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So -
Once Upon a Time in the 80's I put together a bolt-on axe (Stratty thing, koa body & Warmouth birdseye neck, as I recall) for this wildly successful pop producer/writer/guitar player (who will remain nameless.) It had what I used to call a "212" in New York back in those days, you know, hum-sing-hum; 'buckers on the outsides with Strat pickup in the middle. No switches; just 1 volume control for each pickup (with pull-up functions for single coil mode on the 'buckers.) He's been nuts about the thing for thirty years; if only I could get royalties from all the tracks this thing has been on... He keeps saying "Why doesn't Everybody use this setup" - I keep telling him that he doesn't play live. Amusingly, since I couldn't find reverse audio taper pots (which really work well for blending) with switches on them I wired the controls backwards, and he still loves it.
So, he contacted me a while back saying that he wants to start playing jazz again, and decided that Les Paul Recording guitars really feel good to him for some reason. Really, I think these are the only guitars ever produced on which Absolutely No Living Human likes the pickups (& associated convoluted passive harness.) So, we gutted the thing and started from scratch.
First thing I noticed after pulling the (10 ohm DCR) pickups was that the pair of them weigh 1.5 Pounds! Man, after you get 'em outta there the axe turns out to be not as heavy as you might have thought. Also, the mags are so brutal that you could move a fridge with these things!
Anyhow, I discovered that with a bit of Dremelling of the cavities (and a big enough hammer) a regular P90 cover will go into these things. He wanted really hard-ass sounding humbuckers so I wound up some coils and loaded them with 1/8" bars, using neos for charging up the field. Slid the coils so as to account for the drastic slant of the wells. (See snaps below, pay no attention to string/saddle positions.) Man, did this thing ever come out doing just what he wanted. I highly recommend this approach should you ever be faced with this project.
In fact, he specified the 1-knob-per-pickup-w/pull pot wiring again, and wanted them to work backwards because that's what he's become accustomed to over the years.
Bob Pamieri
Once Upon a Time in the 80's I put together a bolt-on axe (Stratty thing, koa body & Warmouth birdseye neck, as I recall) for this wildly successful pop producer/writer/guitar player (who will remain nameless.) It had what I used to call a "212" in New York back in those days, you know, hum-sing-hum; 'buckers on the outsides with Strat pickup in the middle. No switches; just 1 volume control for each pickup (with pull-up functions for single coil mode on the 'buckers.) He's been nuts about the thing for thirty years; if only I could get royalties from all the tracks this thing has been on... He keeps saying "Why doesn't Everybody use this setup" - I keep telling him that he doesn't play live. Amusingly, since I couldn't find reverse audio taper pots (which really work well for blending) with switches on them I wired the controls backwards, and he still loves it.
So, he contacted me a while back saying that he wants to start playing jazz again, and decided that Les Paul Recording guitars really feel good to him for some reason. Really, I think these are the only guitars ever produced on which Absolutely No Living Human likes the pickups (& associated convoluted passive harness.) So, we gutted the thing and started from scratch.
First thing I noticed after pulling the (10 ohm DCR) pickups was that the pair of them weigh 1.5 Pounds! Man, after you get 'em outta there the axe turns out to be not as heavy as you might have thought. Also, the mags are so brutal that you could move a fridge with these things!
Anyhow, I discovered that with a bit of Dremelling of the cavities (and a big enough hammer) a regular P90 cover will go into these things. He wanted really hard-ass sounding humbuckers so I wound up some coils and loaded them with 1/8" bars, using neos for charging up the field. Slid the coils so as to account for the drastic slant of the wells. (See snaps below, pay no attention to string/saddle positions.) Man, did this thing ever come out doing just what he wanted. I highly recommend this approach should you ever be faced with this project.
In fact, he specified the 1-knob-per-pickup-w/pull pot wiring again, and wanted them to work backwards because that's what he's become accustomed to over the years.
Bob Pamieri
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