[Herrseigneur]

So I put a set of Blackout in my RG7321 last night ,and considering that it is my first pickup swap ever, and that I fucking hate soldering and electronic, it almost took me all night to actually be able to hear the fucking thing. And here are some facts you gotta know if you want to perform the installation.
1- No routing necessary in the pickup cavities
2- The scews in the Seymour Duncan kit are TOO LONG, you gotta trim'em, or see the fucking screws bashing the crap of the paint job on the back of your guitar (what I did )
3- The 25k ohm shaft pot are larger than the stock 500k ohm, so be prepared to re-drill the 2 holes.
4- You DON'T have to swap the original 5way switch for a 3 way switch. You're gonna waste money AND lose pickup options.

Here's the new switching of my guitar
1- Bridge
2- Bridge (Unintended, but sounds parallel to me, correct me if I'm wrong)
3- Bridge+Neck
4- Neck (Unintended, but sounds parallel to me, correct me if I'm wrong)
5- Neck

The original idea was : bridge, bridge, bridge+neck, neck , neck. But considering both neck and both bridge sound different (quieter, similar to the 4th position of the stock wiring,) I thought it might have ended up wired in parallel, if this sentence makes sense ...hum hum...I speak French

PICKUP CONNECTION: I don't know how the fuck a 8 pole 5 way switch works at all, but after hours of research with google, I ended up with a certain wiring that was almost perfect, but failed to give me the aformentionned pickup options. so there you go. Check the 8 conector of the switch and do your connections this way:
[1=bridge] [2] [3=neck] [4=volume] [5] [6] [7] [8]
And that's all..nothing else.... Do NOT ask me how it works, as I fucking don't know. THEN if the switching doesn't activate the right pickups, just swap the wire (poles 1 and 3) .

The hardest thing to do is the ground soldering on the back of the pots. It breaks all the times, I HONESTLTY almost ended up smashing the fucking guitar. Fortunately, my girlfriend is more talented than me for electronic so she helped me out a bit with her skillful hands.

So now that I've sacrified my guitar and my sanity to inform you how to perform the swap without any trouble, you'll probably do it in 30 minutes instead of the 8 hours it took me to figure out how to wire the shit up and to find someone who would lend me a drill in the middle of the night. AT LEAST the result is worth it all. Basswood+ Blackout sound almost as good to my hear as my ESP/LTD EC-1000 (Mahogany + EMG81/60), considering that I don't like the tonal properties of Basswood from the start. I still hate to play the RG7321 Unplugged, but blessed be the great gods of metal, the guitar is now ready to kick some major asses.





Don't forget to trim the screws


unless you're guitar is a beater anyway (like mine) and you don't care about aesthetic OR you're particularly attracted by guitar nipples

[Xtremevillan]

Wow. Thanks, and that's...pretty horrible

[7 Strings of Hate]

nice dude

[Edroz]

i see two holes in the back of your guitar

sorry if i sound like a dick, but didn't the first screw popping out of the back of the guitar tell that they're too long and need to be trimmed?

[ibznorange]

dude, i ALMOST did that to my carvin, but i stopped when i noticed a slight bulge in the paint. That sucks.
theres never been a better excuse for a refin :scheme:
how do they sound though?

[D-EJ915]

you forget to sandpaper the pots? seems everyone misses this step...they should really write it on the instructions if they don't

[frank falbo]

It looks to me like you used mounting ring height screws to screw directly into the wood. If that's the case, yes they are way too long for direct mount. But more importantly they are machine screws, not wood screws. The preferred method of direct mount is to reuse the same screws that mounted the other pickups. They look great in there though!

[dtrax]

Word up. Now let us know how they sound vs. the stock PU's!

[daybean]

since you had "regular" size pups , they should have given you " regular screws" or both.
anyway looks good overall, but the marks in the back..?

[Herrseigneur]

Originally Posted by ibznorange

dude, i ALMOST did that to my carvin, but i stopped when i noticed a slight bulge in the paint. That sucks.
theres never been a better excuse for a refin :scheme:
how do they sound though?

Yeah, You know, I've been waiting since monday morning to install these pickups and I decided these pickups were going in at all costs, with NO delay. When I, too, noticed the paint was starting to peel, It would have been too late, probably. Fuck it. That guitar is a beater, as I said. I played live with it for two years beating the crap out of it with my fists, wearing 2½ inches studs/nails wristhbands. So the paint is already pretty fucked. At this point, BEFORE the pu installation, I didn't care anymore about the aesthetic of this axe already. So considering that it was in the back, that I had nothing to trim the screws at hands, and that I didn't want to waste any second I just finished to install them in. The only thing that would pisses me off, aesthetic-wise about that guitar is if I would blemish the Über-Almight-7stringsize-Ibanez headstock/white logo, which I FUCKING love.

Originally Posted by D-EJ915

you forget to sandpaper the pots? seems everyone misses this step...they should really write it on the instructions if they don't

Yes I did, but it didn't seem to help at all. Then I scratched the back of the pot as hard as I could with a screwdriver to ad texture to the suface, but no success here. That thing was driving me fucking nut.

Originally Posted by frank falbo

It looks to me like you used mounting ring height screws to screw directly into the wood. If that's the case, yes they are way too long for direct mount. But more importantly they are machine screws, not wood screws. The preferred method of direct mount is to reuse the same screws that mounted the other pickups. They look great in there though!

The Ibanez screws didn't seem to fit in the pu brackets, and I didn't want to break that cheap-looking epoxy bracket. Really, once it's broken, you're fucked, and they're probably easy to break. I had similar pu in one of my guitar and It never withstood the roughness of my live performances...So I played safe with the pu and use the Duncan screws. I just forgot to watch the lenght of it and as I said, even though I would have notice before, I had nothing here to trim them so I would have done the same way. no regret here. The goal was really to fit these pu in without breaking something about them, at the price they costs...

Originally Posted by dtrax

Word up. Now let us know how they sound vs. the stock PU's!

Personal Opinion Ahead-> I just can say that the stock pu are the most horible I've ever played. Usually, I even like cheap pickups because I can always find a special purpose for them, a special sound that I wouldn't get otherwise. But these were just a mess. I really felt like there was a sandstorm in the amp and I couldn't recognise a note from the chords I was playing. I liked the Idea of the 7th string but the only sound I could get from it was the shitty sound a la Korn. NOW I can play chords with open notes on top of it and actually heard everything. The distortion throught the Blackouts needs way less gain to be attractive. The 7th string isn't muddy anymore. They seem to clean fairly well when the volume is rolled back, giving nice and usable crunchy tones, but don't expect to get "real clean" this way. The only drawback until now is that the tone control is almost useless as it doesn't make any audible difference (to me) and doesn't help cleaning with the volume anyway, so I might change it to have 2 volumes, instead of 1 volume + 1 tone... I really suck at describing sound, and I didn't experienced with many quality pickups, appart from EMG81/60 in mahogany so...I just had to try it in my practice amp so far (Spider III 15, which is the less noisy amp in the entire world...I guest...how can it be lest noisy than silence?) so as for hums and hisses, I will know when I got to try it with my crappy Marshall (which is a really good test, since it requires REALLY great pickups if you want it to sound "good"...well..."ok"). I'm probably going to my friend's home studio next weekend to record a solo for one of his project, so I gotta be trying the Blackouts throught a Triple Rectifier/1960A and maybe post about the noise...if noise there is. But really, you could have taken a pineapple instead of the stock pickups that it would have been an improvement, so yeah, the Blackouts were worth the price. I got them for 175$ (Phase-I set) brand new on ebay. So that sounds cheap to pay to at least be able to enjoy my seven string. Also mentionned in another thread, I also ordered Schaller locking tuners. Hope that will help, too. I've had this guitar for more than two years now and I've never been that addicted.

*Leaving the board to play some Dino Cazares-esque riffs from hell, with a smile of satisfaction*

Originally Posted by Xtremevillan

Wow. Thanks, and that's...pretty horrible

Fixed