REVIEW: Seymour Duncan SHPR-1 P-Rails pickup

Published April 25, 2009 | By Peter Hodgson

The Seymour Duncan P-Rails SHPR-1 pickup is one of the latest entries to the company’s increasingly broad pickup offering, and it looks like nothing else the company has ever made. While most pickups tend to look quite similar to each other on the outside, the P-Rails looks like bizarre hybrid of a P-90 style single coil pickup and one half of a mini, single coil-sized humbucker.

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NOT YOUR ORDINARY PICKUP

The strange visual presentation is a clue that this is not your ordinary pickup. Designed to be wired into either a 2 or 3 way switch, the P-Rails can be either a regular humbucker, a Fender-style single coil, or a Gibson style P-90.

I tested a matched P-Rails set in a Framus semi-acoustic guitar, with two-way mini toggle switches discreetly installed underneath the pickguard, and wired for humbucker and P-90 modes. A 3-way switch would also allow for standard single coil mode using the mini rail-style portion of the pickup. Seymour Duncan says that when this mode is engaged on both pickups, the tone is similar to the ‘quacky’ positions 2 and 4 on a Stratocaster.

In the bridge position, the P-90-inspired portion of the pickup sounds warm and edgy, but not too over the top compared to some other such pickups on the market. Note separation is nice and clear, even with complex chords and a good dose of distortion. In the neck, the tone is full and warm, with pronounced pick attack, and is especially good for blues soloing.

HOW’S IT SOUND?

In humbucking mode, the bridge pickup is not a particularly high gain affair. It’s great for crunchy, supportive barre chords and voice-like solo tones, and the smooth, rounded midrange and slightly muted treble response make it especially good for banging out power chords in a more traditional rock style, rather than a downtuned, chugga-chugga metal way. The neck pickup sounds juicy and lyrical in humbucker mode, with great sustain and dynamics. It sounds especially good when its output is boosted by an overdrive pedal or clean boost.

It’s also a lot of fun using the mode switches almost like amp channel switches. If you set your amp just on the edge of crunch when the guitar is in humbucker mode, you can then switch to P-90 mode for a cleaner, brighter tone.

Since the test guitar had individual volume controls for each pickup, I was able to bring in a small amount of the bridge P-90 to add a subtle little high end and pick attack to the neck humbucker mode, or change the ratio between the two pickups to add a little roundness to the bridge P-90 by fading in a small amount of the neck humbucker sound.

Seymour Duncan recommends another wiring option for the pickup: Normally, in humbucking mode, P-Rails are wired in series, for a high-output sound suited to classic rock and heavier tones. However, when the coils are wired in parallel, the mismatch produces a P.A.F.-style humbucker tone with less phase cancellation associated with standard parallel wired humbuckers, with present upper-mid bloom responsiveness and pronounced string articulation.

THE BOTTOM LINE

The P-Rails is the ideal solution for players who want a maximum number of options with the minimum amount of fuss, and it’s an especially handy studio tool, effectively tripling the number of available sounds from the one guitar.

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Seymour Duncan SHPR-1 P-Rails Neck Humbucker Electric Guitar Pickup Standard

Seymour Duncan SHPR-1 P-Rails Bridge Humbucker Electric Guitar Pickup Standard