Westone Parts, Part 2

Over the last few weeks I've taken delivery, bit by bit, of all the remaining parts that I needed for the Westone. The main thing that was outstanding was the bridge pickup - I've gone for a Seymour Duncan "Duncan Custom", which will give a bit more oomph than the '59 that I've got for the neck position, but they should go well together to give a good range of tones and sounds.

I needed to get the "trembucker" version for the bridge position on this guitar - this is Seymour Duncan's term for pickups with a slightly wider spacing between the pole pieces, generally for guitars with tremolo rather than fixed bridges. The string spacing for a standard fixed bridge (e.g. the tune-o-matic on a Les Paul) is a shade under 2" from low E to high E string, but for tremolo bridges (and some fixed bridges, like the one on this Westone) it's slightly over 2". This means that the ideal spacing of the pole pieces on the bridge pickup will be slightly different dependent on the bridge type, to ensure that the strings pass directly over the poles.

So, because I've been a bit choosy with the pickups and gone for the "Reverse Zebra" colours (see here for an explanation of the difference between Zebra and Reverse Zebra), in addition to needing the trembucker version (especially of one of the less popular/common Seymour Duncan models, from what I can tell of how few UK websites listed it!), I had to wait 4-6 weeks for the pickup to be ordered through from the US!

Needing the trembucker did solve another problem though, somewhat fortuitously - but that's a slightly long story so I'll go into it in another post...