Creamery '59 covers and covers off

Next up is the set of pickups that I chose to keep in the '57 Les Paul Goldtop but NAKED!

That old myth about the removal of pickup covers leading to searing unrivalled lead tones and an increase in valve pummelling output levels will be explored.

Yes, time to remove those covers and do a comparison between covers on and covers off whilst maintaining all other variables. I have removed the covers already, to reveal double black coils; no easy task I have to say, as all 4 corners were soldered down. I went in with my big bolt and solder braid but after getting most of it off, I resorted to the Stanley blade and hammer. The solder had wicked between the baseplate and the cover, so only a few hard thumps with the hammer on the blade, which luckily spanned the two joints, were enough to split them.

I re-installed and popped the covers back on from the top and re-strung prior to setting the height from the pickup cover to top of the string as before.

I did buy some 3/48" nuts which were glued onto the short leg baseplate mount with epoxy so I could use vintage style slotted and aged screws, given that the screws supplied were Phillips and M3 thread.

Spoils the vintage vibe!

Hence the need to reset the height but rest assured, I have the pickups at the exact same height as before and then loosened the new strings and popped the unsoldered covers out again.

Waiting in the wings are 2 lovely Area '59 aged PAF covers from Crazyparts in Germany to complete the test but I am expecting to hear very little change between cover on and cover off, so the addition of new covers will bring it full circle; small though that circle may be. Perhaps so small it's a tiny dot!

Click on the pictures for full view and description

So. Is there any difference. Can you hear any change in the sound?

I certainly can.

There was a big difference as soon as I plugged it in after the re-installation of the pickups and I was super careful to get the pickups in the same relationship to the strings. I did nothing but push the covers back on and re-strung then set the pickup height with new height screws to be the same height as before. I used Vernier callipers to measure.

To me, the sound of the midrange shifted up towards the higher frequency range. They seemed to retain most of the honkiness but there was a lessening of the filtering effect.

All pickups act like filters really. If the wideband signal is the string vibrating, then all a pickup can do is to limit frequencies. They can't add anything! A perfect pickup would have a filter width equal to the frequency response of the vibrating string but in the real world they all act as a transducer, converting physical movement into an electrical signal and also as a filter, allowing a range of frequencies to be passed through to the amplifer.

I am thinking here that the cover acts as a factor in determining the shape of this filtering effect as I didn't notice a huge change in volume but more of a shift in the mid band range of content up a bit. I heard a wee bit more high top end also but noted that the coils in the bridge position were super microphonic. A tap on the bobbins was clearly audible through the amplifier.

I have to say I liked these pickups even more without covers. I even thought it sustained more than before but 'liking something' can lead to all sorts of subjective biases. We all want to like things more though, so maybe it's a good thing even without analysis.

If I had a network analyser, I could attach the pickup between ports and actually demonstrate the curve of frequencies allowed to be passed by the pickup but I don't so all I can say is:

They sounded clearer with less of an obvious filter effect
Mid band was shifted up a tad
They had very slightly more output
I liked the guitar more with the covers off

I'm not sure I will put the Area '59 covers on. Maybe I will and make sure I don't literally weld them on as I might want to remove them again :-)

Time stamps are in the YouTube video for easy comparison across all the phrases.