EMG Pickups PJ Bass Set Review

Hello!

A few months back I got a smoking deal on an old Fender PJ bass because the electronics were on the fritz and it sounded terrible. So I did what any self-respecting bass hack would do – I grabbed an EMG PJ pickup set and stuffed those puppies in. It was as easy as pie, and I got exactly the results I expected. These are two things that do not happen very often for me!

EMG has been around since Rob Turner founded it in 1976 in Santa Rosa, California. This company has done a lot better than the metric system, which was launched in the US right around the same time. Though they started out making guitar pickups, bass pickups followed shortly thereafter, and have been a staple in the low-end world ever since. Besides making awesome replacement parts, many manufacturers install them as standard equipment – most notably Gibson, Steinberger and Spector.

The pickups have a ceramic magnets, and the kit comes with pots, wiring, a battery connector and pretty good instructions. Everything is prewired and quick-connect connectors are used, so no soldering is required. It was a super-easy installation, particularly as I already had a control cavity to stuff the battery into.

This active pickup set sounds like all of the other EMG pickup I have had in a bass before. They are high fidelity with more bass than a passive pickup and it is clear as a bell with no hum. But the disadvantage is that they sound like EMG pickups so it they are rather sterile without a lot of character or warmth, so you had better like the sound to start with. Fortunately, I do! These pickups cut through a loud mix like nobody’s business, and the bass will definitely be heard, with the advantage of a consistent tone and volume across all frequency ranges.

This EMG P-J set is not super cheap, with a list price of $209 and a street price of $159, but you will certainly save some money by being able to install them yourself. If you like the tone, or just need more power and clarity, give one a try. What could go wrong?

Mahalo!

Golden Age Pre-wired Harness for Gibson Les Paul Guitars -- Review

Greetings! I have plenty to complain about with the newer generations of Gibson Les Paul guitars. The company has lost it way and despite spending tons of cash on high-zoot machinery, they have a great deal of difficulty with making a guitar with a straight neck and level frets. They also have trouble in the electronics design area and they load up their instruments with features that nobody wants (robot tuning) or by screwing up a good thing by installing printed circuit boards and push-pull pots in their revered Les Paul models.

Well, it is easy to fix a bad neck or salvage a bad fret job, but at least you can easily re-wire your Les Paul like god intended with a pre-wired harness kit. There are a lot of companies out there selling these, and one of the better ones is the Golden Age kit from Stewart-MacDonald.

These wiring kits are made right here in Athens, Ohio by first world workers that earn a living wage, not by shoeless little kids overseas that will never see the inside of a school or eat a hot lunch. And these harnesses are assembled using quality parts that you would pick off the shelf if you had a choice, not the crap that Gibson gets from their lowest bidders.

The Golden Age 1934 Les Paul long shaft pot kit includes:

- FourCTS 300k potentiometers

- Two Orange Drop 223K (022uF) capacitors

- A Switchcraft three-way toggle switch

- A Switchcraft ¼-inch mono output jack

- Push-back cloth wiring

- A neat wooden template that you can use in case you decide to build your own harness next time

This is all good stuff, and it is neatly wired and ready to be popped right into your guitar. If you can figure out how to attach it to your pickups, it is as easy as pie. It was for me, and I had it soldered to my Burstbuckers in no time flat.

There have been no problems with my kit. Everything fit well, and there was no added static or popping and everything worked exactly like it was supposed to. I like it a lot, and would not hesitate buying another.

By the way, they sell these for many different guitar and bass models, so if you have a project instrument that you need to rewire, these guys might must have the solution!

What is finally comes down to is the cost of the Golden Age pre-wired kit. The street price is $80 with standard length pots (pre-1978) and $91 for long shaft pots. If you do the math, you are going to be out of pocket for over $60 if you buy all of these parts separately to do the job yourself. To me it is worth an extra $20 to have a job like this done professionally, because it will look just right when it is installed.

See for yourself, and let me know what you think.

Mahalo!

Seymour Duncan and his Pickups

Hello!

I have owned great gobs of guitars and basses over the years, and a quite a few of them have had replacement pickups in them, and some of my favorites have been from the Seymour Duncan company. I am in good company, as many top rock musicians also use his pickups. I really had no idea who Seymour was, so I thought I would check a little further into the man.

Seymour Duncan was born in New Jersey, and has been around the rock world since the 1950s, which is an eternity in the music industry. He starting playing guitar as a youth and became an accomplished gigging player.

He also tinkered mechanically with the guitar, both out of necessity and in the elusive search for better tone. A famous anecdote is that his Telecaster neck pickup crapped out during a gig, and he had to finish with just the bridge pickup. He later rewound the pickup using a record player, which was the first pickup he ever built.

He researched guitar tone and electronics and spent a lot of time talking with guitar heroes Roy Buchanan and Les Paul. This helped him realize how much more potential could be drawn from the electric guitar.

Less Paul suggested that Seymour give England a try, so he moved there to play, but ended up working at London’s Fender Soundhouse. This is the shop that did guitar work for the murderer’s row of late 1960s guitar royalty, including Clapton, Townshend, Hendrix, Frampton, Page, Harrison, and Beck. Jeff Beck was probably one of the biggest stepping stones for Duncan’s work. His pickups are the ones you here on Becks first solo albums, and this gave Seymour a metric ton of credibility.

Seymour eventually returned to the US, and ended up in California’s central coast. He continued to research and experiment and build custom pickups with input from Les Paul, Seth Lover and Leo Fender. His work became popular enough that Seymour and his wife Cathy started their own company, Seymour Duncan Pickups.

These pickups became the choice of many high-profile musicians, and have also been sourced by some manufacturers as original equipment for their guitars and basses. His company has not stopped innovating and has continued to develop new pickup models.

I especially dig the Antiquity Series hand-wound bass pickups which are the hands-down best choice for a traditional 1950s or 1960s bass tone. If you have a vintage bass that is missing the original pickups (or if they are broken), these are the go-to for replacements.

Today there are tons of pickup manufacturers and boutique winders for guitarists to choose from, and they owe Seymour Duncan a big “thank you” for all of the development work he did to bring us pickups that sound great right out of the box.

Mahalo!

EMG-ZW Guitar Pickups Review

Sugoi!

I’ve had a few Les Paul guitars with the EMG Zakk Wylde pickups and they were monstrous instruments. The good news is that you do not have to spend 3 or 4 thousand bucks for a Gibson Zakk Wylde Custom Shop Les Paul to get them.

For those of you who do not know of Zakk Wylde, he is a guitar god who got his major break as Ozzy Osbourne’s guitarist. He later played with Pride and Glory and is now the frontman and lead guitarist for Black Label Society. He has been a longtime user of active EMG pickups, and they sell a set in his preferred configuration, which includes an EMG-85 at the bridge and an EMG-81 at the neck.

The EMG-85 has a bit more output than the neck pickup, and uses two Alnico magnet coils. This pickup has a heavy low end that is not mushy while maintaining a loud high end that does not sound brittle or shrill. This makes it the ultimate rhythm pickup that loves distortion and overdrive but can still sound good when played clean.

The EMG-81 is a high-output ceramic magnet pickup, and is perfect for playing lead and soloing. It still has a fat tone up top, and has great sustain with no added noise to the signal. Together with the EMG-85 you have the perfect combination for most any rock or metal gig.

When you buy the kit from EMG, it includes everything you will need to rewire a Les Paul. This include the pickups, pots, cable, screws, springs, battery connector and jack. And best of all, no soldering is required, as the cables all have Quik-connect terminals.

After I sold my Zakk Wylde Custom Shop Les Paul, I installed a set of these pickups into an old Aria Les Paul to see if I could get the same tone. The installation was easy, and the end results were impressive. I ended up with a guitar that sounded exactly the same for 1/5 of what I got for the Gibson.

You can pick up the EMG-ZW pickup set from online retailers for around $199. They are a great value, and it is worth spending the extra money for a quality product that you do not have to pay a pro to install.

Mahalo!

Lollar Pickups

Hello!

I have rarely installed aftermarket pickups in any of my guitars, unless the originals were broken or missing, but I could make an exception for a set of Lollar pickups.

Jason Lollar is a first-class luthier, but he is better known for the custom pickups he builds, and he wrote thebook on winding pickups. That is not an exaggeration – he really did write the book (Basic Pickup Winding and Complete Guide to Making Your Own Pickup Winder).

He provides pickups in the usual configurations: Jazz Bass, P Bass, Telecaster, Stratocaster, Gibson Humbucker and P-90, but he also builds steel guitar pickups and pickups for some offbeat applications.

Lollar pickups are well regarded by musicians and luthiers, and manufacturers source them for some or all of their models. These builders include Collings, Nash, National Resophonic, and Sadowsky, among many others.

Looking at the pickups, they are very neatly wound, wrapped and soldered. Lollar stands behind the pickups too, offering a 2-year warranty to the original purchaser.

My experience with their pickups has been positive. I‘ve had Lollar pickups in two instruments over the years: a Sadowsky NYC Original P, and a Fender Telecaster (Vintage T Series). In both cases I found them to be brighter and biting (but not brittle), and stronger in the bottom end than the equivalent Fender factory pickups. They enhanced the sound that was already there, and did not make them sound like a completely different instruments.

For more details on Jason Lollar’s products or to place an order, check out lollarguitars.com

Mahalo!