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Vintage threads from the first ten years

Re: P-90s in Les Paul

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2/9/1998 12:22 PM
Earl	Re: P-90s in Les Paul This is the first I have ever heard about mini humbuckers being dressed as P-90's. Did I read that right??? How long did that go on??? I have an SG loaded with mini's and It sounds great. (Plays well too with some machine work)

2/9/1998 1:21 PM
Doc	I think he meant plastic mounting rings, not actual soapbar covers. Don't mini-HB's have side by side coils? If adjusters were visible, they wouldn't fall along the centerline like P90's anyway.

2/9/1998 1:37 PM
Earl	The Mini's on one of my SG's are black; no adjusters visable. P-90's mount much differently than the Humbuckers I know: using wood screws down the centerline like the adjusters. So.... how are the p-90's being mounted in the space for mini's? Also, was there mention of a quick change? Like the clear Armstrong axes? I've been playing gibsons for 35 years and I'm confused.

2/9/1998 1:59 PM
Doc	I think the cutout size for the soapbar and the mini-humbucker are the same, or very close. You can mount them in the same hole. There was mention of a mounting bar in the base of the routed cavity that had tapped holes for both sets of height adjust screws.Sounds like a cool idea.

12/14/1997 5:02 AM

Joe:

    I ordered a pair of dog-eared P-90's from Gibson for my Epiphone Casino hollow-body guitar and their output in both positions is at least equal to PAF-style humbuckers.
    One tip: as shipped from Gibson they were not RWRP with respect to each other, so in the middle position they weren't hum-cancelling. I carefully took one of them apart, flipped the magnet around and switched the two leads from the coil. Presto: hum-cancelling in the middle position now. (While I can get used to the hum from one single coil pickup, with two of them the hum seems to be twice as loud if they aren't hum-cancelling).

    I tried to do the same trick with a pair of hb's on a LP with a factory coil-cut switch, and guess what- it didn't work! (I was trying to get the middle position in coil cut mode to be hum-cancelling.) To do that with hb's, you need to rewire the dpdt coil-cut switch so that it doesn't ground out both of the center taps, but instead routes one of the center taps to the volume pot.
    Depending on what pickups you have, you may need to flip the magnets and reverse the leads for one of the pickups for the middle position in coil-cut mode to be hum-cancelling. While coil-cut humbuckers usually suck, a hum-cancelling middle position can sound really nice, and is one of the linkages used in a PRS with a rotary switch.

Steve Ahola

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