Welcome to Seymour Duncan Hot Rails Review.
You came to my Seymour Duncan Hot Rails Review because you have pressing questions regarding this guitar pickup.
Your questions will be answered plus you will get extra information after reading my review.
I think I can help you because I have been doing guitar modifications and repair for more than 17 years as of this writing.
Seymour Duncan Hot Rails Review
Summary
Name : Seymour Duncan Hot Rails
Manufacturer: Seymour Duncan
Price: $85
Star Rating: 4.5
Bottom line: Excellent pickup when used as a full humbucker but not good for coil splitting.
Table of contents
What is Seymour Duncan Hot Rails?
Seymour Duncan Hot Rails pickups are designed to replace single coils pickups while eliminating hum.
They are single coils but actually small-sized humbuckers to fit in the pickup cavities of Fender Stratocasters and any guitar using single coils.
They reproduce a single-coil like tone but without the hum on high gain settings.
This pickup is primarily for those guitar players who want a single coil sound without the hum while maintaining the original size of the stock pickups thus retaining the classic Stratocaster look.
There are three models available for the bridge, middle and neck position.
How does it sound?
This is a high output pickup that is why it is called Hot Rails. A lot of my customers are complaining that it is more on the bassy side.
High output pickups tend to be warmer in tone and the solution if you do not like the tone is to wire it in parallel. I like it better than the full humbucker mode which is wired in series.
This is a Demo of all the rails pickups of Seymour Duncan with the Hot Rails in the bridge position.
Is it good for Coil Splitting?
It is designed with a four-wire set up for those who would like to do coil splitting.
A coil-split Hot Rail pickup ( single coil) will produce a usable single-coil tone, but if you want to use it to replace a single-coil pickup especially the boutique ones, you will be disappointed.
These pickups are designed to replace a single-coil pickup in a humbucker mode. If you want to split coil a pickup, you will do yourself justice if you use full-sized humbuckers, not these pickups.
That picture is one of my first modification projects. Sorry, it has ongoing maintenance plus the neck is upgraded to stainless frets.
It is a Mexican Fender Standard Stratocaster body with the five microswitches that I used instead of a five-way pickup selector switch inherent on a Stratocaster.
I find the split coiled rails pickups more on the tiny sounding side if you get what I mean. I have that projects that involve splitting a rail pickup, most of them are not satisfactory.
I do not recommend that you split-coil these pickups.
Conclusion
Although the Seymour Duncan Hot Rails Pickups are great sounding in humbucker mode as it is designed to be used, when split coiled, it is not at par with full-sized humbuckers.
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Den
Seymour Duncan Hot Rails Review
Summary
Name : Seymour Duncan Hot Rails
Manufacturer: Seymour Duncan
Price: $85
Star Rating: 4.5
Bottom line: Excellent pickup when used as a full humbucker but not good for coil splitting.
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Hello Everyone,
I am Belden but friends call me Den, and I am the owner of this Website.
I have finally quit my job in Aviation as my online business is giving me financial freedom.
I love doing this online business as I love to help people quit their day job and do things they really love.
You will mostly find me hanging out at the coolest site to learn anything about online business.
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I am interested in learning the guitar. It is very interesting to know what you can do to a guitar to improve its tone. I always thought that buying an expensive guitar is just the best you can do. Can these pickups really improve the sound of a cheap guitar? I have a cousin that is into electric guitars. He’s been looking at trying to get different things to affect the tone and sound to his liking. This sounds like a great website for me to refer him to. Thanks for this great article.
Hi Caleb,
There are a lot of modifications you can do to an electric guitar. Changing pickups are one of the best upgrades. A Seymour Duncan Hotrails pickup will make a drastic improvement on the tone of a cheap guitar. Cheap guitars have cheap pickups so changing it to a top of the line pickup will do wonders.
Thanks for the comments,
Den