming out?
Or does it have all 4 wires (hot and ground of each coil) available? If that's the case, you could try wiring both coils in parallel instead of in series - a humbucker with both coils in parallel also has a much more open, brighter tone than one with the more common series wiring...

[Darrell Birtcher]

Sven, I'm very interested in knowing what you came up with on this issue. I have a Remington that sounds great but I'd like it to have a little more twang.
Was about to play around with bypassing the pots when I came across your post. I stupidly sold an S8 here a while back that had some kind of George L back by the bridge and it was very bright and had lots of twang. For what it's worth, that steel had no pots and the pickup was very close to the bridge.
Oh well, at least I have one good recording of that guitar.

[Charles Kleinert]

Sven:
I don't know if this will help, but Mr Remington offers a GeorgeL that is made to sound more like the Fender Stringmaster. Cindy Cashdollar has a D8 with these, I spoke with her in Austin and she said she loved them. She said her previous Remington sounded "muddy" and she wanted more of a brite tone. As you know she played a Fender most of the time. You might call Mr. Remington and see if he has any ideas.

[Sven Kahns]

Thanks

[Peter den Hartogh]

Just to hear what the GeorgeL would sound like if it were much closer to the bridge, you could try to unscrew the 2 long screws that hold the bridge bar and slide the bridge bar as close to the pickup as you want.
This would be a temporary test only, and obviously the fretboard would now be incorrect. But it is for testing purpose only.

If it works, you could get longer bridge screws and a shorter scale fretboard without harming the guitar.

Also, stainless steel wound strings have more twang than nickel.

Replacing the pickup with an Alumitone will give you a greater difference in sound than swapping different types of GeorgeL humbuckers.
http://bb.steelguitarforum.com/viewtopi ... =alumatone