DiMarzio Chopper T & Twang King Telecaster Pups

[adamg67]

I recently bought a nice MIM Telecaster, mainly for the way it played but I also liked the pickups that had been installed, so I thought I’d share what I thought of them on here. They’re the DiMarzio “Chopper T” and “Twang King” as fitted to the Fender Ritchie Kotzen Signature Telecaster (https://shop.fender.com/en-GB/electric-guitars/telecaster/richie-kotzen-telecaster/0255202532.html?rl=en_US)

After a few sessions with the guitar it was obvious it had some electrical problems, no big surprise when aftermarket pickups have been fitted, so I gave it a new control plate (no problem, I keep looking for wiring projects anyway at the moment) and got it working nicely.

Overall impressions: The bridge humbucker is the defining thing about these pickups, and it’s a proper humbucker as far as tone goes. These pickups don’t give a classic Tele sound at all, and the main thing I noticed after using it for a while was how close it was tone wise to my PRS Custom 24. Nice middle-ground humbucker sound from the bridge, and the neck seemed fairly dark for a Tele as well, and very different to the bridge. Both of them are quality pickups, great with some crunch, drive or distortion.

I used 500k pots, definitely needed for that bridge pickup, and used push/pull for both. Tone cap was 0.047uf and the tone knob had pull for series/parallel on the bridge pickup, which was well worth doing, really does two different sounds from one pickup. The volume had pull for direct out, which I like on a Tele normally, but it’s not such a big difference with a 500k tone pot as with a 250k, I suppose because there’s not as much treble loss on the “high” tone setting to start with. I stuck a coil tap in as well just to see, but that wasn’t really needed - there was hardly any difference between the bridge pickup tapped and in series, and the series option keeps the hum cancelling.

If I was doing another control plate for these, I’d stick with the 500k pots and the 0.047 cap values and the push/pull for series/parallel, but not bother with the direct out or the coil tap.  I had the 4 way mod as well with parallel neck & bridge which gave a really nice fat sound.

In the end, for me for my only Telecaster these pups didn’t give me that classic Tele sound, which shouldn’t have surprised me, and they’ve now been swapped out for a Texas Special pair - but, they’re good for what they are, they would be perfect for building a Blues Rock or a straight out Rock Tele.
 

[ezbass]

Nice review, thanks for posting. I really like Richie Kotzen and Teles in general, so this was really interesting for me.