The Black Keys Fan Lounge Forum

you might wanna try some GFS pickups from guitarfetish.com, I hear awesome things about them and they aren't expensive. They also have a really big variety, maybe go for their paf styles or their humbucker sized p90s

+1 for GFS Mean 90's. that's what I'll be putting in my Gibson SG once I get around to it. I've had the Dream 90 neck pickup in several guitars and it's fantastic. The Mean 90's are supposed to be even more P90-like.

*May I ask why you're changing the pickups though? Make sure you try adjusting the height and whatnot before you give up and decide you have to replace them. I didn't particularly love the sound of my Gibson 490R and 490T pups in my SG but after tweaking the distance between strings and pickups, and balancing the trebly strings and bassy strings... I'm getting some real nice tones. More like what I was wanting from the pickups. The last guy to own this guitar played in a modern heavy rock band so he had the pckups set real close to the strings for maximum, er, "rawk". Also try lowering the guitars volume knob(s) a bit if you want more vintage tones.

Another vote for the Duncan '59s or Mean 90s. I acquired a hollow body that had some really expensive boutique pickups in it, and I plan to replace them with Duncan '59s. Never heard Mean 90s in a hollow body but I like them in my les paul copy. Two totally different sounds with those two options, but both are great pickups.

Thanks so much guys! I figured everyone would say gibson 57s lol. That seems to be the most common answer. The stock one on my epiphone are too dull, and that shouldn't be happening because even the neck on the guitar is maple. It's a very lively guitar unplugged, just a little dull/dark plugged into my vox ac15. I want a nice smooth clean, with a vintage dan overdrive. I have US Hamer artist korina with p-90s and i'm not a huge fan of its overdrive through my amp.. maybe they're just the wrong p-90s for me. I have some expensive guitars and this $450 epiphone is my favorite to play so i figured i put some work into her. sorry about the book

Glad to help here dude. Just know that potentiometer value and cap value matter in your tone as well. Usually 500k pots for humbuckers with .22 uf value capacitors but it's all up to you. If you go with P-90's or Mean 90's in this case, I would pick .47 uf or higher with 250K or 500K potentiometers. It's all up to your prefence however, http://www.tdpri.com/forum/telecaster-discussion-forum/94453-what-p-90-pot-value.html

ya im gonna have a tech install them and i would hope he would do the pots and stuff too... i know nothing about that stuff lol

Just a friendly reminder - if you want to spend money on pickups go right on ahead, but you can usually tweak them into sounding pretty close to what you're looking for. You said they sound dull? Raise the pickup that sounds dull closer to the strings, and do so in a way that allows balance from treble strings to bass strings (adjust each of the 2 adjustments screws so that you get what you want). And yes cap and pot values can help. And those parts are much less expensive than pickups.

My last Epiphone was a reissue '56 Les Paul gold top with stock P90's. I liked the stock epi neck p90 a lot so I kept it, but I did replace the bridge P90 with an overwound Lindy Fralin. My point being - you may find that one or both of the stock pickups are perfectly good once you spend the time to dial them in. I feel like too often everyone jumps to the conclusion that you need to go spend a couple hundred on pickups - and they never even put in the time to try to dial them in first.

You might be right, you may have shitty pickups that don't catch the sound you're after. But you may find that all you needed to do was spend TIME rather than money.

Also, when it comes to tone caps, I find that it's better to use way smaller caps than most "stock" values. Read this excellent article on tone caps...
http://www.premierguitar.com/Magazine/Issue/2008/Mar/Auditioning_Tone_Capacitors.aspx

a snippet - "In the “golden days” of electrical guitars, Fender and Gibson used tone caps with a very high capacitance (0.1uf/0.05uF and 0.047uF/0.022uF, depending upon the time period). The 0.022uF value is still the standard today. If you need very dark and bassy tones, this value may work for you. For most of us, however, this value is much too large and the effect is more or less useless, resulting in the aforementioned problem of the effect only taking place between 10 and 8. The solution to the problem is simply a tone cap with a much smaller value. This little change will enhance the usability of your tone control dramatically, giving you a good evenness among the complete taper of the tone control without any hotspots, and every movement of the pot will result in a change of tone."