PAF parts

[David Schwab]

So SD, obviously there are people making great sounding 'PAF' replicas these days , without original 50's alloys, perfectly matched wire, and exact bobbins (It's beyond me why a certain alloy can't be manufactured; but I know nothing about metals), but if these variables don't have to be exact to make a great sounding pickup, then why all the fuss? I understand the alloys used are important, but I don't understand what the deal is about '50's' alloys, especially since you stated from extensive research that the Gibson metals varied over time.

You can take the route DiMarzio did. They used Larry's old LP with PAFs as a reference for tone, but the pickup only looks like a stock Gibson. They used an Alnico V magnet, but put an air space between it and the keeper. The slug poles are the same diameter as the screws, but with larger flat heads, and they have extra steel slugs between the screws and slugs. They might also have two keepers, but I forget now.

So basically, they reverse engineered the PAF, probably for consistency. And I'd bet they couldn't match the tone on the LP doing it as Gibson did, so they took their modern materials and approach and fudged it.

And surprisingly, it's a very nice sounding pickup. My shop partner puts those and Duncan Antiquities in all his guitars.

[RedHouse]

Possum, I know you really like to position yourself as the voice of authority on all things PAF, but sometimes you are not alltogether correct.
(sorry to sound argumentative, but...)

...The TRUTH is that Jimmy Page's guitar, and Peter Greens', and Duane Allmans, Claptons', Bloomfields', if those guys had all swapped their guitars around you wouldn't notice the difference.....

Now there's a problem, if you can't hear the difference how are you judging your PAF tone? sure they would play great but the tone would change for certain.

I hear a big difference in those players tone, and speaking of tone I'm glad you are working on your tone too Possum, I did see in your new videos you have a real Les Paul's now, the Epiphone and Stellar Les Paul copies you were using in your old videos didn't do you any justice in your efforts.
(the WayBack machine may not be your friend)

... I have had a bunch of different year PAFs in here now...

I'm glad to hear that, your old videos and your research were based (as you said) on a pat no pickup which you think sounds the same, it's good to hear you have some real PAFs's now.

...What you aren't paying attention to is that there IS ONE CHARACTERISTIC that they all SHARE. A 9K PAF and a 9K StewMac kit aren't going to sound the same, no way, its because the parts designs are radically different.

That's obvious, don't think anyone said diffferent.

...I am getting really tired of people saying there is no "one" PAF tone....

I really get tired of certain individuals keep saying they are all the same, they are not. I personally also get tired of the whole "it's the metals" thing, it's not all in the metals either.

[JGundry]

Have any of you guys done an A/B test with a PAF keeper bar and a repro bar? The difference is nearly non existent. I tested several PAF keeper bars against a repro in the same PAF and really if anything the PAF keeper bar maybe just maybe sounded the worst if there was any difference at all.

I supplied the keeper bar for testing and Possum and Belwar know the results of this test and I don't mind telling you the original alloy was 1019 steel. It was basic hardware store steel in the 50's but you can't get it now except in huge quantities from China. You can get 1018 steel which is as close as you will find. Some guys like to go one step further with the keeper bar. Gibson could have done this extra step to keep the screws from stripping out on the keeper bar. So from a purely practical stanpoint it is plausible it was done by Gibson.

Frankly the hardest PAF part for everyone to get is pole screws of the right alloy and head size. I have seen the results of more than one PAF screw test. I'm not going to say what the alloy is as I think the pole screws have a pretty big influence on the tone of the pickup. But I will say it is nearly impossible to get a screw maker to use this alloy now. But I found one place that will do it.

As far as bobbins go I have been working on them with Belwar. And for whatever reason none of the repro bobbins we have seen seem to get all of the details correct. I think some guys like to have a little taller bobbin so they can get more wire on it. But one detail that everyone I have seems to have missed is the pole and slug spacing offset. In a PAF this spacing is different. I think this matters because I think you get a bit of a phase thing going in the tone due to the offset. The other detail that many don't get right is the difference in coil former size between slug and screw bobbins.

The biggest surprise for me has been that the quotes I have gotten for custom baseplates have been way lower than I expected. And the quotes I have gotten for slugs have been way higher than I expected, more than screws.

Oh yeah. The keeper bars Belwar is making are nicer than PAF keeper bars because the end is not sheared off.

[Possum]

...

There are some great pickups out there calling themselves PAFs, but they most definitely are NOT. A Tom Holmes pickup is NOT a PAF, Burstbuckers are NOT PAFs, Seth Lover etc. etc. Wrong alloys, physically wrong cheap parts, way wrong winding patterns. They can come close and they can sound good but put them side by side with the real deal and the copies lose. Does anyone really care? Probably not, but I do. The metals ARE the tone at least 80% or more, when you work with this stuff day to day you see and hear that over and over. The wind can change things but the characteristics overall stay, change the magnet, same thing. One reason some PAFs sound really dull and muffled is because they are dying, they have internal shorts in the coils, they were never made to last, they were literally a five dollar part in a utility guitar meant for jazz guys :-)

And one sample chem analysis from one keeper is not enough to get the full picture, believe me. Now maybe after a couple beers most can't tell the difference between the real thing and sloppy bunch of StewMac parts and asian stamped wrong alloy steel parts, but I can. You study something for 7 years you develop an ear for whats up. PAF alloys are more than just chemistry, a '79 TTop keeper and a '56 keeper are related but don't sound the same, when you really really really listen. I'm not talking about diming every knob on your amp and guitar and blasting away, you can't hear the differences there. I'm talking about when you got your volume pot half way down and your amp set to barely break up, thats where the differences become real obvious. I realize most people could give a shit about what I'm doing, but its a true love obsession with me and has taught alot about pickups and steel alloys and magnetism etc.

And for the record the very earliest Patent pickups ARE PAFs, the only difference is the screw poles have smaller heads and the coils are equal winds. In '60 as far as I have seen so far, equal winds came in so is a '60 not a PAF? It has the sticker. Alot of regular PAFs ended up being equal winds too, does that disqualify them too?

I don't think the keeper shootout is going to prove anything, who is the judge? The subtleties the real ones have aren't in your face kind of thing as I said before, you have to play for hours to appreciate what the true design can do at all levels of volume and playing.

I will probably be studying these things for years yet to come. It literally takes about 3 months of making one small change in the replication process to listen and hear what the change does. Putting a changed piece of steel takes that long just to acclimate to the magnet circuit and become what it will evetually stabilize at, its frustrating but if I ignore it my butt gets kicked and time is wasted. PAFs RULE!!!!! YEEEEHAAAAAAAAW!!!!! (ok, Spence your turn...)

[jwendt2003]

I remember when I first started playing, my first guitar was a Sears silvertone SG copy. Some guy came over to jam one time with a brown 'slab' looking real SG, and it sounded amazing to me; plugged straight in; no pedals or nothing. Of course I realize what I was comparing it to, and I don't know what kind of pickup it had, but none the less, that's when it hit me how great a guitar can sound just by itself. That started my curiosity about pickups...

[Possum]

....

My first in person exposure to PAFs was I bought an SG from a guy in the paper for $75. The neck was bowed pretty good but I managed to straighten it out. It was a '63-64 somewhere in that range, but had slide switches, but not like the horrible ones they made in the early 70's, never saw another one like it. It had great sounding pickups, only Gibson guitar I ever liked because all the other Pauls were real muddy sounding. Only when I started getting my PAF versions right I suddenly was hearing that tone again and remembered that guitar. I wrecked my finger one year and thought I could never play again so sold all my guitars for cheap to a dealer for quick cash, man do I ever regret that to this day, I had some real nice vintage guitars that are worth thousands now. That SG was something else, the cheesy Gibson ones sound are junk compared to those oldies....

[JGundry]

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.

[RedHouse]

...Tonally they are a very, very minor part of the equation in a PAF...

[NightWinder]

??

Belwar you need to put a few more years into your research, I'm into my 7th year and still doing metallurgical lab work. I've been using that stock you "found" since 2004. No disrespect intended Others here are obviously using it too, judging from photos that have been posted, its no secret and nothing new.

This is complicated territory, there are parts that are close alloys but the measurements, MASS is wrong. I am still doing work through a metallurgist friend on looking extensively and deeply into 50's metallurgy. I have had a bunch of different year PAFs in here now, completely dissected and have sent a whole bunch of different year Gibson vintage parts to the metallurgist who is a magnetic alloys specialist, so I have a very broad view of the changes that happened up and through TTops. The stuff he is doing with me would literally cost thousands of dollars, he is helping me just because he's a good guy and wants to help me further my goals. Talk about a gift from the PAF gods... The most unique PAF I've seen so far is a rare '61, that had some radically different things about it, yet its still a PAF.

As to the 50's alloys yes they are different, as different as the magnet wire is. You won't ever see a direct match for either ever again.

I am getting really tired of people saying there is no "one" PAF tone. There are differences in the alloys over all the years I've seen, but not big enough to cause major tonal changes. If you have a stock set of parts that are physically all the same sizes and vary how much wire goes on and change the magnets, thats why they sound different. What you aren't paying attention to is that there IS ONE CHARACTERISTIC that they all SHARE. A 9K PAF and a 9K StewMac kit aren't going to sound the same, no way, its because the parts designs are radically different. The TRUTH is that Jimmy Page's guitar, and Peter Greens', and Duane Allmans, Claptons', Bloomfields', if those guys had all swapped their guitars around you wouldn't notice the difference. The difference is the PLAYER, and his gear, his hands, his talent, and what amp he was plugged into. All of them have identifiable PAF tone. The idea that each of those guitars had special or magical qualities that made each one sound so different is ridiculous. Bloomfield only played that one Les Paul yet you can find recordings and videos of the same guitar sounding very different, mostly because of the different amps he used. There is ONE PAF characteristic that they all share. How to explain it in words is the problem, I suck at that, but I can hear it.

Now what boggles my mind is that Gibson, Shaw, Holmes, all had access to what metals were used, what magnets, yet NONE of them even come close in any of their products....why? Is it interpretation of the data, is it that they were trying to "improve" the PAF design for the mass market Guitar Center crowd? Are they just plain dumb and didn't do any deep level research on PAFs?

I've also had all the major parts maker's metal parts analyzed with astonishing results, they are all over the map and miles away from PAFs. Also just got my Holmes pickup analyzed, his stands out from the crowd, his keeper is unique among all and obviously he has some overseas source that is making custom alloy stuff for him. But even his pickup is miles away from being anything like a PAF, its his own unique design. Why players say his is a great "PAF" is a mystery, its more TTop than anything else.

PAFs are a deep subject, and the more you look the deeper the pool gets, I'm still digging deeper and still experimenting weekly tweaking mostly small things at this point. I luv them little critters

QUOTE=Possum;117677]Belwar you need to put a few more years into your research, I'm into my 7th year and still doing metallurgical lab work. I've been using that stock you "found" since 2004. No disrespect intended Others here are obviously using it too, judging from photos that have been posted, its no secret and nothing new.
Seriously??? I've talked to this guy befor and he knows whats shakin'. I think the sooner you realize "THERE IS NO "ONE" PAF TONE, (maybe a character they share) perhaps you could finally settle on some of your own ideas with the same character and not waste another "7 Yrs" Not trying to ruffle your feathers Ol' bird, just sayin'

[NightWinder]

Funny..

So it can't be the wood or the players because you thought the "PAF"s were all over the place in tone differences. I can't imagine the parts were radically changed from one to another; they had to have them made in batches by the hundreds or thousands. Maybe the difference was in how they were wound. I wonder what makes an original PAF sound bad; or muddy, and another sound great?

I've also had thousands made and tested and only to find out the material was not the same and fluctuated pretty good between the samples of the same batch which would be material from China. Its very apparent because they mix and recycle so much and spill it back on the market in an impure form. There is also a known material China uses for cleaning out carbon in there recycling process that shows up in testing

[NightWinder]

Cool

You can take the route DiMarzio did. They used Larry's old LP with PAFs as a reference for tone, but the pickup only looks like a stock Gibson. They used an Alnico V magnet, but put an air space between it and the keeper. The slug poles are the same diameter as the screws, but with larger flat heads, and they have extra steel slugs between the screws and slugs. They might also have two keepers, but I forget now.

So basically, they reverse engineered the PAF, probably for consistency. And I'd bet they couldn't match the tone on the LP doing it as Gibson did, so they took their modern materials and approach and fudged it.

And surprisingly, it's a very nice sounding pickup. My shop partner puts those and Duncan Antiquities in all his guitars.

At least its original- Ive seen more originality with Dimarzio than any other company- Its true. A few yrs back, I took one apart and found a really short magnet and a bit thicker also(54mm?)- Custom Keepers I might add

[JGundry]

PAFs are a deep subject, and the more you look the deeper the pool gets, I'm still digging deeper and still experimenting weekly tweaking mostly small things at this point.

I actually think the opposite is true. If you look at anything with a fine enough microscope and it will appear to be a very deep subject. If you look too closely you are going to see variations in tolerance as being meaningful data. And you are prone to seeing differences due to tolerance or methods as proof of unobtainium. You have to see it as what it was. A PAF was made with parts from different suppliers over the years and with all of the variables that suppliers and tolerances would build into the pickup. A PAF was the result of a manufacturing process. The variable in the process are where it can be tweaked.

I talked to Tim Shaw a few months ago about a coil winder question. He was very friendly and answered all the questions I had. Shaw was limited by what Gibson wanted to do. He tested magnets and looked at old magnet orders. He said A2 and A5 and unoriented A5 were what was used for PAF's. He said A4 was used only used for mini humbuckers. He said he knew some of the metal parts had changed over the years but Gibson didn't not want to get into that but did later on. But did Shaw find all the answers to all things PAF? No. Is he the last word in all things PAF? No. Not because it was a deep subject or because it was complicated but because he had the limits of time and resources that every large company puts on their employees.

[RedHouse]

...did Shaw find all the answers to all things PAF? No. Is he the last word in all things PAF? No. Not because it was a deep subject ....

I would only add that it's because chasing "the PAF sound" is redundant, too many job lots were used from one run to the next, too many variables and availabilty from vendors etc. The best thing is to find the decent sounding PAFs and base efforts on those.

Again, the PAF sound is all over the place as was said before.

[David Schwab]

But did Shaw find all the answers to all things PAF? No. Is he the last word in all things PAF? No. Not because it was a deep subject or because it was complicated but because he had the limits of time and resources that every large company puts on their employees.

Yeah, he would suggest something, and Gibson would shoot it down. I bet they regret that now! He probably gave up after while and did the best he could do with their restrictions. He could have done a lot more if they let him.

The pickups he did were not too bad though. Do they make anything better these days? I'm always suspect about Gibson pickups.

[RedHouse]

... I'm always suspect about Gibson pickups....

Me too!