P90 or humbucker

Sassafras

clarkefan said:

Sassafras said:

I don't much like humbuckers so I'm bound to say P90s.
They can easily handle heavy rock as well as more subtle forms.

Not in my experience they can't.  You could argue they have a place in the neck position, but rock is a bridge position sound.

What's wrong with the P90 bridge sound? That's all I usually use. Sometimes I'll use both pickups but hardly ever the neck on its own.

ICBM

P90s sound great for heavier rock, but if you’re gigging be prepared for them to be unusable noisy in some venues. Not all by a long way, but you’ll probably come across one eventually. Make sure you have a spare guitar with humbuckers or at the bare minimum, a hum-cancelling middle position.

I don’t mean a little bit of hum and buzz which no-one will notice when you’re actually playing, I mean noise which is as loud as the guitar sound, especially when using any kind of distortion. As Phil said, that’s why humbuckers were invented in the first place...

p90fool

Does the noise thing still happen? I've been gigging P90s and other single coils for 40 years in thousands of venues in half a dozen or more different countries and have never had a noise issue, apart from what you'd expect from standing too close to a loud amp. 

ICBM

p90fool said:

Does the noise thing still happen? I've been gigging P90s and other single coils for 40 years in thousands of venues in half a dozen or more different countries and have never had a noise issue, apart from what you'd expect from standing too close to a loud amp. 

Yes, it does. There's at least one venue in Edinburgh - and another one which is now closed - where all single-coil pickups are literally unusable without standing at a very exact and awkward angle on stage. I've played in both, so I would now never have a gigging guitar without at least one hum-cancelling setting.

In fact, all my guitars and both basses are now fully hum-cancelling, even though they look like they have single coils.

TTBZ

Anyone tried the Railhammer P90s? Very interested in the Huevos 90.