I paid $100 for back seats to see Joe at the Murat in Indy......worth EVERY PENNY! Joe puts on a hellava show. He played good ol' rockin' blues for hours. Don't ask him to lower his fee as he's earned that. Just save and scrape it up and go see the blues master of our time
Sweet Example of my favorite band screaming out the P90s in 2014. One of the last few shows. Warren Haynes, about 12 minutes, then he solos again next song, etc.
One of the most amazing LP voices I ever heard was from a 1956 gold top LP with P-90's. A local player brought it to a blues jam on Thursday nights, and that guitar just sang with perfect tone. He was a gifted player with a good soul. A joy to accompany as a rhythm player.
Leslie West got an incredible tone from a Jr w/single P-90. I've always kept a similar guitar in my collection. It is noisy, but it goes away as soon as you start playing, so don't stop.
John Lennon bought a Jr in the early 70s, but wanted a second pickup. He took it to a luthier and asked for a “humdinker” to be put in at the neck. Instead, the luthier installed a Charlie Christian (I think - something with a clean clear sound), and Lennon loved it. I guess years later Gibson did a replica version of it.
Joe, I'm an avid LP lover. I front a contemporary blues outfit here in Raleigh, NC. I want to thank you for your pontificus maximus these days because it help us struggling guitfiddlists to get that nice edgy blues tone for the small venues we play here. Back in the day guitarists wouldn't share their secrets, but thank god for you and your generosity. Thx, Lonesome George, and the Stranger Blues Band.
always loved the gold top with p90's .. to me its the best Les Paul ever .. the natural sustain with the P90's is incredible, without pedals or gain the natural sustain is unmatched and the tone to me is the Real Les Paul sound of course a Les Paul with humbuckers is a real Les Paul too but you will absolutely fall in love with an old Les Paul with p90's .. nothing like it and no comparison whatsoever
I have an LP Standard Gold with P90’s. I love it. It’s a growly surly bitch that bites hard. What more do I need to say? Love the fatter neck too and get this right, I’m a Strat guy but American classic instruments are my thing and I love my LP, it offers me something different than my fenders and no one guitar I own is more important than the other.
Same here brother. I got my eyes set on a Maybach Lester. European manufacturer in case you don't know. True LP shape with nitro slightly aged finish gold top. Soapbars instead of humbuckers as you said. It's a thing of beauty
It’s so cool that single coil, p90, and humbucker, were thought of as improvements on one another and yet even today people disagree on which is better. Artists can use any quirky feature to creative effect.
This was just lovely! The mood, the humor, down to earth attitude despite the obvious skills, and the knowledge+wisdom about gear. I'd enjoy reviews like this any time, perfect.
The PAFs were never meant to sound different. It was a "techi"- thing, the PAFs were essentially meant to be quiet P90s. The HUMbucker was born. The first "noiseless" pickup. Take two P90s reverse the winding on one and it cancels the noise. Shrink it down to smaller plastic bobbins put a cover on...tada PAFs. The fact they do sound different is just sort of "what happened" they rolled with it. It was happy accident like how cherry red 50s strat had sunburst finish underneath or how a Marshall has a lack of clean headroom or how those old cherry sunburst finishes on those 59s flame tops would yellow and fade into a glorious transparent golden flame.
Actually, when Seth lover designed the PAF it sounded more like a P90 - brighter and tighter. His original design didn't have any pole pieces - both slugs had steel bobbins, and they were very low output, 7k - 8k. It was intended to to have a full metal cover on it and be adjusted like a strat pickup, but the sales guys at gibson wanted adjustable screws and so Seth lover put those in, which really changed the sound
It is AMAZING to share this instrument with you Joe. Your dedication to the craft and the history is exemplary. Next time you are in SWFL, I have a custom Les Paul double cut conversion looking for your signature on the back before I lay the last coats of nitro on her. Rock on Mr. Bonamassa!
to have all the main flavors of electric guitar, you need a les paul with pafs, paul or sg with p90s, a strat, a tele, and a gretsh hollow body...and maybe a Rickenbacker...
Hey Joe, I totally agree with you on just leaving the guitars alone and playing them like they are. I've seen so many beautiful guitars get chopped up and basically ruined just to up date from P90s to PAFs. Happy playing!
If you want your humbuckers to have more top end sparkle and tighter bass and low mids, there is this simple mod: Just make the 6 pole adjustment screws flush with the baseplate of the pickup by either cutting them or by removing and grinding them to the proper shorter lenght and re-installing them. This simple mod is an old Carlos Santana and Neil Schon trick. It changes the shape of the magnetic field around the pickup. It works and is completely reversible by simply installing new adjustment screws.
Thank you Joe for that cool demo. Can Hear the higher output from the PAFs. The P-90s sounded just a bit cleaner(that's with headphones on), I have Les Paul Jr. with P-90s that I love playing. Once again, thanks Joe for the comparison.
It's worth remembering that the humbucker was designed to remove the hum from the glorious sound of a P90 and not to create a new sound. If Seth Lover had got it bang on then they would both have sounded the same. However Physics came into play and the addition of a second magnetic field did change the sound of the PAF by what I guess was considered an acceptable degree by that genius. I'm talking about PAFs here not the overwound descendants which moved the goal posts into regions which the purists believe to be unacceptable. All the variants of these pickups do what they do and suit the different genres and different players. Lollars, Seymour Duncan, Bare Knuckle etc There is no Holy Grail just a bunch of guys with soldering irons, different ears and a lot of hype. Now talk about amps and your really into the true areas of tone sculpture.
"There is no Holy Grail" People like what they like and no one is more right! (Except you and I agree) Big difference from my 1st Traynor to 2nd HiWatt to 3rd and last Mesa Boogie!
Personally don't like the use of "Holy Grail" just to describe an instruments rarity or features. We should be able to do better in describing unique or desirable qualities on an instrument.
I also own a Les Paul . She's not old .... but has a great sound. My amp also fills in my needs. Loving it more everyday. Thanks Joe for the info video and always the great tunes. 🎸
Just bought my first P90 LP (Epiphone '57 tribute) and I have to say I'm blown away by the P90's. HB neck pups have always been disappointing to me but not the P90, it sounds like it's got a fuzz pedal plugged in, especially with the tone turned down, and creates the most moreish tone...goodddd I love it!
They are different in sound but they are both equally awesome, couldn't pick a winner where tone is concerned although there is in my opinion a clear winner in looks. I love the look of the snakebite, what a guitar!!!!!!
A great review. I remember when LP's were dirt cheap. When the British Invasion happened not just players were carving guitars but store owners were carving and selling. That Standard or Gold Top that had been in the store for years was now in demand with PAF's . It actually hurt the bottom line when Gibson brought back the LP. I got a LP Special and G6 amp for $90 in 1964. I still have them.
+Danny Twork The "vintage" market started around the late 70's and that ruined everything, especially through the 90's and early 2000's. Even in the 80's the thing was getting a good used guitar to start out on, then go from there. Not so much now. Even almost 35 years ago you could get a good one cheap. I bought a '66, Olympic White Strat in excellent shape for $475.00 cash money. Ten years later someone offered me $2,500.00. I would never sell i; it's an unreal guitar, a Strat even people who hate Strats like. I'm just sayin'...
larry geetar can't get a good guitar cheap these days. New Lps at 2k suck, which is absurd. You and Danny are lucky to experience the peak of craftsmanship. Guess I'm sticking to used prs.
in the late 70's i bought a mint 1969 cherry burst lp custom with a hsc..for $425 off the wall in a local store...kept it 3 months and sold for $375 because it was too heavy.....what an ass I was!!!....
The most important takeaway from this video is the placement of the screws on the p90s, especially on the bridge pickup. Those screws are dialed so high that they’re popping out of the pickup. Those are the details I love to pay attention to from pros like Joe
The old P-90 has only one drawback: the 60 cycle hum. If you can deal with it-and some rooms/bars are inherently more prone to noise than others-then it's the best pickup of them all. I adore P-90s.
My main squeeze for years was a 74 Les Paul Deluxe like Scott Gorham's out of Thin Lizzy. Sadly, some wise person decided to do a photo shoot before we went on stage and lined all the guitars at the front of the stage. As always, I'd finished sound check and hidden it in the corner behind my amp. I was about 50 ft away sitting behind the front of house desk , and as I looked up I saw it fall forward off its stand. I ran like the wind and there it was on the floor with a broken headstock. I just burst into tears! I had it repaired my a top luthier but it was never the same. It had lost its sustain. The sustain is in the grain! I much prefer the P90's to the PAF. They snarl! You can add warm to a P90 but you can't subtract it from a PAF and I find them too woolly. Great for Country. Those mini humbucker's will give a Tele a good run the money any day of the week!
Why? Why did you have to upset me tonight? I was having a good night, kicking back, enjoying some good Les Paul videos and then you pop up with this story that will make me have nightmares... now Im going to have to hug each of my Les Pauls tonight and make sure they know I love them. But I want you to know something, that 74 is dead because of your failure to secure her to the stand. Anchor the stand to the floor, tie the guitar in with a soft yet strong strap and never, ever! leave her alone! You were 50 feet away! How could you stray so far?
FINALLY a musician who knows what's what. I've had my Historic '56 Goldtop since the early nineteen nineties At that time I had a Les Paul Standard Goldtop, a Les Paul Deluxe [mini-humbuckers] and a Les Paul Custom with SD humbuckers. Finally the one I still have the Historic Goldtop '56 P-90s. I've sold them all but one referred to at the beginning of this post.It is a great guitar and I won't be destroying it just so I can fit a pair of PAF's. That will never happen.
Very wise words from Joe. Not that it's of any importance, but I always enjoy putting "Liege and Lief" on and hearing the great sound Richard Thompson got out of his LP Gold Top with its P90s.
A real nice video. Joe, I love the way you call things as you see them and I really appreciate that you respect where these great and sometimes not so great guitars came from and the story that they tell. Bravo!! Bryan
O vaguely recall seeing Joe when he was a kid. I was not that familiar with him but the last couple years how can you not be + I gotta tell you I really like what he's about. We all dreamed of the same guitars he just git good enough that he can have them now and he's way cool about it
Very good point. I put P90s in my Standard that are the size of humbuckers. It is a new tone from an old friend. I love my P90 sound and it is very much like my old Casino. With the Les Paul I play other stuff besides Beatles songs.
Outstanding thoughts from Joe. I did the opposite move. I removed the PAF's from my gold top and replaced them with Seymour Duncan Phat Cat P90's that fit into a humbucker cavity...the guitar "snarls" better with P90's and if I ever want to switch back to PAF's...No problem.
Great examples of the two eras of 50’s Les Pauls appearing together are any recordings of the original Fleetwood Mac. Peter Green playing a burst and Danny Kirwan playing a gold top with P90s. Each of them created equally great, classic LP tones.
I have a 1993 Strat Plus (that I bought new). Lace sensor pickups, LSR roller nut, no string trees, etc. For the longest time I considered swapping out pickups for pole piece pickups, and other mod's to make it look like a "regular" Strat. But over the last couple years I decided that I love it the way it is, love it for _what_ it is. It's a great sounding Strat.
Sounds incredible Joe! Just bought your Polymist Firebird signature. Fantastic guitar. On differences of these pickups. I wind both pickup configurations. Comparing a stock say 59 PAF and P90 you made the comment that the humbucker has more output than the P90 because it has 2 coils. Actually the PAF came stock with about 5000 winds per bobbin. The P90 came with about 10,000. Comparing both pups on the multimeter results in normal resistances of about 8k. Inductance, or the measure of potential voltage output however is measured in Henries. Both vintage pups normally measure around 5 Henries. So what’s the difference? The PAF has a wider magnetic field from slug to screws. It picks up a longer length of string vibration. The P90, picks up a narrower length. This affects what you hear. The last big bugaboo of Gibson of this era was their use of varying magnet grades. Alnico 2.3,4 and 5 were all indiscriminately used. And I’ll tell you they all impart very different tones to a pickup. Just another reason why there is so much tonal variation in vintage Gibsons.
If I managed that hotel I'd be honored to have you playing loud and disturbing the peace when in actual reality you're drowning out all the shit going on in the world. Keep rockin', Joe. You're truly one of a kind.
Dear Joe, This week I just played a Max les Paul ... best Paul I ever played... 100 year old wood, blows any les I ever played away.. and I've played a few bursts and 52,54 conversions
What makes you think he "made that up"? I would also beg to differ that you can't hear any difference between two similarly equipped electric guitars. An Epiphone LP Standard sounds a world apart from a Custom Shop R9, even when they have the same pickups. If you can't here that then you have shit ears.
@Pops Fereal I won't deny that the player can make a guitar sound better but that's only to a certain degree. I was watching a video of rl burnside playing see my jumper hanging on the line and he was playing a cheap teisco guitar through some crappy amp and it sounded fantastic. It's just that some gear is complete shit and nothing can change that
@Pops Fereal yeah I definitely agree that "bad gear" can be really subjective. What I was going off is people saying that a guitarist playing like a cheap shit solid state pawn shop amp and a cheap shit strat copy Could make it sound like a 59 les Paul through a nice vintage fender. A good player can push any gear to the best it'll be but some gear really just isn't good at all
I came to listen to the P-90s as those are what I hope to swap to. And, yet, I think that this is the first review vid where the guitarist is playing lines that have life to them. Most reviewers go into this zombie-esque too many notes shredding where it is less about tone, music, and review and more about see how fast I can play. Joe's playing approach allows us to listen to the tone which is an accurate representation of the items we may be interested in. Thank you Joe.
I think that the P-90s are the best sounding pickups for the all mahogany body guitars such as the Les Paul Junior, the Les Paul Special, the SG models. They also sound very good in maple capped body guitars such as the Les Paul Standards, Gold Tops, etc... In these maple capped body guitars, I think that the humbuckers also sound very good because of the high frequencies that the maple cap brings, which compensate a bit for the bite that the humbucker lacks when compared to a P-90... And of course, any guitar will sound good when played by Joe Bonamassa!
Lol Joe this is exactly what happened to my 1968 gold top it originally had p90s but when I found it, it was carved out for pafs pickups still got the mojo though crackle in the top too I agree great tone
I always been poor. So I bought the cheapest epiphone junior, at the pawn shop, and fit a p90 from ebay. Yessss.. the tuners are crap, but I just love the different tones I get by rolling back and forth, the nobs, with all the combinaisons possible, it is sooo versetile.
The P-90 tone is a thing of beauty. The problem is the noise and hum at high volume. Gibson's Seth Lover tackled the problem by inventing the humbucking PAF pickup. Years later the noise gate was invented. This means you can enjoy the P-90's without the annoying background noise.
I think his style of play does not take really take advantage of the quality difference in the pickups. You can tell - especially when you play clean - the difference. The p90 is brighter, more dynamic, responds better to every slight movement of the fingers.
IMO there is absolutely no comparison between the snarl of a vintage p-90 that is dialed in correctly and anything the humbuckers can generate. While HB's are absolutely brilliant at what they do and have generated iconic tones... a perfectly setup p-90 through warm tubes has a clean-but-dont-tell-mom-about-this kind of character that when pushed breaks up into a snarling loud knife fight at the drive-in that will have johnny goodboy smoking the marijuana cigarettes and make betty sue drop going to church faster than she dropped her baby in the dumpster on prom night.
Just bought a 2019 Les Paul DC with P90's. Sound very nice clean and to get a ballsey fat sound, turn down the tone knob and get a fat, rich sound. Seems to work for me through my Marshall.
I found a great setting. Turn pre-amp or volume up in amp and put p90 bridge vol on 4 with tone down to 5/6 and there lives a tone that for some reason is louder and clearer..maybe cos the output valves are playing a bigger role. I don't want hassle wiv neighbours either but those p90s. I use fingers now and put the pick down when strumming over the bridge p.u. it sounds great for Townesend type playing.get as close to the strings as poss with height. 1/16" gap.
I am lucky enough to have a couple of P90 Gibson guitars, for me they are the Les Paul version of a telecaster. They are brutally clear and honest and unlike a humbucker hide nothing, this is the reason many twin coil player's can not get on with them.
The reason people can never get the sound they hear in their head is they really don’t know what that sound is. It’s a subjective thing that keeps on changing. The vintage Les Paul’s could not be sold when they came out because the “experts” didn’t like the sound. It was only when the great rock players of the era started using them that people decided they were great.
not really sure I agree...I own several guitars (LP, Flying V< custom SG's etc) which once had PAF and/or Duncan Humbuckers..I actually prefer the clarity and dynamics of the P-90 style pickups...i went the opposite direction and swapped out the humbuckers with P-94 pickups....(p-90"s in a humbucker format) so there was no cutting or routing etc required and all the tone of the p-90 style pickup. This is a fabulous way to get the p-90 tone...in fact i was turned on to this years ago when I started gigging with a Black sabbath tribute act...all the guitar tones on the first four albums are p-90 style pickups...lower gain/output yet massively expressive with as much blues-rock laden crunch you will ever need...(and all that with .008-.038 gauge strings in Iommi's case!!) NOT for the "metal shredder" guys....but great for almost anything else. Oh yes, and who can forget David Gilmour's "comfortably numb" solo...yup, Les Paul with P-90"s! so, if you REALLY want/need PAF style pickups, DON'T just start routing out nice P-90 equipped guitars. buy another axe that already has humbuckers, or learn how to handle the single coils, you might also find they will channel you to become a more precise and expressive player.
That brown top looks nice, I believe these were still called Les Paul Model and only the later LP Sunbursts were called the Les Paul Standard. Yes, even 1958 PAF Goldtops are not Standards!
