Les Paul special pickup advice needed

Teyeplayer

I picked up a bargain price 97 Les Paul Special when the Teye sold, chucked a bigsby on and am really enjoying the new guitar. Plays beautifully. However, the bridge pickup is somewhat lacking both in terms of tone and output.

I understand these are p100s rather than p90s and have read that the pickups are identical hence the perceived lower output of the bridge. So I am left with a bit of a dilemma. I really like the neck pickup, it's got a fantastic smooth creaminess to it that may not be 100% p90, but sits in a unique position between my single coil and humbucker guitars, kind of like a jazzmaster plus some.

Anyway, I see three possible solutions:

1) Do I chuck in a a beefed up p90 in the bridge, or is mixing p90s and p100s going to have a similar effect as chucking a humbucker in a telecaster neck, ok but you're forever swapping tone and volume pots trying to find the perfect middle ground between 250k and 500k on mismatched pickups?

2) I have wondered about chucking a mini humbucker in the bridge, love those deluxe pickups and it might be that extra oomph that I am after. Would the stacked coils of a p100 work in partnership with a mini humbucker? I see this being great for Neil Young-esque solos but would the middle setting be obsolete (I play on the neck and middle selections a lot).

3) a whole new set of p90s? Fully embrace the 60 cycle hum and let the magic happen. I Particularly like the look of Alegree pickups 'murky horizon' set and at the price I can't see that I'll lose out.

Any advice appreciated.

ICBM

1 will work fine - no need to change pots or anything. You'll obviously get hum in the bridge position if you're in a noisy room, but you'll at least have the neck pickup as an option.

2 will also work fine. The middle setting will be good too.

3 will also work but you'll lose the option of a hum-cancelling setting unless you have the new pickups RWRP, which for some reason seems to affect the tone of P90s more than most other pickups - I don't know why, because it shouldn't really, but it does! That said I still think it's a useful compromise if you're ever likely to play anywhere noisy.

Teyeplayer

Thanks for that @icbm was veering towards the mini-humbucker as if it isn't right it's 100% reversible but has that possibility of just being rather different to the standard sonic expectations. I think Fletcher pickups is about to have a few quid sent his way on payday.

edit: Not that the other options aren't reversible, just realised how stupid that sounded!

ICBM

Forgot to say… make sure the mini-humbucker has 4-conductor cable - or at least 2-conductor + shield - so you can fix any out-of-phase problem it might have with the Gibson, unless the maker is 100% sure which way round it has to be. The P100 construction makes reversing its phase very difficult, compared to a P90.

Teyeplayer

Now that is useful to know as I've already had issues with the phasing. The guitar had been owned by the same guy for 20 years and he hadn't realised that the bridge pickup was out of phase stock from the factory, just thought that was how it was meant to sound! Fortunately my tech sorted it quick enough, but don't want to make him extra work if I can help it.

Headphones

Of course, you could use the age old approach of winding up the bridge PuP and dropping the neck down.

Teyeplayer

The bridge is already high @Headphones and the neck is in the sweet spot so seems a bit too much like a compromise if I drop the neck further. There's that many decent priced pickup makers these days that I've been meaning to try out, it just seems like the perfect excuse.

paulnb57

Bare Knuckle Nantucket P90.......

impmann

Embrace the hum!

Teyeplayer

But which one @impmann the 60-cycle or the bucker?

impmann

P90s all round - the P100s are ok but in my experience were a little characterless.
Minihumbuckers are quite bright and if I'm honest, I don't like them in the bridge position. But they seem to sound good with other folks!! 

Teyeplayer

I've not had a mini in the bridge, tele neck -it's been great. Had p90s in several guitars, Casino (years ago), Dan Armstrong reissue, among others. Some have worked some haven't, but I usually have found a p90 in the bridge of a solid guitar has never been quite what I wanted -I am open to being proven wrong of course, hence my interest in @Alegree murky horizons. But that means a whole new set rather than just the one. Damn I had almost made up my mind!

ICBM

impmann said:

Embrace the hum!

All good until you play a venue where there is so much - actually usually buzz rather than hum, but still electromagnetic - that you can't use any gain at all, and even on a clean sound you have to stand at a specific awkward angle on stage to prevent the hum/buzz being as loud as the guitar signal.

There's a venue in Edinburgh which really is this bad - Moe_Zambeek has played there too and will back this up - a single-coil guitar without at least one RWRP setting is effectively unusable there. Since discovering that I've always insisted on having at least one hum-cancelling setting on any guitar I may gig with.

Bridgehouse

ICBM said:

impmann said:

Embrace the hum!

All good until you play a venue where there is so much - actually usually buzz rather than hum, but still electromagnetic - that you can't use any gain at all, and even on a clean sound you have to stand at a specific awkward angle on stage to prevent the hum/buzz being as loud as the guitar signal.

There's a venue in Edinburgh which really is this bad - Moe_Zambeek has played there too and will back this up - a single-coil guitar without at least one RWRP setting is effectively unusable there. Since discovering that I've always insisted on having at least one hum-cancelling setting on any guitar I may gig with.

Serious question @ICBM - how do you cope in such circumstances with your Ric 4001?

olafgarten

Bridgehouse said:

ICBM said:

impmann said:

Embrace the hum!

All good until you play a venue where there is so much - actually usually buzz rather than hum, but still electromagnetic - that you can't use any gain at all, and even on a clean sound you have to stand at a specific awkward angle on stage to prevent the hum/buzz being as loud as the guitar signal.

There's a venue in Edinburgh which really is this bad - Moe_Zambeek has played there too and will back this up - a single-coil guitar without at least one RWRP setting is effectively unusable there. Since discovering that I've always insisted on having at least one hum-cancelling setting on any guitar I may gig with.

Serious question @ICBM - how do you cope in such circumstances with your Ric 4001?

I think ICBM has a RWRP Pickup.

Bridgehouse

olafgarten said:

Bridgehouse said:

ICBM said:

impmann said:

Embrace the hum!

All good until you play a venue where there is so much - actually usually buzz rather than hum, but still electromagnetic - that you can't use any gain at all, and even on a clean sound you have to stand at a specific awkward angle on stage to prevent the hum/buzz being as loud as the guitar signal.

There's a venue in Edinburgh which really is this bad - Moe_Zambeek has played there too and will back this up - a single-coil guitar without at least one RWRP setting is effectively unusable there. Since discovering that I've always insisted on having at least one hum-cancelling setting on any guitar I may gig with.

Serious question @ICBM - how do you cope in such circumstances with your Ric 4001?

I think ICBM has a RWRP Pickup.

Ah, you mean he has a modded 4001? 


That would explain it

Teyeplayer

It makes logical sense to me, although the idea of a whole gig on one pickup setting just to avoid poor venue wiring,  may have me arrested for assaulting the venue owner.

ICBM

Bridgehouse said:

olafgarten said:

Bridgehouse said:

Serious question @ICBM - how do you cope in such circumstances with your Ric 4001?

I think ICBM has a RWRP Pickup.

Ah, you mean he has a modded 4001? 

That would explain it

Yep. My 4001 has humbuckers - a Rick HB-1 in the neck, and a Kent Armstrong in the bridge - which is not meant as a Rick, or even a bass, pickup… but is about the right electrical spec and fitted perfectly so I stuck it in as a stopgap when I needed a temporary replacement, and I've never taken it out! It still sounds like a Rick, too.

Before that I had a 4003 which I RWRP'd the bridge pickup on, which is easy - the magnet is only held on by the baseplate screws. It baffles me that Rick won't do this as stock - the 4001/3 is the only current professional-quality bass I know of which has no hum cancellation of any sort, other than the '51-style Fender P-Bass.

Bridgehouse

ICBM said:

Bridgehouse said:

olafgarten said:

Bridgehouse said:

Serious question @ICBM - how do you cope in such circumstances with your Ric 4001?

I think ICBM has a RWRP Pickup.

Ah, you mean he has a modded 4001? 

That would explain it

Yep. My 4001 has humbuckers - a Rick HB-1 in the neck, and a Kent Armstrong in the bridge - which is not meant as a Rick, or even a bass, pickup… but is about the right electrical spec and fitted perfectly so I stuck it in as a stopgap when I needed a temporary replacement, and I've never taken it out! It still sounds like a Rick, too.

Before that I had a 4003 which I RWRP'd the bridge pickup on, which is easy - the magnet is only held on by the baseplate screws. It baffles me that Rick won't do this as stock - the 4001/3 is the only current professional-quality bass I know of which has no hum cancellation of any sort, other than the '51-style Fender P-Bass.

And you could have got a nice P bass and avoided all that faffing about, eh @ICBM ?

I hear they even sound good with fuzz 

ICBM

Bridgehouse said:

And you could have got a nice P bass and avoided all that faffing about, eh @ICBM ?

I hear they even sound good with fuzz 

Yes, but the one thing you can't do with a P-Bass is split the pickups and run the bridge pickup through the fuzz and the neck pickup clean… which sounds absolutely immense. (Although to be honest I don't actually do that very often.)

Bridgehouse

ICBM said:

Bridgehouse said:

And you could have got a nice P bass and avoided all that faffing about, eh @ICBM ?

I hear they even sound good with fuzz 

Yes, but the one thing you can't do with a P-Bass is split the pickups and run the bridge pickup through the fuzz and the neck pickup clean… which sounds absolutely immense. (Although to be honest I don't actually do that very often.)

I could split it in a helix patch and get 90% of the way there