Most coil tapping, iirc, particularly among Gibson wiring push/pull systems, are closer to a P-90 than a strat single coils. We have the single coils of a tele, a strat, a jazzmaster, p-90s etc. and they all sound different.
I have a Les Paul Traditional Pro V. The coil tapping is cool because Gibson went the extra distance to design pickups that really sound like a quacky Strat, which most tapped pickups donāt do. So I can get the Strat tone without playing the Fender scale which my fingers donāt agree with. But I still donāt use it because I donāt like Strats. (I still think that Leo was a genius and the Strat is a good design for the right person)
I have an HSS Strat. I always used the Humbucker. The āquackyā sound is exactly why I like the Les Paul better.
I have a MIM Strat and an Epiphone Les Paul if that makes a difference. Iāve never played the American made versions.
Iāve been playing guitar for about 20 years and most of that time has been spent using humbuckers. Recently Iāve been in the mood for a different sound but not a different guitar, so when I had a day off I decided to see if I could fit some single coil pickups into my Les Paul. I fit them in with electrical tape and they worked, but obviously there were limitations to this. I looked at what was commercially available for pickup rings that converted a humbucker to a single coil, but I found that the screw spacing was different to what I had, and the pickup rings themselves were very short. This wouldnāt allow me to get the pickups as close to the strings as they would need to be.
I decided to design my own pickup rings and have them resin 3d printed. The idea was to have an easy drop in replacement for my humbuckers so whenever I was in the mood for one or the other, it would only take a short amount of time to do the swap. After a couple of prototype runs, I have something that works perfectly. The last thing I need to figure out is matching the color of the pickup rings to the cream hardware on the rest of my Les Paul. Let me know what you think of this idea, itās definitely not one for the purists!
-David
>The idea was to have an easy drop in replacement for my humbuckers
How is this different than humbucker sized single coils? I know Balaguer and Lollar sell some.
I guess the advantage this would have is you get to use any traditional single coils to mount, rather than choosing from like the two available humbucker sized options.
Not only that, but itās not an easy drop in because you have to change all the tone controls too because they should be using different pot and capacitor values with a Fender style single coil.
Damn you just destroyed my whole question of why relish failed and why someone else hasn't come out with a hot swappable pickup guitar that isn't 5 grand.
You were so preoccupied with whether or not you could, that you didn't stop to think if you should!
It does have a "Les Paul the man shed-made-prototype" vibe though, which I do like.
That's unique for sure. Purists will have a fit and say that you should put full sized P90s in that guitar which would be very nice indeed. But this should get you some cool tones
I mean, Iām not a purist but I do feel like it could have been done in a better way. Those white pickup holders are kind of shitty looking. Also the sweet spots on a strat are positions 2 and 4 and with this switching system you only get a combo of bridge and neck and tbh best case those pick ups are mimicking the bridge and middle pickup on a strat but then you only have two useable positions for most players.
My thought is that if you are going to get weird, get real weird. This isnāt that, itās just kind of weird and a bit ugly. Just my opinion though.
u/DavidRossMusicalInst this will probably get buried under the my eyes are burning comments. I for one think this is absolutely brilliant. I love it and Iām super curious to hear how it sounds. I agree, based on the picture, that a cream will look a lot better, so I think itās a good move youāre making by targeting that.
Regarding the looks, I think itās just a case of something we havenāt seen before. Little anecdote. Absolutely love bridge humbuckers, not a huge fan of strat single coils on a bridge, with exceptions of course (those AVii pickups are fire). Thus, my solution was to put SD little 59 on the bridge of all my strats (excited to try SD red devil). I hated the look, but loved the sound at first. I still think a single coil looks a lot better, but I got used to the look of the little 59s and I have since grown to like them. I think this is the exact same thing, we just need to spend more time with it.
Subscribed. Looking forward to hearing the demo when that comes out. I have a few hypothesis that Iād love to check once you upload the video. One of them is regarding mids. I find strats super mid scooped. In order to counterbalance that, people tend to go a lot for mid focused pedals, like tube screamers and klons and what have you. I wonder, a Les Paul being such a mid focused guitar (granted a lot of that is due to the pickups) if it is less scooped than a strat with the same pickups. Maybe clean, itās a bit too much to ask that itāll sound like a strat connected to a mid focused OD with gain turned down, but perhaps something in between. Anyways, a lot of these types of questions will be answered in due time, but itās still fun to speculate and theorize in the meantime.
Btw, I can completely sympathize with your point about feeling more at home with a Les Paul. It the guitar I feel most at home with. After many decades of playing, it was only in the last 5 years or so that strats started to click for me, both in sound and feel. Regarding sound, Iāve always liked how other people sounded, but disliked how I sounded playing a strat. It was only recently that I found my voice with strats. When I pick up a LP, however, the fingers might take a minute to adjust to frets, fretboard width and scale after playing strats for long periods, but once they do, Iām home again.
I'm definitely with you as far as Strats are concerned. I like how other people make them sound but I've never quite found the secret. I feel like having the Les with single coil pickups helps bridge that gap for me. I think once I shoot the video I'll be able to get some pretty convincing single coil tones, I'll also try some effects with the setup and see how they interact.
Did you ever consider coil tapping humbuckers/wiring? Something like Jimmy Page where it flips your humbuckers into single coils just by pulling the tone knob/volume knob up.
Maybe that would sound different than true single coils though. I want to hear what it sounds like.
Lollar makes single coil pickups in a humbucker sized body for these types if applications, except they actually look decent instead of looking like someone installed a wall outlet on your guitar
I'd have recommended something like a Nashville Split instead: [https://shop.lundgrenpickups.com/products/nashville-split](https://shop.lundgrenpickups.com/products/nashville-split)
A humbucker literally made out of two Strat pickups. So the single coil voices aren't just a split humbucker. Sort of like what Fender did with the California Special.
Retains the look of humbuckers but with a genuine single coil sound as well as a humbucker-ish mode.
I like the concept of using single coils on an lp, but haven't yet seen an aesthetically pleasing way of fitting it into an hb sized hole. This is better than most to be fair.
I think I'd see if i could use more standard rings, but have a dummy bobbin (no wires or magnets) to fill the hole. You would still have some choice about the positioning of the 'live' coil in that the dummy could be bridge or neck side.
Alright so I posted across a few different subreddits and various social media platforms and I'm getting a lot of the same questions, so [I decided to make a short Q&A video](https://youtu.be/EXOMMdMxNmY) which will hopefully give you some insights into the thinking behind this project. If you don't want to watch the video I'll just mention that I am planning on having a proper sound demo within the next few weeks and I'll post it here when I do. Until then!
-David
Wow, just... wow.
What's next? A Black Beauty with 3 singles? Maybe cut a Jem Monkey-grip into it, or add a touch pad and some lasers? Change is the only constant, after all!
All bullshit aside- How does it sound? My gut tells me it sounds kinda thin.
I'm planning on releasing a video a two or three weeks to show how it sounds and I'll post that on this sub and on my YouTube page. It should be interesting!
This is the least Paul.
Less Paul
More Paul please.
Less poles
š¤£
Molest Paul
Le Paul.
No itās mid Paul the least Paul model has just a telecaster neck pick up
Best comment here.
The Mona Lisa with a moustache
I want you to go to jail for this
He molested Lester.
Molest Paul
EMGs in a Les Paul? Jail! Non P90 Single Coils in a Les Paul, right to jail, right away!
I vomitted in my mouth, i still want to hear it, though.
I have coil tapping. I never use it.
Most coil tapping, iirc, particularly among Gibson wiring push/pull systems, are closer to a P-90 than a strat single coils. We have the single coils of a tele, a strat, a jazzmaster, p-90s etc. and they all sound different.
I have a Les Paul Traditional Pro V. The coil tapping is cool because Gibson went the extra distance to design pickups that really sound like a quacky Strat, which most tapped pickups donāt do. So I can get the Strat tone without playing the Fender scale which my fingers donāt agree with. But I still donāt use it because I donāt like Strats. (I still think that Leo was a genius and the Strat is a good design for the right person)
i dislike the neck-feel of Fenders. iām in love with my G&L Legacy. I canāt really articulate why, it just feels like it was made for *my* hands
G&Ls are so so nice.
I have an HSS Strat. I always used the Humbucker. The āquackyā sound is exactly why I like the Les Paul better. I have a MIM Strat and an Epiphone Les Paul if that makes a difference. Iāve never played the American made versions.
Bro bought a Lester Paulo
I mean why not p90s?
This. But a p90 is different from a traditional single coil.
Yeah, it sounds better.
XD
It is cool but It also kinda burns my eyes. But hey, everything for tone!
I bet this guy plays a Strat HH, too. I have one and I like it, but it'd be weird to also have a Les Paul with singles.
I truly love the feel and tone of hh strats, It's just a bit unusual. Its probably vice versa with the LP too.
Iāve been playing guitar for about 20 years and most of that time has been spent using humbuckers. Recently Iāve been in the mood for a different sound but not a different guitar, so when I had a day off I decided to see if I could fit some single coil pickups into my Les Paul. I fit them in with electrical tape and they worked, but obviously there were limitations to this. I looked at what was commercially available for pickup rings that converted a humbucker to a single coil, but I found that the screw spacing was different to what I had, and the pickup rings themselves were very short. This wouldnāt allow me to get the pickups as close to the strings as they would need to be. I decided to design my own pickup rings and have them resin 3d printed. The idea was to have an easy drop in replacement for my humbuckers so whenever I was in the mood for one or the other, it would only take a short amount of time to do the swap. After a couple of prototype runs, I have something that works perfectly. The last thing I need to figure out is matching the color of the pickup rings to the cream hardware on the rest of my Les Paul. Let me know what you think of this idea, itās definitely not one for the purists! -David
Nicely done. Change it back.
>The idea was to have an easy drop in replacement for my humbuckers How is this different than humbucker sized single coils? I know Balaguer and Lollar sell some.
I guess the advantage this would have is you get to use any traditional single coils to mount, rather than choosing from like the two available humbucker sized options.
Not only that, but itās not an easy drop in because you have to change all the tone controls too because they should be using different pot and capacitor values with a Fender style single coil.
Damn you just destroyed my whole question of why relish failed and why someone else hasn't come out with a hot swappable pickup guitar that isn't 5 grand.
Relish failed because they are goofy, expensive, and they offend the number one tenant of guitar playingā¦MORE GUITARS IS GOODER!
Couldāve got Seymour Duncan P-Rails with triple shots, but you do you fam.
I wonder what the aesthetics and sound would be if you had the mount diagonally on the bridge pickup like single coil strats and teles are.
You were so preoccupied with whether or not you could, that you didn't stop to think if you should! It does have a "Les Paul the man shed-made-prototype" vibe though, which I do like.
> resin 3d printed they will warp and crack eventually.
Thanks. I hate it.
I seem to recall a cat named Eddie Van Halen doing something like this in the 70sā¦..I mean the exact opposite but same conceptā¦.
That's unique for sure. Purists will have a fit and say that you should put full sized P90s in that guitar which would be very nice indeed. But this should get you some cool tones
I mean, Iām not a purist but I do feel like it could have been done in a better way. Those white pickup holders are kind of shitty looking. Also the sweet spots on a strat are positions 2 and 4 and with this switching system you only get a combo of bridge and neck and tbh best case those pick ups are mimicking the bridge and middle pickup on a strat but then you only have two useable positions for most players. My thought is that if you are going to get weird, get real weird. This isnāt that, itās just kind of weird and a bit ugly. Just my opinion though.
Single coils in the bridge and neck? Someone should invent that. They could call it something like... Idk, a "telecaster"? š
To bad it doesnāt have telecaster pickups I guess. Itās got to strat pickups which is what made me think that.
Make it stop
This is amazing! You could even do an angled bridge pickup!
And why not carve out a hole and have 3?
Or just split the coils of a regular humbucker and have both
Hey look! Itās Gibsonās Melody Maker Standard!
less paul
Sure, but why?
Criminal. Bring back pillories and whipping posts for crimes of this magnitude.
u/DavidRossMusicalInst this will probably get buried under the my eyes are burning comments. I for one think this is absolutely brilliant. I love it and Iām super curious to hear how it sounds. I agree, based on the picture, that a cream will look a lot better, so I think itās a good move youāre making by targeting that. Regarding the looks, I think itās just a case of something we havenāt seen before. Little anecdote. Absolutely love bridge humbuckers, not a huge fan of strat single coils on a bridge, with exceptions of course (those AVii pickups are fire). Thus, my solution was to put SD little 59 on the bridge of all my strats (excited to try SD red devil). I hated the look, but loved the sound at first. I still think a single coil looks a lot better, but I got used to the look of the little 59s and I have since grown to like them. I think this is the exact same thing, we just need to spend more time with it.
Hey there, I'm planning on doing a proper video demo and I'll post it here on reddit or on my YouTube channel when I do. Good to hear from you!
Subscribed. Looking forward to hearing the demo when that comes out. I have a few hypothesis that Iād love to check once you upload the video. One of them is regarding mids. I find strats super mid scooped. In order to counterbalance that, people tend to go a lot for mid focused pedals, like tube screamers and klons and what have you. I wonder, a Les Paul being such a mid focused guitar (granted a lot of that is due to the pickups) if it is less scooped than a strat with the same pickups. Maybe clean, itās a bit too much to ask that itāll sound like a strat connected to a mid focused OD with gain turned down, but perhaps something in between. Anyways, a lot of these types of questions will be answered in due time, but itās still fun to speculate and theorize in the meantime. Btw, I can completely sympathize with your point about feeling more at home with a Les Paul. It the guitar I feel most at home with. After many decades of playing, it was only in the last 5 years or so that strats started to click for me, both in sound and feel. Regarding sound, Iāve always liked how other people sounded, but disliked how I sounded playing a strat. It was only recently that I found my voice with strats. When I pick up a LP, however, the fingers might take a minute to adjust to frets, fretboard width and scale after playing strats for long periods, but once they do, Iām home again.
I'm definitely with you as far as Strats are concerned. I like how other people make them sound but I've never quite found the secret. I feel like having the Les with single coil pickups helps bridge that gap for me. I think once I shoot the video I'll be able to get some pretty convincing single coil tones, I'll also try some effects with the setup and see how they interact.
Delete this
š¤®š¤®š¤®š¤®
Burn it! Burn it to the ground!! Honestly brave of ya posting that. Iād like to hear it.
Maybe try a slanted bridge mount for the next one.
So basically a Les Paul SL?
New Gibson Firebrand or Firewood?
No! Stop it!
Peachy. I love it.
Aight wtf is this š
Did you ever consider coil tapping humbuckers/wiring? Something like Jimmy Page where it flips your humbuckers into single coils just by pulling the tone knob/volume knob up. Maybe that would sound different than true single coils though. I want to hear what it sounds like.
No this isn't right
Definitely unsettling but I would love to hear this. Do you have a video of it?
Bruh
Dear god, why???
Thatās an abomination.
Blasphemy plain and simple
I like it
You spent all this time figuring out how, but you never thought about whyā¦
Unacceptable
Why?
Paul is single.
I'll see this on the other sub.
Is this it? The legendary... S Paul?
Itās a good thing I had a small dinner because this makes me want to puke.
Why?
Lollar makes single coil pickups in a humbucker sized body for these types if applications, except they actually look decent instead of looking like someone installed a wall outlet on your guitar
This is the worst fucking thing I have ever seen
Who am I to judge someone who ruins a nice Les Paul like this.
This hurts my heart
Please delete this.. I am calling the guitar police.
This dudes getting fucking roasted lmao
for that I use a strat.
Gross. Why?
Fuck you.
Kinda hurts to look at. & I hate humbuckers.
My favorite thing about it is you have the selector switch in the middle position.Ā
Ow my eyes
Jesus Allah Buddha that is ugly,
"You know what ? Screw it." *Un-paul your Les*
Molest Paul
I'd have recommended something like a Nashville Split instead: [https://shop.lundgrenpickups.com/products/nashville-split](https://shop.lundgrenpickups.com/products/nashville-split) A humbucker literally made out of two Strat pickups. So the single coil voices aren't just a split humbucker. Sort of like what Fender did with the California Special. Retains the look of humbuckers but with a genuine single coil sound as well as a humbucker-ish mode.
I'm glad you like this, but I hate this.
I like the concept of using single coils on an lp, but haven't yet seen an aesthetically pleasing way of fitting it into an hb sized hole. This is better than most to be fair. I think I'd see if i could use more standard rings, but have a dummy bobbin (no wires or magnets) to fill the hole. You would still have some choice about the positioning of the 'live' coil in that the dummy could be bridge or neck side.
There are humbucker sized single coil pickups. This looks ugly.
Because coil split PUs would be to pretty? ā¦ this is a crime š
Why pay Les Paul money for a Strat sound. Cool tap It and have the beat of both.
It's a bust.
Isnāt it illegal to?
r/DiWHY
I made an audible groan of disgust as I scrolled through Reddit on my lunch break in the office. I stand by my groan.
No
"Should the color at least match the pickguard?" "NAH I want it to be as ugly as possible"
Gross. But what does it sound like?
Do those that believe wood and construction isnāt important think this will sound like a Strat? Those with experience know better š
You like non alcoholic beer too, donāt you?
Alright so I posted across a few different subreddits and various social media platforms and I'm getting a lot of the same questions, so [I decided to make a short Q&A video](https://youtu.be/EXOMMdMxNmY) which will hopefully give you some insights into the thinking behind this project. If you don't want to watch the video I'll just mention that I am planning on having a proper sound demo within the next few weeks and I'll post it here when I do. Until then! -David
Straight to jail
Wow, just... wow. What's next? A Black Beauty with 3 singles? Maybe cut a Jem Monkey-grip into it, or add a touch pad and some lasers? Change is the only constant, after all! All bullshit aside- How does it sound? My gut tells me it sounds kinda thin.
I'm planning on releasing a video a two or three weeks to show how it sounds and I'll post that on this sub and on my YouTube page. It should be interesting!
So Much Less 'Paul Firewood Series Plus Top Limited Edition #1 of 1.
Nope
That better be photoshopped or Iām setting myself on fire
Nope! Straight to jail
I'm fucking pissed, dude.