Les Paul Lo-Z pickups

[clementc3]

Just in case you scanned this, and for others that scan things like this, please scan in grayscale, not as line art. So in other words, scan for a photo not for text, that way the images don't turn out as black blobs. You need to scan at least at 600 ppi for sharp text, and you might need to adjust the levels to get the background white and the text black, bt it would look so much better and preserve these ads for prosperity.

Plus, that is such a great ad, it would be great to see it in its "monstrous" detail! Thanks for sharing it!

[Grog3]

I'll repost the ad with a better job scanning it.....................

[Grog3]

Thanks David! I've tried to limit myself to Gibson guitars & basses, matching sets when possible. If I would have included Fenders etc... it would have gotten further out of hand than it did. The Triump basses have gone up in price lately. I only paid $300.00 for my first one aprox 20 years ago. It didn't end up being such a bargain though, seven more low impedance Les Pauls are now keeping it company. I just added the Les Paul Personal last spring, that was the hardest one to find. They were either asking way too much or were in rough shape.

[David Schwab]

The Triumphs were a lot more reasonable back then. I missed the chance to pick one up a few times, as well as the recording guitar.

I used to own an EB-2DC similar to the one you have.

Here is is at its current home. I had made a few modifications; replaced the nylon saddles with aluminum saddles, and replaced the useless baritone switch with a 6-position varitone. It also now totally bypasses that circuit when it's on position 1. The original wiring always had a mid cut going on.

Now that I make better sounding pickups for these basses I wish I kept it!

[Grog3]

The Triumphs were a lot more reasonable back then. I missed the chance to pick one up a few times, as well as the recording guitar.

I used to own an EB-2DC similar to the one you have.

Here is is at its current home. I had made a few modifications; replaced the nylon saddles with aluminum saddles, and replaced the useless baritone switch with a 6-position varitone. It also now totally bypasses that circuit when it's on position 1. The original wiring always had a mid cut going on.

Now that I make better sounding pickups for these basses I wish I kept it!

I've had the '67 EB-2 for coming up on 40 years, I think it has better tone than the EB-2DC. All of my mudbuckers sound a little different, but the EB-2C's pickup has the smoothest, least raspy sound, ( if that's a real word??!). I bought the EB-2DC from a store called High Tec Consignments in Minneapolis. Shortly after I bought it, the store was bought by Play it Again Sports. From this store, they started the Music-Go-Round franchise. I bought the 1959 EB-2 because it had one of the last of the single coil pickups, same as the original EB-1. They switched to the Humbucker in early 1959.

[clementc3]

Thanks for posting the ad again, in color this time - very cool!

[David Schwab]

All of my mudbuckers sound a little different

This is true. I had picked up a NOS mudbucker at the same time I had the EB-2. It's was clearer sounding than the one in the EB-2. At some point I swapped the two pickups and put the one from the EB-2 in my Rickenbacker. Then I rewound that one to about 12k. I also added two more magnets, which is how the NOS pickup was. Ive also seen some with alnico and some with ceramic magnets.

[DeepFrequency]

Les Paul Low-Z Pick-ups

Dear David, I found your page from Music Electronics Forum. You were in a forum thread about Les Paul Low-z Pickups. I have this pickup in my Gibson EB-3 1967. I bought the bass new at Victor's House of Music in Bergen Co. NJ and in 1974 had Alex Dumble, Dumble Amps fame, wire the low-z pickup. I constantly search for info on Dumble and the pickup because about 10 years ago I tried to repair the chicken head rotary switch and f'd up the connections, never getting back the combination of tones Dumble had made. This Thread is THE most comprehensive discussion I have come across about this pickup. IS there ANY way to resurrect the thread? There were a few contributors, one in particular who had put a low-z in a Fender bass.

I can answer a couple of the questions you were asking in the thread. This pickup CAN go straight to the recording board. I recorded at Steve Boone's Blue Seas studio in Baltimore and went straight to the board with headphones and it was almost heaven. Second, Alex Dumble had wired my Fender Bassman (cbs silverface) with a small low-z transformer in channel 1 to take one wire of the stereo out XLR cable while the other high-z wire(both were 1/4" jacks) went to channel 2 of the Fender. Strapped for money I sold the amp and used the standard in-line mic low-z to high-z transformer and still do. Into a small mixer, then into an amp.

I used the LP Studio bass drawings and that wiring made for crap sound. All 4 positions sounded the same. Alex had made: Neck pickup sound/fuller-more coil sound/FULL-all coils sound/ and OUT-of PHASE. I found a Ripper schematic that had out-of -phase and swiped that to make my homemade schematic. But I am not inclined this way. I include it here along with a photo of my bass.





EDIT: This was the Thread that got me started. Thank you all. This is a fascinating group. Especially for a musician/bassist like me who has limited electronics skills.
https://music-electronics-forum.com/...ead.php?t=3737

[DeepFrequency]

Interesting thread......

I have a Les Paul low-z pickup I got from eBay. The mounting ears were broken off, so I haven't yet used it for anything, but I did take DC resistance measurements from it. Mine is coil-tapped, and I can dig the measurements from my notes of the time if anyone is interested,

I built two low-z pickups from that info... I used 1100 turns of 34 gauge wire to produced two coils of 150 ohms each, on a stacked frame. I liked the Agile Les Paul copy I had, so I bought another one, spent two days (mostly setup time) on a friend's milling machine routing out larger holes for the pickups and ended up with a very nice sounding instrument. One of the hardest things about the construction was finding the proper value pots. I ended up using linear pots instead of audio taper, because that was all I could find after 3 months of research.

It sound very, very close to the sound on the Les Paul and Mary Ford albums.

If anyone is still interested, I can furnish more info on the process (I took photos during the project), and on info I found out by talking to the fellow that does the sound board for Les at his Monday night gigs and has known him for 25 years.

Mike

Mike if your still out there...What size Pots did you use? I am re-building my Gibson EB-3 modified in 1974 with a Les Paul Studio low-z pick-up. I would have sworn Dumble left the original pots in and it ran to a Fender bassman with a low-z transformer. But what i read here the 250K Gibson pots should not work?

[DeepFrequency]

I posted this in the "Stacked humbucker bobbins/Les Paul Recording pickups thread" also:

I recently acquired a 1970's Les Paul Recording guitar with the low-impedance pickups and I want to take advantage of the low-impedance output without using the transformer that is built into the guitar.

There are several low-to-high impedance transformers that I can put at the amp end of my cable but I wondering how low the "low-impedance" output from the guitar is. For example, Shure has their A95U which can accept low-impedance input in the 75-300 ohm range or 19-75 ohm (if you re-solder a lead), while Electro-Voice has their E-V 502CP at 150 ohms. Radio Shack has one at 900 ohms (I think).

Reading this and other threads I see people say the Les Paul Recording pickups have values of 10 to 150 to several hundred ohms.

Which impedance matching transformer is most appropriate, and does it matter?

(Note that my electrical knowledge is from one physics class that I took in 1975 - about the same time that my guitar was being marketed by Gibson - AND my electrical knowledge has not been updated since, so it's pretty rusty!)

Thanks for your collective knowledge!

FYI- I have used several different models after I sold the matching Fender amp I had. The Shure works well.

[DeepFrequency]

This is all I have - feel free to ask questions - I traced this out when I was still a teenager - long long time ago - lol

The attachments have been long gone. Are you out there still? Will you re-post them please?

[DeepFrequency]

Here's what I have.

I colored that one in back in the 70's so I could follow the wires.

I threw in the photo just for the shock value!

Hi Dave, thank you for the invitation to open this thread again. If I could ask for a re-posting of the drawing that were once here please? Thank you.

[DeepFrequency]

You may have already seen this page on the whole range of Les Paul low-impedance guitars:

Les Paul Recording Guitar Users Forum

About 2/3 of the way down is a short section regarding the Les Paul Signature.

A schematic is here (in the lower right corner of the jpg):

http://www.guitar-parts.com/images/lespaul.jpg

Information on the cream-colored low-impedance pickups is impossible to find as far as I can tell. I have an Epiphone Les Paul Signature with similar looking (but possibly quite different) cream-colored "Electar" (one of Epiphone's proprietary brand names) pickups. The Epiphone LPS only has one high-impedance output jack while the (real) Gibson LPS also has that and also a low-impedance output jack which completely bypasses the internal transformer.

On my Epi LPS the 50-250-500 rotary switch selects different taps of the internal transformer with VERY significant changes in tone. (Can anyone here explain the science behind this for me? )

For the sake of completeness here are two other sites with lots of information about Les Paul low-impedance guitars:

Woody's Gibson Les Paul Recording guitar page

Les Paul Personal

I have had a good experience using the Shure A95U transformer with the low-impedance output from a Les Paul Recording guitar (to enable one to plug into a regular guitar amp) and I would think you can use this with the low-impedance output from a LP Signature. I use the Shure A95U in its off-the-shelf 75-300 ohm configuration; it is reportedly a simple task (if you know what you are doing, which I don't) to change the internal wiring for 19-75 ohm input, which is supposed to be even better.

Please post here if you find more information about the Les Paul Signature!

FYI- I will second the information about the Shure inline transformer. My original Dumble set-up was an XLR plug in my bass(still is) ground/humbucker/low-z to an XLR female. This is a standard mic cable I can buy anywhere. Then I keep in my case the Dumble made XLR male split-Y to two 12" leads ending in 1/4" phone jacks red/black - highz/low-z. My Fender bass was one channel high-z and channel two modified to low-z with a cool little low-z transformer inside. About the size of a shot glass. I sold that amp and used the Shure for years and it sounded the same.

[DeepFrequency]

The Triumphs were a lot more reasonable back then. I missed the chance to pick one up a few times, as well as the recording guitar.

I used to own an EB-2DC similar to the one you have.

Here is is at its current home. I had made a few modifications; replaced the nylon saddles with aluminum saddles, and replaced the useless baritone switch with a 6-position varitone. It also now totally bypasses that circuit when it's on position 1. The original wiring always had a mid cut going on.

Now that I make better sounding pickups for these basses I wish I kept it!

SWEET BASS!

[bbsailor]

Mike if your still out there...What size Pots did you use? I am re-building my Gibson EB-3 modified in 1974 with a Les Paul Studio low-z pick-up. I would have sworn Dumble left the original pots in and it ran to a Fender bassman with a low-z transformer. But what i read here the 250K Gibson pots should not work?

The rule of thumb for volume control value is to find a pot value that is between 35 to 50 times the total DC resistance of the pickup coil or coils if wired in series. This will give you a resistance range in which to find a standard pot value.

Joseph J. Rogowski