so I put a mule in my R7

Barney

What a difference ...not that the burstbucker was bad but the mule makes my les paul probably the best guitar I own rather than just a gud un...I needed to share that

skay

Hi @Barney

Glad you are enjoying them in what is a fantastic guitar, I have an R7 & did the same thing a few years ago but switched back after a couple of weeks trying to make it work for me. 

I play through an AC30 and the Mules made my Goldtop sound muddy and less present in the mix than the Burstbuckers. I tweaked the pickup heights and pole-pieces to no avail, after a few emails Tim from BKP kindly sent me a Stormy Monday set but they didn't work for me either, I couldn't dial out the fizz and missed the cut that the Burstbuckers gave me. 

The rave reviews all over the internet made me feel I was missing out if I didn't install these in my guitar, but in the end I just didn't see what all the fuss was about these pickups myself, the Burstbuckers were much better suited to my rig it seems.

Tim was rather annoyed at me that I preferred the Burstbuckers, and basically said I was wrong for doing so, even hilariously adding that the Mules I sent back were being enjoyed by Lenny Kravitz in his newest custom Gibson and as he 'knows tone' this was further proof that I was wrong :-)

I bought some nice Russian PIO caps and decent pots from Dr Vintage and the Burstbuckers improved even more, and would recommend people went this cheaper route first before laying down big money on replacement pickups, as it rectified the tiny bit of harshness that made me want to try new pickups in the first place.

Barney

Yeah the burstbuckers sound good as well but I was getting a bit of feedback..in a bad way...

ThePrettyDamned

The caps won't make any difference to the tone, but the pots might as well as the wiring in general.

I actually don't like burst buckers at all, nor the 490 whatever they are things. 57s are nice but if they work for you.

Heard many great things about mules, but don't feel the need to get pickups from anyone but oil city

Also, I envy you guys the r7s

skay

@Barney

Is this because your Burstbuckers are unpotted? I think the ones that came OEM are wax potted but the aftermarket ones are unpotted, or have I got that assbackwards? :-/

OilCityPickups

It can't be repeated enough ... however good you think the pickups you wind are  ... if they are not someone's cup of tea they simply aren't ... and that's all there is to it. Most 'boutique' winders (god I hate the boutique bit) wind to please our own ears ... and then if someone wants something different you either take a stab at it for them ... or point them at somebody else's products that may suit them better. Personally I tend to wind a little more treble orientated with PAF type pickups ... as every real PAF I've tried in the flesh has been much more cutting than people imagine.
The great thing is that there's a massive range of tones available from the mainstream players and the small guys ... there'll be something to please everyone somewhere

skay

Fair point @TheGuitarWeasel but that's why I made a point of stating that they "didn't work for me" and were not suited to my rig as opposed to calling them shite etc as the many glowing reviews are testament to how many people these pickups DO work for.

I would say that the clean sound was very nice, possibly even better than the Burstbuckers, but almost all of my live tones are overdriven so they were never going to stay however nice and chimey they were playing cleanly at home.

@ThePrettyDamned I also like the 57 Classics in my SG as they have some nice vintage clarity to my ears, they do the 'just breaking up' sound really well and stay nicely focused under higher gain, but then again that could just be the SG body doing that I suppose.

At the end of the day it's all Horses for Pickups, no that's wrong, er Pickups for Horses, er Course for Picku... you know what I mean

chrisj1602

I put a bridge BK black dog in my R7. Much improved. I was tempted by the mule, very tempted, I've only read good things about them.

monquixote

I think a lot of it comes down to what you are going to do with it. Most of my strat usage is spanky clean for funky stuff so a Texas Special fer'example would be much too harsh, but if most of what I was doing was bluesey drive stuff they would be just the ticket. 

fretfinder

Not a Les Paul, but I swapped out the pickups from my McCarty for a set of Mules and it totally transformed the guitar, sounds great now, ballsy when you want but still with clarity. I hardly use the tapped sounds at all though, they don't sound enough like a Strat or Tele!

mcsdan

I have both mules and stormy mondays in Les Pauls.  Both sound superb.  These are both wired with 500k premium CTS pots(about 520k), PIO caps and using 50s wiring.  Certainly not muddy.

I think the mistake alot of people make with Gibson burstbuckers is not realising there are 2 distinct flavours.  The Burstbucker 1,2 & 3 as normally seen on historic reisses use alnico 2 magents and will have a softer bass/top end. Then there are the the Busrt bucker Pro which are seen in USA standards and they use alnico 5 magnets and have a tighter bottom end but more trebly top.

skay, I suspect your R7 may have had 300k pots (as standard on historics until the last few years) may have made the pickups sound muddy.  I know the Bareknuckle wiring diagram shows hookup with 500k pots.  When you changed the pots they were probably at least 500k or 550k which do make a difference. Even current historics that have 500k pots are within a tolerance and I've measured them as 440k and 480k in my 58.

I've also found with Les Pauls that pickups that sound good in one may not sound as good in another LP. There are tool many variables, however it is fun try out the options ;-)

Skipped

I like this thread.
Burstbuckers (1 and 2) are great pickups. Hard to get a bad sound out of them IMO. But some of want to be just a bit nearer to the original design, and I am also experimenting with PAF types in an old Les Paul.
This is great fun, but I have realised something over the years. The reason why original PAFs fetch crazy money is because of that sticker.
But hang on a minute - why do the early PAT No pickups (same as PAF) fetch silly money when they don't have the magic sticker.
 It is because they sound incredible in the right guitar.
I guess that is why everybody is trying to clone it.

OilCityPickups

I can honestly say in thirty years+ of pulling guitars apart and putting them together for money ... then latterly producing pickups for money ... I've never heard two 'real' PAFs that sound the same. There were so many variables in the fifties
1. Gibson bought in several different grades of alnico in the at that time ... notably 2, 4, and 5 ... and used them fairly randomly on their humbuckers. Whatever was in the magnets bin that day got used.
2. Although the winding machines should have had automatic wire traverse: whereby all the coils were laid in tight machine patterns ... in practise the operators had to take control pretty regularly as the machines tended to wind odd shaped coils if left to their own devices.
3. The timing gears on the winding machines used to strip on a regular basis ... this meant the bobbin drive wouldn't shut off automatically after 5000 turns. So rather than have down time on their machines, the operators used to 'time' the bobbins to 'full' or judge them by eye. hence combined coil resistance can vary between 7.3k and 9k for perfectly authentic PAFs. Sometimes they even used the more powerful pickup in the neck ... as they were all meant to be the same ... they weren't even 'handed' as far as which side the output wires emerged.

Now try and tell me which real PAF is the paradigm? The answer is there isn't one.

Skipped

A very interesting post!
I have played lot's of old Gibson guitars and tend to assume that the differences are always coming from the wood.
Maybe modern pickup makers should be aiming for this randomness (the healthy used market should be able to sort out anybody who is disappointed)
Maybe you already are aiming for that!

skay

@mcsdan I measured the pots that came out of my R7 when I did the swap and they did read a bit low for 500k (around the 450-480k  IIRC, plus they had 500k stamped on them, i'm going back seven years here though...) so the Dr Vintage overspeced pots that read just over 500k probably did change the sound of my Burstbuckers but not in the way you would expect.

Surely if the pots are rated higher then MORE treble comes through, so i don't know if the harshness went away because I had inadvertently changed the height of the pickupswhen re-installing them or just got better at dialing them in after all that messing sround with the BKP? I know that the pot taper was vastly improved and I love the way I can now go from 10 to 9 on the volume pot and actually hear a slight drop in volume but with still with clarity that it's made the guitar much more versatile live.

Another good point made above by a few posters is about the magnet type affecting things. The Mules use alnico IV magnets, so Tim from BKPs suggested that the added midrange was what I was hearing and possibly didn't like (especially coupled with the pronounced upper mid-range of the Vox), so I tried the Stormy Mondays afterwards which were alnico V I think, but I found the same issues occured with those as well.

We eventually got around to discussing him making me a custom alnico II set, as he thought maybe it was the scooped midrange of the Burstbuckers was what I liked, but I politely declined as £200 would  have been a lot of money to basically have replica clones made of the pickups i'd be replacing!

Anyway, from @Barney confessing his love for some new pickups, this has grown into quite an interesting discussion

 

ICBM

You won't be able to hear the difference between a pot which measures 480K and one which reads 500K, assuming everything else about them is identical.

I did some testing on this with direct switching in the guitar, and the smallest difference which was clearly audible was about 25% (low) and 33% (high) from the nominal value. This surprised me as well, but it also confirms why the normal tolerance on pots is +/- 20%, because that's within the range where it matters.

If you fit closer-tolerance pots and hear a difference, it's because either pot *quality* is different (some pots have different self-capacitance from others, which acts like a small tone control), or because you altered something else (eg pickup height)... or because you want to hear a difference!

Same with cap type - it makes no difference, but tolerance variations of about the same percentage do.

These tests are quite easy to do if you have a guitar where you can fit a switch to swap values on the fly with the guitar being played, and some means of measuring values accurately.

Barney

very intresting read all this ...just wondering iff i should change my pots now ? the pots i used are just the same ..all i done was change the pickup , should i be changing pots and stuff and 50s wiring .....all this is new to me , the guitar as it is with the mule and the same pots sounds great ..will i have a improvment doing the other things..?

ICBM

Changing pots can make a significant difference depending on what the old ones are. For example Gibson use 300K pots in their standard and cheaper guitars and 500Ks will be noticeably brighter and clearer - Traditionals and Historics use 500Ks anyway though. Many far-east-made pots seem to have higher self-capacitance than the classic US CTS ones as well, so swapping either of these for 'selected quality' pots (almost always CTS) may make a difference. The taper in many stock pots is also poor, which matters if you use them for other settings than full up/down, although not otherwise.

50s wiring makes a big difference if you use the volume controls too, but not if you run them up full all the time.

I also tend to think that the really excessive lengths of thin shielded cable in many cheaper guitars does alter the tone as well, although it's hard to do a proper comparison.

Barney

ICBM said:

Changing pots can make a significant difference depending on what the old ones are. For example Gibson use 300K pots in their standard and cheaper guitars and 500Ks will be noticeably brighter and clearer - Traditionals and Historics use 500Ks anyway though. Many far-east-made pots seem to have higher self-capacitance than the classic US CTS ones as well, so swapping either of these for 'selected quality' pots (almost always CTS) may make a difference. The taper in many stock pots is also poor, which matters if you use them for other settings than full up/down, although not otherwise.

50s wiring makes a big difference if you use the volume controls too, but not if you run them up full all the time.

I also tend to think that the really excessive lengths of thin shielded cable in many cheaper guitars does alter the tone as well, although it's hard to do a proper comparison.

the one i have is a R7 goldtop 2004....wonder if that one has 500k ones in..?
what difference will it make to the volume control for 50 s wiring ..?...thanks

ICBM

Barney said:

the one i have is a R7 goldtop 2004....wonder if that one has 500k ones in..?

Yes.

Barney said:

what difference will it make to the volume control for 50 s wiring ..?...thanks

It will retain the treble better as you roll down the volume, and also make the volume and tone controls more interactive when neither is up full - most people like the first, some don't like the second.

It's very easy to try, anyway - just move the tone cap connections on the volume controls from the left-hand terminal to the middle terminal. Contrary to some diagrams you do not need to alter the tone control at all.

OilCityPickups

skay said:

.

Another good point made above by a few posters is about the magnet type affecting things. The Mules use alnico IV magnets, so Tim from BKPs suggested that the added midrange was what I was hearing and possibly didn't like (especially coupled with the pronounced upper mid-range of the Vox), so I tried the Stormy Mondays afterwards which were alnico V I think, but I found the same issues occured with those as well.

We eventually got around to discussing him making me a custom alnico II set, as he thought maybe it was the scooped midrange of the Burstbuckers was what I liked, but I politely declined as £200 would  have been a lot of money to basically have replica clones made of the pickups i'd be replacing!

 

Stormy Mondays are Alnico 2 (same as my own Blitz Spirits) which have a mid 'hump' compared to an alnico 5 pickup.
As a general rule:
Alnico 2 = slightly unfocused bass end ... some would say flabby. Mid hump soft singing treble.

Alnico 4 = more focus in the bass around the same mids as alnico 2 ... and a little more top cut. Overall very even balance (that some find boring).
Alnico 5 = fat bass, somewhat scooped mids, stinging ... sometimes a little over the top highs.
Alnico 8 = a high output version of alnico 4's EQ

Oh ... and people confuse alnico 2 and 3 ... 2 is actually magnetically more powerful than 3 ... which is the weakest magnet commonly used in pickup making.