2017 Gibsons

But it's still just after half past 2016... :(

If you visit a car dealership, you will notice all the 2017 cars too. That's kind of how this sort of thing works, the end of summer is when companies rollout the next year's models.
 
What is it with Gibson and those 490 pickups that they like to put on all their lower end guitars? Dark, muddy, inarticulate. The SG Special that I bought in the late 90s sat in its case for a decade until I switched them out for a pair of Seth Lovers. Then it became on of my favorite guitars. Come on Gibson, do better.
 
What is it with Gibson and those 490 pickups that they like to put on all their lower end guitars? Dark, muddy, inarticulate. The SG Special that I bought in the late 90s sat in its case for a decade until I switched them out for a pair of Seth Lovers. Then it became on of my favorite guitars. Come on Gibson, do better.

Maybe you should have given it a rub down with Gibson's tone improvement polish.
 
Maybe. I just assumed that's what SGs sounded like. You know the kind of music they are associated with, and you know how I sound. I figured SGs weren't my thing. I never sell anything, so I kept the SG and kept on playing my Fenders. It put me off buying any more Gibsons for a long time. Then I bought an LP with the '57 Classics and realized, hey, they don't all sound that way. So the pickup change. Now I've got an SG that sounds great and is a lot more fun to play than an LP.
 
I dunno, I'm not an expert on pickups (come to think of it, I'm not an expert on anything). I didn't really know that people generally complain about the 490 pickups. I just know what ones I like and what ones I don't - an my experience is pretty limited. I tend to like really hot humbuckers - must be something to do with the way they introduce some compression that suits the music I play and how hard they push the amp. I recently tried a PRS with >8kOhm and hated it - I thought it sounded completely dead or maybe it was just the voicing of that particular PRS. Might just be that I dial an amp in to what I know, I'm sure if you spent some time working on it you could have dialed the amp in but then it might not have worked with the rest of your gear.

I recently learned that 16kOhm is about as hot as you can get before you start to get inductance - so when you see pickups over 16k they're not actually hotter, just a bigger number to act as a selling point. Probably why pickups resistance tended to top out at about 16k until pretty recently.
 
I'm sure some people like the 490s, or Gibson would stop making them. Believe me, I played around with those pickups quite a lot before consigning the SG to its case for a decade. The amps I use the most are ones I've had for a long time, so I pretty much know what they can do. But there's no dialing in a tone that wasn't there to begin with. Whether it's overdriven or clean, there's a certain clarity I'm looking for in my guitar tones. The 490s just don't have it, in my experience. Vintage style, low output humbuckers suit the music I do.
 
490s exist because most people just don't care that much. To their credit, they're not worried about the minutia of pickups and they don't even know what speakers are in their cabs. They just work with what they got. That's plenty admirable in it's own way.

For me, I'm not a fan of 490s. If I come across a guitar I like with 490s, I'll get the guitar and yank those fuckers out for something else.
 
That is probably the other part of the equation. I never buy a guitar because of the stock pickups. I buy it because of how it plays, then I put the pickups that I like in it.

Hell, the last 10 years I was playing, I had the same pickups in every guitar. The bridge pup from a strat in the neck position and my special humbucker in the bridge. That configuration was in 2 les Paul's, a vee, an Explorer, 2 iceman's (icemen?) An SG and a warlock.

The guitars still sounded different (Iceman were much brighter than the explorers), but the amp reacted the same to them.
 
Yes, most of the time. On a couple, I had a plate made to cover the hole. Basically a humbucker trim ring with only a cutout for the single coil.
 
My amps didn't have a clean channel, so I would have the volume backed way off on the single coil neck pickup. Then I could just switch to crystal clean with the pickup selector.
 
Got it. Gigging setup. Good idea. Live I played through Vox Valvetronix with a buttload of presets from dirt to clean and all in between. Usually had the Lesters' knobs dimed.
 
Both of my Gibson guitars have the 490 p'ups in 'em, the only difference between their p'ups is the bridge (the LP also has coil taps on both p'ups)...The SG has a 498T, where the LP Studio has a 490T...There's not a lot of difference in the 2 guitars' bridge p'ups, the 498T seems just a little hotter, but not much...

While I admit I haven't tried many different p'ups, I think the p'ups in my Gibsons sound pretty good...YMMV
 
Got it. Gigging setup. Good idea. Live I played through Vox Valvetronix with a buttload of presets from dirt to clean and all in between. Usually had the Lesters' knobs dimed.
If I did use the single coil all the way up, it had kind of an Yngwie sort of tone.
 
My les Paul studio had those 490/498t pickups in it. I didn't care for them at all. I put a set of Seymore Duncan 1959s in and it sounded MUCH better.
I have been tempted to get a set of Duncan "vintage hot" pick ups. Guitar center has them for around $165 for a matched set. They get rave reviews but I would like to play a guitar that's loaded with them before pulling the trigger on them. $165 is kind of high for a shot in the dark.
 
The pot values and taper can have a big effect on a pickup's sound too. Some Gibsons come with linear 300k pots and they can sound a little muddy - especially when rolling back. I'm personally a fan of 500k audio taper vol pots with humbuckers. And then there's the "50s wiring"...which I haven't tried myself, but if you're a vol/tone twiddler it seems to be the way to go.
 
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