Roland GK2 triggering on a Warr

[mike_d]

So I'm hopefully getting a Warr 10 string very soon and wanted to know if anyone has had any luck installing a Roland GK 2 (or 3) midi pick up and how is the triggering on it?

[maddmannmatt]

Well, I thot that I would do the same thing and save a few bills.

One word: "bitch."

The first and foremost problem is the design of the pickup housing. It has a parabolic curve which works great on a Strat bridge, but not so much for a Warr.

To get around this, I removed the pickup circuitboard from its housing. This is simple enough to do as the thing is essentially held in by 4 bent tabs on the underside of the housing itself. Just make sure to be care not to stress them too much if you ever need to put the board back in so they don't snap off.

The board is actually a rubbery compisite so it's flexible. I though when I found this out that it would be much better for making it fit properly, HOWEVER, this is actually one of the banes of the installation.

It is prett easy to fit it under the strings, but you have to angle its height which unless you have alot of patience and talent, and are used to working with fine tolerances, can be a royal PITA.

You also have to set it at an angle so that each pickup will be under each string You can't get them exactly centered, but as long as they are near the center of the pickups they will be OK, except for the highest string. Look below for more on that.

The worst thing of all was trying to get it close enough to the high Bb string without it contacting. Plus the damn pickups are magnetic, so if you get them too close, it they will pull up and stick to the strings. This is frustrating to no end.

You the best thing would be to make some sort of ramp and then try to place that under the strings. But this is alot of work.

I decided more work than it's worth.