Once upon a time, the folks at EMG gave me a tip that the TW bass pickups make great guitar neck humbucker/single coil pickups. At the time, I got a 35TW for a 7 string, now I've added this 40TWX as the neck pickup with an 808x in the bridge, it's a great pairing, I'll be enjoying this pickup a lot!
Special note, using the solderless wiring system made it easier than normal BUT still required help... and Konstantinos from the Thomann guitar dept. was a great help. Outstanding customer service and technical knowledge.
This pickup is a TW, which means it has both a humbucker and a single coil inside the pickup, so this switches between them instead of "tapping" the pickup in half. The X part of the pickup means it has the newer preamp, for this model that makes a huge difference because the single coil and humbucker are nicely balanced with no difference in volume, only in sound.
The humbucker is full and rich on cleans, it can squeal and chunk in distortion mode and has a nice wide-open neck tone for leads. One note: the bass is very strong on the humbucker mode, I had to turn down the bass setting on my amp's clean channel. Not a bad thing, but worth knowing. The single coil is great as a reduced/denounced presence (in a good way) without getting quieter (like my old 35TW did before EMG's X preamp was available) and it gives the "slinky" sound that strats and teles are known for. This single coil sound is fantastic for clean and low distortion clarity, and sadly is absent on most factory built guitars with EMGs.
The installation of this pickup was quite easy, but only after I got the right diagrams from EMG and some extra parts (connecting wires & barrel jack) from Thomann, all of which took some time. I advise double and triple checking your guitar/bass from pickup to the input jack to know exactly what you'll need and how you'll install it. Call Thomann and EMG, they have all the answers and were super cool in helping me.
