Reusing old pups from brand guitars and cheap Asian made pups versus the brand name

[Slobrain]

I wanted to ask this to all here that post, have any of you had good results using brand guitar pups or Asian made pups from places like GFS or sellers like them? or doing mods to those pups that made them sound much better?

Reason I ask this is that I have used some of the GFS brand Humbuckers for years with really good results. I just took a pair of Ibanez V7 and V8 Humbuckers and swapped the magnets to change the sound, they sound good, not really great like SDs but not so far off but some what different. I've used some other off brand Asian made pups that surprisingly sounded good. Sometimes I have to pot them but most the time I don't.

Just seems so many pickups out there now that are good that it seems the prices we pay for name brands are a bit hi these days... I do really like SD JB Humbuckers and some of the Dimarzio pups but sometime the prices are a but much when a person is on a budget and building or modding guitars.

What are your thoughts?

Slo

[Chuck H]

I'm not part of the pickup forum, but I do have an opinion on this.

What you pay for from the major pickup brands is recipes and consistency. They develop designs they think people want. People want some of them, they keep those designs. They develop manufacturing processes that produce a very good to excellent quality and consistent product of known performance. And they have a reputation and longevity that inspires confidence and trust. It's a matter of spending more to get a known sound and performance level from a source you can rely on. Try getting ANY of that with cheap Asian made pickups.

That isn't to say that cheap pickups can't sound good. Certainly they can, but... IMHO Matching pickups to guitars is just as cumbersome as matching speakers to an amp. It takes a ton of product familiarity and experience to even begin narrowing it down to under five attempts before something clicks. Brand name pickups offer a known selection to work from. Many models with reputations of their own.

As to small time and boutique winders... My experience (which shouldn't be taken for gospel) is that it's much harder to know what the pickup you're buying will actually sound like (very bad) but it will be of the highest possible quality and customer support (very good). I stumbled into some Van Zandt pickups early on that someone assured me would be the bees knees. I never liked them, but I used them for many years because I spent a silly amount of money on them. I recently decided I'd had enough of them and replaced them with a set I bought from a winder on this forum. The first set sounded MUCH better than the Van Zandts in my guitar. Then the winder worked with me to refine and idealize based on where we were, where we went and where we wanted to go. The second set of pickups he sent me pretty much peg what I always wanted this guitar to sound like. You won't get that sort of thing from a major brand and certainly not from an Asian importer or any salvage.

We're fortunate to live in a time when basically good materials and know how make for a lot of good inexpensive stuff. The really good and great stuff still costs proportionately higher as always. So, if "good" is good enough, ok. If you want more you'll need to bite the bullet and play ball. When it comes to something as personal and important as my guitar tone I don't prefer to settle.

[Chuck H]

big_teee likes this because HE made my pickups.

And maybe some of that other crap I talked about

[Slobrain]

Hey Chuck,
I appreciate your view. I Really do like certain brand pups like the Seymour Duncan and Dimarzio and use both in my guitars. But I also use the GFS crunchy rails in a few guitars and they sound really good for those guitars. I like to try cheapo stuff too just to see what I can get out of them, same as EVH did back in the 70s. Glad you like the pups Big_teee made and glad we have folks here that do what Terry does. it helps when we decide to do the pup experimentations on our guitars. I was just curious to see what people find in some of those off brand or Asian made pups they mess around with. The Ibanez V7-V8 I just installed into a basswood strat with a maple neck sounds good. I did the magnet swap for kicks and grins to see if it would help those pickups and it does somewhat. Sometimes those old not so great pups can actually sound good in the right combination guitar which I have ran across once in a while.

Cheers

[Chuck H]

When you consider that historically there have been MANY cheap pickups that have managed to earn reverence and are now copied it becomes clear that:

Pickups aren't hard to make
There have been A LOT of inexpensive guitars with cheapo pickups
Even a blind pig finds a truffle now and then

You can get fed at a diner. It'll even be good, sometimes. Is Duck a L'orange from the frenchy place uptown worth seven times more than that plate of biscuits and gravy? Well... When it comes to pickups at least you'll only need to buy them once to feed your appetite. So go for the good stuff.

I don't think the Fender single coil was ever intended to be top end, boutique product or design So why shouldn't some modern inexpensive pickups sound good? This flys in the face of those making a higher end product, but there you go. I still stand by my points above. There's a lot to be said for choosing top shelf materials and treating them artfully and carefully to achieve a consistently excellent product with customer support.