kboman said:
That should be no major problem to achieve with Warmoth parts :icon_thumright:
As for pickups - just throw a rock and you'll hit someone who makes PAF type pickups, Big Name or hand made cusom shop. Pick a price point and see which maker makes the most sense to you.
For those who don't know,
PAF stands for
Patent
Applied
For. It generally takes years for a patent application to be approved, and Gibson wanted to manufacture the newfangled humbuckers and sell them. So, they put stickers on the pickups that said "Patent Applied For", which meant they were unique and couldn't be had from anybody else. They became known as "PAF" pickups. They were eventually awarded the patent, and of course not only continued making that style pickup, they also licensed others to do it.
That patent has long since expired (It was issued in 1959, but applied for in 1955, so the 17 year term was up in 1976) but there's a strange desire in the market to associate that awkward name with some humbuckers to satisfy some musician's demand for crummy pickups. So, PAF type pickups are made by everybody with $50 to invest in a cheap winder because they're easy to make. Just underwind them, and don't keep track of the number of winds or the type of magnet used. In other words, they're about the weakest, sloppiest, most inconsistent pickups ever made. Why anyone would want anything but an actual original one for anything other than museum display is beyond me. It's the original PAFs, and even the ones that came after the patent was awarded that put guys like Seymour Duncan in business.
I remember when me and my buddy were just teenagers back in the early '70s, we used to collect up old humbuckers out of old guitars and take them apart. We'd measure the coil resistance, and either match up hotter windings with like hotter windings to balance them and get higher output, or actually add windings to some to balance them and make the whole thing hotter. It was tedious work, but back then we didn't have any choice. Seymour Duncan, Dimarzio
et al had yet to start making pickups. If you went to a music store to buy a pickup, assuming you could even find loose pickups to buy, you bought either Gibsons or Fenders. It wasn't until the late '70s before an aftermarket started up at all, and even then there wasn't really a whole lot of choice for the next 10 years or so.
Today, as everyone knows, it's insane. Trying to pick out a good pickup is like trying to find a good cockroach to race. There are a million to choose from, and too many external variables involved that will affect their performance. Makes it tough for anyone's opinion about how they sound to carry a whole lot of weight.
