Les Pauls and humbuckers have been a winning formula for decades. But the pickups — specifically the Patent Applied For “PAF” humbuckers — weren’t part of the model’s spec until 1957, a good five years after its introduction.
Indeed, Les Paul himself had waited patiently for Gibson to invest in his solidbody electric guitar concept, having rejected an approach from Leo Fender in the interim. When his signature model finally entered production in 1952, it boasted a pair of single-coil P90 pickups.
Considering the number of players who have lifted the humbucking-equipped Les Paul to heaven, it’s little surprise that P90 Les Pauls have become a rarity. Or, as Gibson Gear Guide host Dinesh Lekhraj calls them, “an underdog”.
Recently, three big-name players have come to the P90’s defense, chief among them Joe Bonamassa.
“I’m known as a humbucking kind of player,” he admits, “but I own a lot of P90 Les Pauls and they’re great. They clean up really well.
“Most people who are real dyed-in-the-wool Gibson people will say behind closed doors when the internet isn’t watching that their favorite pickup is a P90. They’re cleaner. There’s a sparkle on top that a humbucking pickup doesn’t get.”
Certainly, in terms of tone, P90s are considered something of a halfway house between the rounded fullness of humbuckers and the bite of single-coils, making them a more attractive pickup for those who a broad range of tones.
Bonamassa has incorporated the pickups into his 12th Epiphone signature guitar, a 1955 Les Paul Standard with a gorgeous Copper Iridescent finish. He admits that players will have to “set up their gain stages” for P90s specifically to get the most out of them, but he’s pointed to three other players, Leslie West, Blackberry Smoke’s Charlie Starr, and modern blues rocker Jared James Nichols as stars to have successfully flown the P90 flag.
For Starr, who installed a P90 into his signature Les Paul Junior, the pickups’ malleable tone was a big part of the pull, especially when it comes to a single-pickup guitar.
Discussing his signature guitar with Lekhraj, he says they clean up even when playing through big amps, thanks to the dynamics of the volume knob. What’s more, he found he can change the tone of the guitar just by moving the position of his picking hand. That sees it going from ballsy rock to twanging country the closer you get to the bridge.
“Not having a neck pickup,” he adds, “you can always use the tone knob, come down to about five, and move where you’re picking the string really gives it a fatter sound.” In this way, he can easily emulate neck-pickup tones.
Jared James Nichols says his beloved “Dorothy” Les Paul was found in his friend’s front yard in the wake of a 2013 tornado, “without a neck and full of mud, with shards on asphalt in it.” Nichols noticed that its bridge pickup had side screws in opposing corners.
“The first run of Les Pauls has those,” he said. “That’s the only run that did those. So right away I was like, ‘That’s an early ’52.’ ”
The guitar’s original owner was tracked down, but by that point, she’d already claimed the insurance for what had been her father’s guitar. Nichols walked away with the instrument free of charge.
A careful restoration job followed, with Nichols wanting to “represent all the bumps and bruises.
“I only wanted it to be playable. I had no reservations if it was gonna sound good or not,” he said. “I plugged it in — the electronics had never been touched — and it worked.”
He slowly started rolling the volume knob up to discover that the pickups still retained their full dynamic glory more than 60 years later.
So not only is there a case for their tonal quality and reactiveness to the guitar’s controls, but they’re tornado-proof too. That’s not too shabby for an underdog.
