PAF parts

[jwendt2003]

I don't think anyone said Jimmy's tele sounded like a PAF tone...I was talking about the LP. When someone talks about Hendrix's sound, they're usually not talking about a flying V. Now I suppose someone will say the V had an excellent vintage strat vibe ...

[kevinT]

Don't jump to any conclusions.

Here is what I already knew. The PAF is a framework of parts and processes. Work within that and you can have a lot of fun making a variety of PAF style pickups. Duplicate the parts and processes as accurately as resources will allow.

Share what you can if you want others to do the same for you. People are also pretty understanding about what you can't share. But holding your cards close to yourself when you are the only one playing poker does not make for much of a game.

+1 ...This is it in a nutshell for me.

[Spence]

Possum. I have had quite a few PAF's come through my shop for repair/ rewinds and every time I get a change I pull the keeper and have a listen. There is no mystery with them. Tonally they are a very, very minor part of the equation in a PAF. I have spent hours with A/B comparisons also. I will try and do an A/B comparison between a 1019 original PAF keeper bar, a 1018 keeper bar and an annealed 1018 keeper bar. I suspect they will be indistinguishable. Some of the differences come down to feel. But I don't recall a major difference in feel between them either. But we will see.

The keeper isn't there for the tone. But then you should know that now that you think you are the world authority on PAFs. If you found 1019 then that shows that you only tested one keeper. The grade of steel varied in keepers but this isn't terribly important. It all goes a bit deeper than that.

[Spence]

Here's what I learned so far about really nailing that 'PAF' sound:

1. You need metal alloys from the '50s that can't ever be reproduced again.

2. You need exact replicas of the plastic bobbins, which to this day, modern science has not been able to accurately reproduce in this cheap little plastic part for some reason. Perhaps it's the circle/square thingy that's throwing them off.

3. You need 43 AWG plain enamel wire that changes gauges within each bobbin, but this is not officially confirmed yet. Perhaps someone can unwind a few more great sounding original $10k PAFs to verify that.

4. PAFs were 'all over the place', so there really is no such thing as a 'PAF sound', which nullifies all of the above.

But seriously, I've learned a lot so far. I won't be as disappointed when my first humbucker doesn't sound just like Jimmy Page. At least it'll be better than the ceramic ones I'm replacing. I have most of my parts in, just waiting on the wire.

You didn't learn any of this here. Stick around for a couple of years.

[David Schwab]

Mama always said PAFs are like a box of chocolates. You never know what you are going to get. No seriously, some if not most original PAF's sounded terrible while there were a select few that were just magical.

From that we can come to the conclusion that the standard PAF formula wasn't very good. The ones that sound very good were aberrations.

Therefore the best way to get a great PAF tone is to not make a stock PAF.

So maybe recreating the exact method is not good enough, unless you want random quality from the pickups. You have to find out why the special ones were special.

Just thinking out loud.

[Spence]

From that we can come to the conclusion that the standard PAF formula wasn't very good. The ones that sound very good were aberrations.

Therefore the best way to get a great PAF tone is to not make a stock PAF.

So maybe recreating the exact method is not good enough, unless you want random quality from the pickups. You have to find out why the special ones were special.

Just thinking out loud.

Thank the Lord. Glad you said it David.

[RedHouse]

Word! What's been considered for most THE quintaessential PAF tone, (Gibson Les Paul-Marshall tone) which's the "Stairway to Heaven" solo, it's actually been made with a stock Tele and an old Supro amp.

So much for that elusive PAF tone, huh?

That's been common knowlege since around 1977 when Page told us that fact in a Guitar Player magazine interview.

...Therefore the best way to get a great PAF tone is to not make a stock PAF....So maybe recreating the exact method is not good enough, unless you want random quality from the pickups. You have to find out why the special ones were special....

Yes, and therein lies the rub. Unless you get a "special" sounding one to come across your bench there's no way anyone in their right mind will let you disect a great sounding one as long as it still works, then, when it doesn't work anymore you have lost half the sample you need to reproduce it. Havind a dead PAF to study (and recreate) isn't going to get you there anyway, but the thing that gets really old is, PAF's are not the holy grail, some were great, most were not, and so ends the story.

Specially when distortion/overdrive comes into play a PAF can mud-up really fast and that's really why most of the moderm players don't like PAF's so much. The PAF was a first-try at getting low-hum onto a guitar, it wasn't tone they were after but a low hum replacement for the P90.

[Possum]

....

David, the PAF was a good design for its time and I still think its the best design for blues and jazz, and beats everything else for soul and expressiveness. I've had a bunch of them in here and they all sound great, the bad sounding ones are the oddities and as I mentioned before there are alot of them out there with partial coil shorts in them that darken them up substantially. The average Joe guitar player doesn't have an LCR meter in his pocket to diagnose it so he just thinks wow these suck. I have a rare Seth L interview a customer sent me and he said they were wound TO INDUCTANCE, have you ever notice that alot of them all hit the same henry readings?

I wish I knew why Gibson took such a radical departure from them into the TTop design which was really bright in comparison.

Also what is not generally known or discussed is that the pots in those guitars were all over the place, some hitting as high as 650K-700K. I don't know how LOW they could have been hitting, I just know that an old guitar tech told me the best sounding bursts he examined in the day had pots around 550K. If they varied in the wrong direction there could have been some guitars with noticeably duller tone out the jack. The wiring harness is practically a musical component on its own, you can't put great pickups in a stock Epiphone wiring harness and expect to get great tone out of that crap. I always talk with my customers about first upgrading the factory junk that all the manufacturers and even Gibson use. Their pots have below average taper, their tone caps are fake. Both my cheap LP test guitars have been completely rewired to authentic 50's specs as much as possible and use good quality new or NOS paper in oil tone caps.

All that said, yes there are alot out there who don't understand PAFs or really know what they are, and even some old timers who have always hated them.

Modern small time pickup makers are spoiled in that they have AllParts/StewMac parts to work with, those put together into a pickup are designed to be real pleasing, its real hard to make something sound bad with those parts; the downside is those who use them don't even understand what the design is and they think all bucker parts are the same. The benefit of studying PAFs for me was the added knowledge of knowing what happens when you alter every major part in the recipe to see what happens, some of it doesn't sound so pleasing.

[David Schwab]

David, the PAF was a good design for its time and I still think its the best design for blues and jazz, and beats everything else for soul and expressiveness.

Right, but here's something to consider. Lover designed the pickup, and made some prototypes. He had ideas about what the materials and construction should be, and Gibson changed the design. He wanted a stainless steel cover and baseplate, and they said no. He also wanted double slug coils and a closed cover. They wanted adjustable poles. We know they sourced their magnets all over the place.

So they ended up making something different. How would his version of the pickup sound? And why do they sound so different? Just the amount of wire wound on them? (I know a little bit either way makes a big difference). You, as well as others, have probably figured how to replicate various good sounding versions, and I bet they all differ in some ways. Like Jon said, it's a framework.

You take something like a DiMarzio Super Distortion. They are all going to sound pretty much the same. I have one from the 70's, and one from the this century, and they are identical tone wise. So what was Gibson doing wrong, and what did they do right?

They did the same thing with Les Paul. The Gold Top was supposed to be all mahogany, and the Custom was supposed to have the maple top. They also screwed up his trapeze bridge design, so they had to make the Tune-o-Matic to fix that.

[Possum]

...

There have been many companies who make double slug pickups, they are much brighter. In Vintage Guitar's PAF shoot out a few years ago they tested the original double slug prototype and said it sounded alot like a single coil pickup. After all, that WAS the intent, to make a humbucking pickup that sounded like a P90. The recipe was for the same number of winds 10,000 total.

There are alot of reasons PAFs sound the way they do but then I'd have to give away alot of hard work to describe why. Almost everything about them except the cover and baseplate are different. They didn't use stainless steel because it was too difficult to solder to. I have seen on Ebay one very rare PAF that did have a stainless cover, so maybe some did make it out the door.

Gibson hasn't changed any over all this time, they are cheap cheap cheap, cut corners, profit is king over everything. The owners don't care about players, its all about sales.

Super Distortions were made after '68, 1968 is when steel making technology changed to what it is today. Magnet wire wasn't the same, magnets were a little different, thats alot of changes from back then. I"m sure you can't get the wood that was available back then either.

[LtKojak]

There have been many companies who make double slug pickups, they are much brighter. In Vintage Guitar's PAF shoot out a few years ago they tested the original double slug prototype and said it sounded alot like a single coil pickup. After all, that WAS the intent, to make a humbucking pickup that sounded like a P90. The recipe was for the same number of winds 10,000 total.

Yes. That was the exact intent. A no-hum P90.

From Seymour's own mouth, as he has the original PAF prototype, when asked about how it did sound, he said: "Bright. Very, very bright"

Maybe his Custom Shop Phat Staples could be the perfect neck p'up with the elusive PAF sound as it should've been? It's NOT a humbucker, though.

[voodoochild]

From that we can come to the conclusion that the standard PAF formula wasn't very good. The ones that sound very good were aberrations.

Therefore the best way to get a great PAF tone is to not make a stock PAF.

So maybe recreating the exact method is not good enough, unless you want random quality from the pickups. You have to find out why the special ones were special.

Just thinking out loud.

Exactamundo.

[RedHouse]

Exactamundo.

Now if we can just get away from our own hyperbole, we'll be somewhere!

[Possum]

...

The truth is that every humbucker is a PAF in a way, the original production PAF was the big momma of all humbuckers that follow. Its also worth studying all the variations, even new stuff that others make, the Holmes pickup is a nice example of intelligent design. I have alot of vintage buckers around here, some with very strange designs and some very cool ones, all have a different story to tell. Its a really good thing to play with the design and learn what each part truly does, so having a lathe and a small mill to use is a must. No, keepers weren't designed as tone pieces, they are there to magnetically improve transfer to the screw poles, but they ARE a part of the tone equation. Just change them to something else and you hear it. I have a huge stack of keepers I've made sitting here that all sound different, I spent most of last year changing everything in the prototypes and found 100's of variations in tone.. in the end I stuck to pretty much what the historical record is, but I found some significant changes that happened somewhere between the first PAFs the coveted '59's.

[Down Time]

Getting back to the keeper, I had a chance to inspect and install a set of WCR humbuckers. Guess what folks, no keeper. The magnet is wider and makes closer contact with the screws and supports the bobbin. Humm, one less part to worry about. Maybe Seth Lover overlooked this possibility.