Best Pickups For Peter Green Sound With Coil Split

IanShaw

Hello everybody

I'm planning to upgrade my LP style guitar mainly the electronics and the pickups. 

Can you recommend a set of Humbuckers for a Peter Green sound?...naming a DiMarzio or Seymour Duncan set would be appreciated.

Another issue is how to achieve the out of phase tone with the configuration I have in my mind. Peter had vintage pickups with one main lead cable (ground and hot wire), but a Humbucker with one lead cable doesn't work for coil split which is what I want in addition to that famous-nasal tone. It means I need a modern Humbucker with 4 wires. My guitar has 1 volume, 1 tone, and 3 toggle switch.  I found a diagram on Seymour Duncan website for 1 push/pull volume (coil split), and 1 push/pull tone (phase) with 3 toggle switch.  Do you think it would achieve the result that I want?...or you recommend a vintage set with the traditional 3 toggle switching? 

Thanks 

thegummy

Never tried them myself but Bare Knuckle's PG Blues set are specifically made to sound like Peter Green's pickups, including some kind of anomaly in the manufacturing of his that makes the middle position sound different to most humbuckers.

PhilKing

I have a set of them and they do sound great in the middle position.  They were also good enough for Gary Moore.

Funkfingers

Coil splittage plays no part in the Peter Green sound.

The Peter/Gary/Kirk sound is the result of a bodged pickup repair. The repairer inadvertently replaced the bar magnet in the neck/Rhythm position pickup in the wrong orientation, reversing its magnetic polarity compared to the unmolested bridge/Treble pickup.

Remounting the pickup the wrong way around (pole screws nearer the bridge) was Peter's attempt to correct the problem. (It was never going to work.)

If you want the "honk" to be switchable, one of your humbuckers needs to have output cable in a format that permits electrical phase reversal.

IanShaw said:

I found a diagram on Seymour Duncan website for 1 push/pull volume (coil split), and 1 push/pull tone (phase) with 3 toggle switch.  Do you think it would achieve the result that I want?

Your idea will get all of the switching permutations that you specified. What it will not achieve is the exact sound of Peter Green. Even the man himself struggled to get close to it after he was spiked.

ICBM

The switching options you want are perfectly possible with 4-conductor pickups, but the big problem you will have is that to get a good Peter Green sound you will need low-wound vintage PAF type pickups - these don’t really sound good with coil splits, they end up thin and weak-sounding.

You can use hotter pickups to give better split sounds, but you will lose the clarity and almost hollow tone you need in the full humbucker sounds, especially on the bridge pickup which needs to be quite high-wound to sound good split. (The neck pickup doesn’t need to be as much.)

victorludorum

I think @Alegree makes some humbuckers that have unequal winds to help the split sound, but as has been said, you will lose some of the Peter Green sound because of that, which was achieved with standard, low wind buckers.

IanShaw

Thanks for the replies. You have clarified many issues. 
It's a tough choice between flexibility or Blues heritage.

ICBM

It’s also worth bearing in mind that the guitar itself has a remarkably unique sound, over and above Peter’s playing, and not just in the middle out of phase position or the neck - you can hear it clearly even in the completely stock bridge position. It’s an unusually reedy, woody tone that’s quite different from most Les Pauls, and you can hear it straight away even when Gary Moore or Kirk Hammett plays it.

IanShaw

ICBM said:

It’s also worth bearing in mind that the guitar itself has a remarkably unique sound.

Yes it might be true, but the official reason is that the pickups were magnetically out of phase, so at least we can emulate it. The fact that guitarists in 2020 after more than 50 years still want to get the sound is unbelievable by itself. How authentic and original Peter was and still.
I could hear the same woody tone in Gary's playing, and I personally like Gary as much as I like Peter.

thegummy said:

Never tried them myself but Bare Knuckle's PG Blues set are specifically made to sound like Peter Green's pickups, 

From what I heard and watched on the net it looks like the Bare Knuckle's PG Blues are among the closest to the real sound. Thanks for your info.

ICBM

IanShaw said:

Yes it might be true, but the official reason is that the pickups were magnetically out of phase, so at least we can emulate it. The fact that guitarists in 2020 after more than 50 years still want to get the sound is unbelievable by itself. How authentic and original Peter was and still.

I could hear the same woody tone in Gary's playing, and I personally like Gary as much as I like Peter.

I think the pickup phasing is maybe about 80% of it. I did a Les Paul for a friend who is a huge Gary Moore fan - and can play like him - using 57 Classics with a magnet flip and the neck pickup reversed, but the basic tone of his guitar is just inherently more solid and 'thumpy' than the Greeny one and it gets close, not exact.

I think if you fit the Bareknuckle set and use 50s wiring, backing off the volume slightly can give you almost a single coil-type tone without needing to split the coils. You can get even closer with a treble-pass cap, but that interferes with the blending of the volumes for the out-of-phase sound so probably won't work for this.

Kittyfrisk

Surprised that Steve hasn't been in this discussion yet 
https://www.manchesterguitartech.co.uk/2011/05/07/upgrade-to-vintage-lemon-drop/

Also (if you can find one) you can pick up a Vintage V100 Lemon Drop second hand for about the same as a pair of new Bare Knuckle PG Blues.
The Wilkinson standard pickups are surprisingly good and can get you very close to the Peter Green tone.