gringopig's guitars
Gibson Authentic™
Play Authentic, play Gibson.
Well there's nothing more authentic than a Patent Applied For Humbucker pickup. A Gibson product through and through that never had a patent (apart from the DiMarzio Double Cream ironically) so anyone can make one and everyone does.
The market is saturated with PAF clones from a huge range of manufacturers: Throbak, Monty's, Lollar, Klein, OX4, Mojo, Creamery and on and on. However, the big daddy who invented the Humbucker have a long history of recreating these 1950's pickups, even through the 70's with Tim Shaw and later with Burstbuckers and then Custombuckers, Gibson have attempted to recreate the mythical pickup that was introduced in 1957.
These are the latest. In the form of the 1959 Collector's series 1 & 2...
The first was the Series 1 and promised to be the best and most authentic with Alnico IV magnets and non aged covers, they attracted a lot of negative comment on the internet. Unsurprising really given Gibson's liking for releasing re-issues. They are doing it again with their purchase of Mesa Boogie!
Who could really be surprised that they would issue yet another PAF. Then came the Series 2 with Alnico II magnets and aged covers.
These are what I bought!
Click on the pictures for full view
I took some photos of the existing pickup setup of my 2019 60th Anniversary Custom Shop Les Paul with unpotted Alnico III Custombuckers and took them out, popped in the new ones and replicated the pickup heights. I had never changed the setup of the original pickups since I bought the guitar so I thought it was best for a comparison.
I replicated the setup as seen above with the new pickups and set up a test. I used my Two Rock Classic Reverb with Ironman II attenuator and used 2 channels of my interface, one of which was the XLR speaker emulation on axis from the attenuator and the other channel was an SM57 of the lower 12" speaker of the cab. I recorded multiple phrases between pickup swaps and used no effects, processing, EQ or compression in the editing of the video.
I have the video demo below and I offer the conclusions at the end.
However, these pickups are expensive. They seem to be intended for 'collectors' given the title and they come in a cute Lifton style case. Goodness knows what you do with the box after installation. Presumably they are not intended to be installed; just collected. Who knows.
However, I fully wanted to install these in my Murphy aged 60th Anniversary 1959 burst re-issue and so I did.
Check out the video and see what you think!
