Guitar.com ultimate guide to Vintage Les Paul tone

I am surprised no one else has posted this, or perhaps it's mostly old news, as this is everything that is discussed here, but distilled into one article. Anyway, nice article on what they tried.
https://guitar.com/guides/essential-guide/vintage-les-paul-tone-guide/

Thanks for posting. Lots of interesting reading.

Cheers

I can really stress the part about the pole pieces.
The custombuckers are great pickups and a lot of times just tweaking them is all it needs.
I don't know why Gibson is following the fretboard radius with the polepieces. I guess it's for even string balance.
But this enhances the midrange of the sound. As I do see it: E and A are the bass, D and G the mids and B and E the treble.
Start by adjusting the polepieces flush to the pickup. This should give straight away more clarity, especially to the neck pickup.
Most of the vintage bursts have the polepieces adjusted a little below the pickup cover. Remember: if you would remove the pickup cover, the polepieces still are higher than the slug.
It could take same time to get the desired result.
To start I suggest to adjust the pickup height even with the pickup rings. Then start to lower the polepieces flush with the pickup. I loose the strings when doing this and use the finger tip to feel the height of the polepiece until the feel is even for each polepiece. An adjustment only by looking at the polepieces won't be sufficient. If you have to do more adjustments afterwards only do small turns, maybe a quarter turn. Remember: it's a magnetic field. So if you do adjust one polepiece it will also affect the sound of the other pickup. So there's a tweaking back and forth until you got it.
Once your satisfied you need to stop.
Play it for a few days, use the tone control for the bridge if it's a little bit too trebly. You need that treble to open up the neck and that's why there are tone controls on the guitar.

So why is the treble pickup of the burst in the article adjusted differently? Well that's the other method to get clarity. I found out that the bridge in this burst measures 9k. That's hot for a burst. So they lowered the pickup even below the pickup ring to get clarity but by doing so you loose output, that's why they raised the polepieces to adjust for the output loss.
If you have hit pickups this helps to get clarity.
But for normal outputs around 8 or even lower than 8 you should go with the method mentioned above.

Try it and let me know about your results!

Yes, I was really interested in the pole piece height comments, my TH has the stock Custom Buckers, and the mid range is too pronounced for my likings, so will try adjusting the heights of those. Worth a go.

A couple weaknesses in the article.

"different sounding Aluminum bridges must have different alloys", paraphrasing. Not conclusive. You can have two different weights, thickness, cross sections, shapes, and tempers of the same exact Aluminum from the same billet or bar, and they can have different responses. Make one a little lighter, and drop it on a granite counter top - the lighter one will have a higher ring. Change the cross section but keep the weight the same, do the same drop, the stiffer one will have a higher pitch, etc. Lighter ones will move a tiny amount, and rob motion from a string, stiffer ones will rob less, etc. Its as much about shape, weight, cross section as material.

The pots measurement was very interesting. But in the end, all pots sweep from 0 to the max value. One may need to be on "4" and the other may need to be on "6" to achieve the same resistance - which means they are doing the exact same thing but at different settings. Some tapers may be a little more intuitive for some, but I think they are exaggerating the significance of the taper.

Capacitors age. They talk about it, but I think underemphasize how drastic caps change over time. My high school era bookshelf speakers are in bad need of crossover capacitor replacement. The highs are way low now, in comparison with the lows.. This is a known common repair in the hi-fi world. It might be a highly desirable thing in the guitar world. They could have measured old, new, reproductions and others with an FFT or some such, and simply graphed what we can all hear. Maybe outside the scope and budget of the article though.

Pickups - they talked about adjustment, and the discovery and value in low height, offset by proud poles. Then they jump to the conclusion, with no discussion theory or cause, that vintage pickups are more important than other factors, and adding vintage pickups to a knock off will get you closer to vintage tone? So is it the adjustment, or the pickup that is more important?

Its not a bad article, but I think the author ran out of time, uncovered more than they could study and resolve, and was hasty in his conclusions as a result. There's a lot of unknown left in this article that would be interesting to chase down and get right. I guess that's what keeps the mystery going, lol.

Thanks for sharing! :salude

BurstFan said:

I can really stress the part about the pole pieces.
The custombuckers are great pickups and a lot of times just tweaking them is all it needs.
I don't know why Gibson is following the fretboard radius with the polepieces. I guess it's for even string balance.
But this enhances the midrange of the sound. As I do see it: E and A are the bass, D and G the mids and B and E the treble.
Start by adjusting the polepieces flush to the pickup. This should give straight away more clarity, especially to the neck pickup.
Most of the vintage bursts have the polepieces adjusted a little below the pickup cover. Remember: if you would remove the pickup cover, the polepieces still are higher than the slug.
It could take same time to get the desired result.
To start I suggest to adjust the pickup height even with the pickup rings. Then start to lower the polepieces flush with the pickup. I do loose the strings when doing this and use the finger tip to feel the height of the polepiece until the feel is even for each polepiece. An adjustment only by looking at the polepieces won't be sufficient. If you have to do more adjustments afterwards only do small turns, maybe a quarter turn. Remember: it's a magnetic field. So if you do adjust one polepiece it will also affect the sound of the other pickup. So there's a tweaking back and forth until you got it.
Once your satisfied you need to stop.
Play it for a few days, use the tone control for the bridge if it's a little bit too trebly. You need that treble to open up the neck and that's why there are tone controls on the guitar.

So why is the treble pickup of the burst in the article adjusted differently? Well that's the other method to get clarity. I found out that the bridge in this burst measures 9k. That's hot for a burst. So they lowered the pickup even below the pickup ring to get clarity but by doing so you loose output, that's why they raised the polepieces to adjust for the output loss.
If you have hot pickups this helps to get clarity.
But for normal outputs around 8 or even lower than 8 you should go with the method mentioned above.

Try it and let me know about your results!

Click to expand...

Thanks for your post, prompted by the article and your post, I did start tweaking pole screw heights, since I wasn’t happy with the pronounced mid range on my stock custom buckers. What a difference. I’ve only just started, but definitely worth getting it right, you can tune the pick ups beyond height adjustment! Hasn’t stopped me purchasing some Monty PAF rewinds. But the pickups are now much closer to what I want out of them. I’ll do some more tweaking and post the results. Is it me, but changing just the low E and A string pole pieces, also seemed to affect the strings overall. Anyway, this is perhaps for another post.

I got the magazine when it came out. Some nice pictures and the usual lame, misinformed and contradictory content, as usual for them. Pretty pictures though and it was fun to see my old pal, Cosmo. Seeing was fun, reading not so much.:hmm

wintomato said:

Is it me, but changing just the low E and A string pole pieces, also seemed to affect the strings overall. Anyway, this is perhaps for another post.

Click to expand...

That's totally correct. If you turn one polepiece it influences the overall sound, also of the other pickup.
E.g. when I'm not happy with the neck g sound and lower the polepiece and then switch back to the bridge the bridge sound will be different. The two pickups generate a magnetic field and changing one parameter has influence on the entire field. So to counteract I bring up the g polepiece on the bridge a little bit. Like I said earlier it's a back and forth adjustment all the time.
The other positive effect is that you loose string pull by lowering the polepieces. The strings can ring it out much better and you will get better sustain and easier playability.

The Monty's are great pups but I really do think with the right adjustment the custombuckers are really great too.

Yes, I agree. Definitely great pickups, I’ll get tweaking. I had an issue with how the pickups sounded, this is quite a revelation. My wife will be so pleased that I’m going to spend Xmas with a screw driver and my custom bucker pickups. (Not)