I have to start out by saying I don’t believe that pickups contribute to tone anywhere near as much as the amp does. As far as I’m concerned I can live with two types of humbuckers, a PAF style and a hot “distortion” pickup. I think it’s a little overkill that a company like Seymour Duncan sells so many different kinds of humbuckers. PAF’s, Seth Lover, Pearly Gates, Duncan Custom etc…they all sound the same to me when I listen to the sound samples at seymour duncans site.

I had an old kramer Striker layin around without a pickup in it. I figured I would just throw a GFS PAF pickup into it. I have a GFS Lil Killer in a Strat and I really like it.

I couldn’t make up my mind between the GFS crunchy paf or the fat paf. I noticed the Crunchy Rails on the site. It is described as “Our Hottest- Modern Metal Power- The GFS Crunchy Rails are wound the hottest of any GFS humbucker”. GFS describes the tone as “relaxed midrange but not quite scooped”.

I’m not normally one for wicked high output pickups. When manufacturers start to add extra windings to a pickup more inductance and capacitance is added which usually sacrifices highs.

On a whim I decided to purchase the GFS Crunchy Rails.

I bought the Crunchy Rails an installed it into the Kramer Striker. I can’t say I was in love with the pickup at first. To me it sounded more like a JB than a duncan distortion. It seems to have the bite of a JB but not quite the shrillness a JB can sometimes have. The GFS Crunchy Rails also seems to have a bit of a lower end than the JB.

After playing it for a few weeks the crunch rails has really grown on me. It really excels at metal tones. It has a much hotter output than a regular PAF. It’s a natural for a modern high gain tone like a recto or 5150 type amp.

To my surprise the pickup is also quite musical and has some depth to it’s personality. It sounds great playing singing sustain like a Gary Moore song or maybe Journey.

This pickup is highly recommended especially for the $33 price tag.

Here is a little video I did to compare the GFS Crunchy Rails to the Duncan JB. The recording was into my behringer v-amp on the modern high gain setting. Ignore the sloppy playing.

On this page I have some sound samples that compare a GFS Lil Killer to a full sized Seymour Duncan Custom.

All sound samples were recorded through a Behringer V-Amp using factory presets straight into the soundcard.
--The Lil Killer is in a late 80's American Standard Strat.
--The Duncan Custom was in a 75 Les Paul Gold Top.

The Strat has a stock TBX control which was set at the midpoint. When you crank the tone knob past 5 the TBX control essentially removes the cap from the tone circuit and the tone gets a little brighter.

I was never totally happy with the bridge pickup in my Strat. I had been shopping around for a mini-humbucker solution and decided on a Hot Rails. I came across the GFS LiL Killer on Ebay and did a quick search on Google. It seemed like the folks at Harmony Central and the Fender Discussion Page had some good things to say about GFS.

Keep in mind that I am not one of those "golden eared, cork sniffing" pickup connoisseurs. I can tell the difference between a single coil or humbucker when I hear a song but that's about it. When I listen to the sound samples at Seymour Duncan I can hardly hear a difference between the various pickups. I hate the totally subjective terms that are tossed around to describe a pickup like warm, shimmer, quack, woody, smooth, transparent etc.

Personally I think the Lil Killer kicks some major ass, especially at $25 ! I even had to go back and record some of the sound samples again because I thought I forgot to switch guitars after listening to the completed samples.

Duncan Custom Lil Killer Lead Tone Duncan Custom Lead Lil Killer Lead2 Riffs in the style of Van Halen Duncan Custom Halen 1 Lil Killer Halen 1 Duncan Custom Halen 2 Lil Killer Halen 2 Installation Issues
At the GFS site they mention that you may have to slightly open up the cutout on the pickguard to fit the pickup.
Rather than modify an original pickguard I bought a pearl finish pickguard from GFS. I used 100 grit sandpaper to widen the opening just a bit. The area where the connection wire connects to the coil bulges out a bit. The higher you want the pickup the more you need to widen the opening. I don't think I removed more than a 1/32" near the center of the cutout. I don't think I would notice the small space if I went back to a stock pickup.

The pearl pickguard looks killer on the red strat !

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