Monoprice Indio Classic V2 Pickup Swap - Duncan Designed Detonator and EY Alnico Hot Rail

The Guitar

Monoprice Indio Classic V2 in stock form.

I impulsively bought a Monoprice Indio Classic V2 guitar to use as a project for some pickups I had lying around. With the help of a coupon code, the guitar cost $54 + tax to get shipped to me. 

The guitar itself is decently built for its normal price point. The frets are a bit scratchy, but less so than the other Monoprice Indio Classic V2 that I have. The guitar came set up with no fret buzz. The tuners are not high ratio, so it’s easy to overshoot the pitch when tuning up if I am in a rush.

The stock pickups are bright sounding, and don’t have much bottom end. The pickups don’t feel great to play through, but the recorded sound is not as bad as I thought.

I previously had a Duncan Designed Detonator and two EY hot rail pickups in a HSS configuration in a Squier Strat. I thought these pickups would be suitable replacements for the stock Monoprice pickups. 

Duncan-Designed Detonator

I bought a Duncan-Designed Detonator pickup some time in the mid-2000s. I enjoyed the sound of the pickup, but started gravitating towards lower output pickups as I got older. The pickup is high output and has a lot of low end information. I would later learn that the pickup was based off a Duncan Distortion rather than an Invader.

The paint on the Hex screws was presumably coming off from age. I came across other users who had the paint come off their Detonator/Invaders hex screws, and ended up sanding off the paint. I did the same, loading each screw in a drill to sand off against a sanding sponge.

Half of the hex bolts sanded.

Cleaned up Detonator.

The pickup’s measured DC resistance was 16.92kohm. 

EY Alnico V Hot Rail Pickup

I bought an 11kohm Alnico V dual rail pickup (part # EY-DRP580-BL) from EY Guitar Parts sometime back in 2016 for under $12. I had read favorable comparisons of it to GFS and Artec rail pickups at that time. The pickup sounded good as a series neck humbucker. I preferred playing the pickup in parallel in the neck position, but will keep it as a series humbucker for this guitar.

Pickups swapped in.

I wired up the Detonator per the online documentation (green-hot, black-ground), and had to flip the polarity of the EY Hot Rail (black-hot, red-ground) for the middle position to sound right.

The Detonator is thick and compressed sounding, which is something I don’t currently get out of my other guitars. There is much more low end available than the stock pickup. I might set this guitar up to drop down 1 step, since I have more classic sounding guitars in standard tuning.