Boutique Pickup Myths and Secrets... grow your own at Home !
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 14 ต.ค. 2024
- Build your own weirdo boutique pickups ... it's easier than you think and the results are worth it !
The Secret PAF formula ...
#1 Mismatched coils ... mixed and matched from donor pickups
#2 Nickel silver base plate
#3 1215 steel slugs
#4 1010 or 1015 pole screws
#5 1010 steel keeper
#6 1010 steel assembly screws (used in 57, 59 and 67 at random)
#7 use a genuine Paper in Oil 50's capacitor
#8 Alnico Magnet of your choice ... mine is Long A2 .. but they all have a sound
but are not critical as long as they are Alnico and fit
#9 take notes... I have a spreadsheet of 25+ pickups I've assembled like this with materials listed
and notes on the "sound" and potential applications
optional
#8 use a thin Nickel silver cover (no copper) the thinner it is the more it adds a particular high overtone that you will recognize from recordings
#9 avoid wax potting if you can ... my compromise is to use donor coils that have been waxed
but I do not wax after assembly ... high gain folks need the wax... but if you build these right you don't need high gain !
amp was a 64 Princeton reverb on 4 ... speaker is a 66 Vox silver Dog/Alnico
I like the clarity.
I made an "offset" neck pickup a few years back, an early Gibson style mini humbucker, front coil (neck side) was wound with 43 awg, and the bridge side with 42, I forget the individual outputs but they were quite different, wired in series the total resistance was about 8.5k. The cover was nickel silver from none other than Philadelphia Luthier Supplies. It was "thought out" by two harebrained fools in a smoke and juice session as something "different" for a 28 5/8" baritone, but despite the ridiculousness of it all, it ended up sounding amazing anyway.
Very cool, would love to see the follow-up video of this that you mention
Sounds awesome 👏🏻
Sounds like you have a few pairs of those old McCarty pickups around. Interested in selling a pair? Located in Canada..thx.
Still hoping for a follow-up vid!
Still working too many hours and trying to recover a hard drive :(
Would it make a difference if I added a nickel cover to my classic 57 pickups in my les paul? Would that give me a clearer , articulate tone . Mine sounds decent, but a bit muddy at times. Would that brighten things up a bit?
Covers can darken the pickup tone…. If you want brighter the simpler answer is to try different poke screws … which is how my experiments started
Had to ask......are you still able to fix a Maestro EP-3 Echoplexes
I’ve never worked on one !
Sorry to ask, Pat, but I need a bit of clarification: when you say that the PUs have a 'wide offset', to what precisely are you referring? Please pardon my ignorance. You also mention 'mismatch', which I presume to mean coils that are wound to different values; was there a mismatch 'zone' which you found during your research which gave you a superior result?
Yes the offset is another way of saying the coils are mismatched... wide mismatches start to sound like p-90's ... narrower matches gain midrange at the expense of articulation... but the metals are more important than any winding specs ... these days the metals are out there on the net ...the clarity and sustain come from the low eddy current metals
There is a custom shop Duncan 59/custom Hybrid ..that a bunch of Duncan fans made up themselves 1/2 of 14k custom and half of a sd59 8k the ..hybrid result is 11.2k with an extreme mismatch ...it sounds very good ... I made one like this in 91 out of a broken super distortion 13k and Gibson 57 classic ... mine was 10.5 k and sounded killer ..that was in 92!
@@patfurlan when “the older I get, the better I was!” is true 😂
WTF does boutique mean? Would you buy a boutique timing chain, or intake manifold for your car? How about a boutique lawn mower? Is nothing sacred?
Boutique means overpriced crap that’s almost the same as regular over priced crap…. However lots of people ascribe special mojo to the latest boutique stuff! P.A.F.s were machine wound ! There were wide tolerances in the parts …. Modern boutique pickup makers are simply using better raw materials with the same old winding variations that the big makers have been exploring for years!
@@patfurlan WTF is mojo? It's a term people use to explain away things they don't understand. Boutique is where women buy underwear. Perhaps there is a correlation.
@@qua7771 mojo is a placeholder, yes it’s hard to explain, but over time if you dig you can figure out the source. Real PAF’s have Mojo… to some people! To me they are the sum of their quirky parts which after 50 years of research are being known to a few … who keep some of the secrets… myself included… this video tells 90% of the story… Jon Gundry at throbak knows 99.99 yet still discovers more when confronted with Kossoff’s pickups (for example) no one would argue that Koss tone in free did not have MOJO