P90 PUPs ... tell me what you know

Strat and Tele pickups have a tall, narrow coil and a narrow magnetic field; that means they 'sample' a fairly short area of vibrating string.

P90s have a short, wide coil and dual magnetic bars. This widens the magnetic field and creates a larger sample aperture on the strings than a Fender pickup. This wider aperture means there are more harmonics captured by the pickup, which produces a midrange boost in the tone.

Contributing to the midrange bump is the length of wire on the bobbin. Most typical Fender pickups measure between 5k and 7k Ohms resistance. Most P90s are in the range between 7k and 9k Ohms. This reduces the resonant peak of the pickup (in general terms) and creates a more mid-rangey tone.

There are no hard and fast rules about which pickup sounds best in which kind of guitar. Generally, players base their tonal preferences on the sounds achieved by players they like--so they obtain a similar guitar with similar pickups and a similar amp and off they go.

How a pickup sounds depends on way more than how it's made. Your individual style, more than anything, will create the sound you get from a pickup. After that, the amp is the biggest influence. Players who prefer one type of pickup over another generally do so because of how their favorite pickup responds to their input on the guitar.

The best way to find out if P90s are a thing you'll like is to borrow a P90 guitar and live with it for a few weeks. Do some A/B testing with other pickups and listen for the differences. These differences will be most apparent when you start with the guitar's volume at about 6 and the amp's gain set up so that it plays cleanly when you gently play, and just begins to break up when you strum hard.

Thanks Geno. Your detailed input is always appreciated, you gave me some great insight there.

I could almost divert my own thread here in that I also do not own a Filtertron equipped guitar.

As I consider new guitar projects both of these PUP styles come to mind.

Maybe you and the others can toss in some info on the Filtertron style PUPs as well.

And know about the single coil hum, that is a consideration I have thought about as well.

Both of my Strats are noiseless. I have the Vintage noiseless in one and an EMG DG20 set in the other. Even my Tele has Demarzio Area T hum canceling installed.

I'm not a Hum guy.

"I also have a 50s Trib with P90s, and I also swapped them. But I stuck in a pair of Rumpelstiltskins wound to my specs (8.2K) and the results are fantastic."

I didn't realize Aaron wound P90's. Hmmmm. My 50's Trib Goldtop currently has Allparts Minihums in it but I keep thinking about those P90'S.

My most recent build Strat and my Tele have custom wound Rumples and they're freakin' great. Haven't seen Aaron around for quite a while, hope he's ok.

I love my P90 equipped ‘78 LP Pro De Luxe, despite its skinny neck and horrendous weight:)
It went hum free a few years ago with an excellent set of Kinman replacement, I’m very pleased with them.
Tone wise, it reminds me of a super beefy Telecaster.

p90s come in a lot of variations of strength. Earlier versions were a bit lighter wound, by the time the humbuckers were in the higher end guitars with p90s in cheaper models, the p90s were crazy hot. If you have the volume control all the way up, it sounds like you have a signal boost/fuzz pedal set to a slight crunch. A lot of the newer ones out there are closer to the later era ones. Think early Freddie King for the early pickups, think Pete Townshend for the later ones.

I like them. The best ones I've heard are the vintage ones, I'm not aware of any that really get close to the vintage, but I haven't investigated that far, either. I do think the Lollars sound great.

Their construction is actually closer to a humbucker than it is to a Strat or Tele pickup, since the humbucker is largely adapted from the p-90. In fact, if you compare humbuckers and p-90s from the same year (the real ones, not reissues) they sound surprisingly similar.

They have a lot of character. If I was building a guitar and I expected it to have a rather dry personality otherwise, p-90s would be a great choice. Another way to think of it... imagine how dry and uninteresting a slab body LP special would be with a couple Strat pickups. Lots of overtones, lots of dynamics, very full sound.

Some guitars with them struggle to get a good sound because the way they mount often makes good adjustment difficult. Ideally a pickup is adjusted by moving the whole pickup and staying parallel to the strings, using pole pieces just as a fine adjustment for string balance. In many guitars adjusting the pole pieces is the only adjustment you get. If I was king of the world, I'd start making p-90 rings like humbuckers get, angled and straight. In a lot of solid body guitars, the answer to this is just shimming the bottom or adding foam (these were later considerations, older guitars had no such things in them).

The hum is ridiculous. You need to either embrace/accept the hum, or find another way of getting rid of it (noise canceling pedals, other circuits, etc.) because I'm yet to hear a noiseless variant that was worth consideration.

May I ask where David Gilmour`s Les Paul equipped with P90s falls in this spectrum? That is the tone I would be aiming for.

Noise canceling can be a confusing description for those unfamiliar. They do not do diddly squat when you're playing. They're effectively a volume shutdown below a certain dB, like any rests or pauses between playing. In my line of amusement (recording), I find them irritating. I'd just as soon do that in post editing since I get to choose when and how to fade out the noise.

I've got very little experience with p90s, but the ones in my son's Epi Les Paul Special sound good to me, especially their clean tone. I got it off the used wall at GC for $70. Picking up a used one might be a good way to get your feet wet.

Will Ray agrees, even though he spent a *ton* more on his.

www.premierguitar.com/articles/20138-bottom-feeder-my-81-les-paul-special