Leaderboard

Well, if you want to go down the deep side of the rabbit hole, I just picked up a used set of ThroBak pickups and installed them in my Gibson custom shop R0 in place of the Custom Bucker 3 p'ups they come with. It is shocking how different they sound than the Custom Buckers and how different they sound than the SD '59 pickups that came stock in my 1998 H150. I measured the inductance, capacitance, field strength and so on, and I have notes on all the pickups I own, including the HRW's in my 2001 H535. Despite being in the range of low-output PAF on every parameter, the ThroBaks are just shocking how bright, clear, harmonic and punchy they are. That goes for the Seth Lovers as well, which are a touch brighter and clearer than the 59's, but man. The only humbuckers in my collection that come close to the ThroBak are the HRW's, but they are a different style of pickup being hotter wound and the bridge especially so. I do know that ThroBak acquired a vintage winding machine from Heritage, that was left over from the Gibson days. ThroBak uses a variety of the same exact winder machines that Gibson used, even some of the actual winders from Gibson. If you know ThroBak at all, it all sounds like absolute hype, but the product performs. I've witnessed hands-on several examples, including my own now. I have no temptation to replace the HRW.

In my experience if you can a great clean sound out of guitar, it's nothing to get a great dirty sound, and I heard all that I needed to hear in the clean section of your demo. Those pickups really sound good. I love how clear the neck pickup sounded, and there was some great harmonic content in the chords that you were playing on the bridge pickup. I would leave those pickups in that guitar, it's a great match.

Not horrified, just wishing you record that current setup so we can hear the tone of that beast.

And, dovetailing here, I think I've mentioned somewhere that my '61 PAF's have been in my Custom Core 150 (after residing in my 20th Anniversary 150) for a while. Veddy, veddy nice! Hoping some Gibson purist somewhere is horrified.

I can only speak about the one I bought. It might be an outlier. This is the Sweetwater pic before I bought it. My biggest complaint are the frets. they are wide and too short. I had it refretted with Jumbo SS.