What do you think? Are there pickups you recommend similar to these Ron Ellis pickups? ✅The great $400 guitar I used on 5 albums 🎸 ruclips.net/video/bIQiWfeWLA4/видео.html
No, I'd recommend swapping speakers before I spent $800 on pickups. Pickups aren't made of magic powder and unicorn farts and don't do as much as changing a speaker would. Lots of pickups claim to do a lot of different things but the differences are often minuscule when compared to the differences a high quality speaker will do
The new pickup felt like it catches the middle strings, maybe it's preferred for rock music than jazz. And I don't know but I'm sure of one thing for a good sound you surely need a good guitar and good strings. Anything else is more of an individual choice. Hope it makes sense
Thank you for this video! i changed my Prs american model McCarthy pick ups for Seth Lover pick ups and suddenly the guitar played by itself. Also changing pickups changes the identity sound of both guitar and player, which is good thing! We can't all sound alike using our Gibsons! Again, thank you Mr Larsen
Hi Jens, thanks for great content, I`ve been watching your stuff for a few years already. As for the pickups change - in my opinion it`s mainly psychological difference, similar as in hi-fi equipment snobbery, based on the mechanism "I`ve spent more, I feel it`s better". It`s all happening in your head.... just as anything else we see, hear, smell, etc. Keep up the great work 😀
Wow. Maybe play guitar more. pickups make a huge difference. Doesn't matter if they are 800 or 80 dollars, they all read the strings differently. the only thing that smells is your mom.
It seems like the issue is a tonal one, more than overall 'quality' of the sound. I'm curious how the Bare Knuckle Stormy Monday set would sound compared to both sets you used in the video, as this is apparently the set Bare Knuckle typically recommends for ES-335 style guitars. Even BK's tonal chart for the Stormy Monday set shows a much more prominent Bass frequency character, which might help with that 'nasal' midrange sound you noted from the Mule set. Thanks for sharing the journey, Jens. Cheers from Canada!
Yes, I don't think this in anyway shows that BK pickups are bad, both RIchard and I say that several times in the video. It is indeed a bit random which pickups I have tried, and I have never tried the Stormy Mondays. The Ellis pickups are very bright which I think works well with the guitar, and the nasal character might also be about the guitar being like that 🙂
It’s amazing how much you can get almost any guitar pretty close to a guitar you don’t own for a sound you want with an EQ pedal. You can have one guitar and a new pedal and a piece of paper for different presets you can dial in quickly and you can basically get different guitar sounds. You can make a single coil sound like a P90 or a even close to a humbucker if you dial in a Boss GE7. Can’t recommend a modded (less noise) GE-7 enough. It’s cheap and it works pretty well. I get along more using a Strat and eq/boosting it to sound like a humbucker than I do with the guitar I have that has humbuckers - but this is because until a year ago I only ever played strats and teles so maybe it’s psychological.
The pickups sound brighter and cleaner, but did not sound to me like an improved tone. I would try using the Bare Knuckles set at lower height (back off the screws by 1 full turn), and maybe use a cleaner amp setting. I personally prefer the demo of the Bare Knuckles as they seem to compliment the guitar pretty well IMO.
I had Ellis LRP pups in a Les Paul. The clean sounds were outstanding: sweet, pleasing, nice clarity. But when I played blues gigs with low gain at a very modest volume they squealed uncontrollably. I don't use a lot of gain nor volume, but I finally had to give up and sell them. I hated to do it because those cleans were so sweet and clear. But the guitar became unuasble for me. I especially love the Humbuckers from Jim Rolph which are excellent. I have them in a ES-333.
It may be not a big difference in sound, but there is a difference. The main thing is that the player will react to that and this changes what is played. The average listener will perhaps not notice the difference in sound but will get a performance by a more inspired musician. It is like changing the pick, wich can make a huge difference in sound but maybe even more in the playing.
My old 90s Japanese-made Telecaster always sounded a bit flat and the volume was always very low compared to the rest of my guitars, so I put a Seymour Duncan Little 59 set in it - a Vintage Stack noiseless pickup in the neck, and the Little 59 humbucker in the bridge. Almost nothing changed, except that now when playing through the neck pickup on my Quilter amp, the guitar is so, so bassy I cannot play at any reasonable volume without sounding ridiculous, even with the bass completely cut on the amp. I'll likely never change pickups again.
I got lucky with a 1980 Gibson 335-S Professional Deluxe. It has original Tim Shaw designed Dirty Fingers humbuckers and a coil tap switch. I play through a Marshall DSL40C. I never played anything else. I love my rig. I've been told that my pickups are too 'hot' for jazz, but I don't have any problems. My teacher used to say that it had everything to do with my pickhand, not my pickup. He was right.
I'll go against the current and say "Sure", if it gets you where you want to be. It's still *only* $1,200.00 total, and you're a high-level professional who knows what he wants. I don't know (yet) exactly what the pickups offer you, but crossing the line into "diminishing returns" territory can for sure be worth it, to me. Aesthetic experience, beauty...compared to the value of money, surely a purely personal thing?
You cannot accurately remember sound for longer than about 7 seconds. The whole audio industry hinges on people being unaware of this, be it Hi-Fi or instruments. So your perception of the sound in the workshop after the switch probably was more influenced by expectation, blurry memories etc. than the actual sound. In the recordings you can hear a slight difference in the frequency response, as you described. But are the pick-ups less mid focused because they are more expensive? Or are they just expensive pick-ups that happen to be less mid focused? You could easily switch the price tags and say "listen to this amazing bass response in the Bare Knuckles" and so on.
Pickups act as inductors, which have a low-pass filtering property. The strength (inductance) of that inductor, in combination with the tone circuit (capacitor and pot) in your guitar gives you fairly flat frequency response up to a corner frequency, after which volume falls off steadily with frequency, and may give you a bit of a resonant bump at the corner frequency. The biggest difference between pickups (aside from sheer volume, which you can compensate for with a volume control) is just where that corner frequency is, and how much of a bump you get there, given your tone circuit arrangement. The biggest difference between normal humbuckers and normal single-coils is just that the single coils have a higher corner frequency. If you want tonal variation, your two best bets are (1) having a coil-split switch so that you can use your humbuckers as single coils (just using one of the two sides of each pickup) and make your Gibson sound like a Fender, or (2) an EQ to effectively move the corner freqency up or down. (You can roll off the highs starting below the pickup's corner frequency, to put the knee lower, or boost the highs somewhat above the corner frequency to effectively move the corner frequency up.) One very versatile arrangement is an HSH (humbucker-singlecoil-humbucker) strat with coil splits on the humbuckers. (The Nashville-style Tele used by a lot of studio guitarists in Nashville is just a Telecaster with HSH (& coil split) pickups like an HSH strat; it's one guitar that can do all the things people expect from electric guitars.)
They certainly sound as you describe, but maybe I'm just very suggestible 😂 I'm all for putting in pickups that are worth more than the guitar itself, I've got a Lollar Charlie Christian in a cheap ply- and balsa wood guitar and it sounds great.
The new pickups are more articulate. Like language, the right amount of the frequencies around the consonants defines the word. In guitar, that frequency defines what you're playing. I like a mellow tone that has a defining edge. Hank Garland was one of my favorite tones. Nice video.
1. While watching the video on lower quality speakers, I preferred the sound of the Bareknuckles, but with headphones I prefer the RE's 2. An EQ + compressor/clean boost before any effects/preamp can do what a pickup change does for the guitar's tone but with much more range and versatility. It's not EXACTLY the same thing as a pickup swap but all effects-using guitarists should consider this option before spending unnecessary money
I wonder if the difference between the pickups is being lessened by running your setup through the FM3. The FM3 does a great job at making disparate inputs sound similar. Running both pickups through a simpler set up might explain your initial impression at the workshop
I think you are misunderstanding something, my reaction is still the same, it is not so that I am less enthusiastic because it really feels so nice to play also on the FM3 or on my twin or my AER. There is no real difference there.
I can say from experience that upgrading pickups can make a dramatic difference, especially in low priced guitars. I wouldn't pay $800 for pickups, though. Glad you liked the end result! You do you!
Pickup builders definitely know how to "voice" them. I struggle with "fairy dust" and "snake oil" type products as much as the next guy. That and there's about $10 of material in a pickup. I decided to swap my Seymour Duncan HB Jazz set out of my '06 Epiphone SG for P90s. Was ready to do some Fralin's or something and bought both sets of Toneriders for the same price(wasn't sure if I would think the neck was hot enough or bridge too hot). Alnico II(Vintage) Neck and Alnico V(Mean) bridge. Sounds beautiful. Same "new guitar" feeling for $200. Same type to same type, in the mix(live or recording), I doubt I would notice. We eq with tone knob, fingers, the mix. It sure is fun, though! I have no hollow or semi and have a hankerin' for that Ibanez JSM20.
If you reduce the space between the low E-String and PU mulm in most cases goes away! Fine tuning with the hight of the pole-screws. But I do here some more grit on the Ellis, a hint more definition, maybe a higher output level? I made the experience that replacing cheap stock-pus with better ones make a huge difference. Replacing good pus with good pus ends like your records. Mostly a matter of taste IF there are differences.
what to expect? i changed the stock-humbuckers on my "Aria Pro II (330-full hollow)" against, an used SD_SH-2 on the neck and a '57 Classic Plus Gibson on the bridge. I would give it a 5 of 5 stars!
Great video! For me, changing pickups in my 335 is a sickness (chronic)... I changed the original Gibson classic 57 humbuckers for some Seymour Duncan, and those were nice but not that much different, then later put in a set from Harmonic design (another boutique), and then still later a set of Ron Ellis LRP. I actually ended up recently swapping those out for a set of Lollar (which are slightly higher output). All this is basically because this 335 (which I love otherwise) is itself very bright and seems to lack a certain amount of upper-mid, so all this has been to try to get the tome a bit warmer. The Lollar's do finally seem to help there (but the guitar basically still sounds mostly the way it always has).
I love your videos - keep them coming! IMHO I think old school P90s sound best overall for all styles. I am not afraid of a little potential 60 cycle hum (easily filtered out if need be) and with a clean jazz style little to no overdrive tone it almost never manifests in my experience. I like P90 loaded guitars, but just a P90 in the neck position is PRIMA - for jazz, blues, rock, everything. Try them out for fun - I love hearing you play and am inspired to learn more jazz through your channel - thank you!
Sonically the difference is definitely very subtle, but I think in the focus on "tone" the feel to the player tends to be a more under-appreciated aspect. There are lots of examples where very subtle differnces may not be that audible to a listener but depending on the player it can make a huge difference to the perofrmance and its hard (basically impossible) to subract the subjective element here because its all so individual (which in my view is kinda cool and why in the world would you want to remove the subjective element in the first place?).
Hello Jens, I wonder what you think about Lenny Breau and Ted Greene, since they are not as famous as the players you usually cover in your videos, but just as great. There is so much stuff that nobody else did in his playing that i am curious what you took away from them to use it in your playing or what you think about them in general. Great channel by the way!
Ok, I see videos on Ted Greene all the time, so I am not sure I agree that he is not talked about that much? Both are of course fantastic and mind-blowingly skilled players but also primarily solo performers and I always found myself gravitate more towards people who play in bands, which is why I rarely do videos on solo guitar performances, but that is also something that people like Tim Lerch and Sandra Sherman do all the time, so I don't think there is a real shortage of that.
I do have to disagree about the difference for metal pickups, some play nicer with distortion than others. I swapped out a bridge dimarzio tonezone for a Titan on my ibanez, and it was a night and day difference (especially boosted with treble dimed). I've also had great experiences with Fishman Fluence pickups sounding clearer through layers of distortion.
I own an IBANEZ ASV73 which was fitted with THE MULE Bare Knuckle pickups. I exchanged them for PAF Vanson '57 Alnico II style humbucker pickups for 45€ (ebay). Not far from 10 times cheaper, but they sound better to my ears. I tested them on a Les Paul and to my great surprise, they sounded great for playing the blues and approaching the sound of B.B King. I also bought the 59' Vanson and found them not as good!
Many claim pickups are the only thing that maters in guitar tone. I think there are many factors actually. Many are subtle maybe, but still contribute. Does his hollow body sound different from a solid body?
I think the difference here, is more a compression matter, more than tonal. Maybe the thing that blew your mind in the workshop, was the reaction that the amp has... Maybe due that kind of amp suitted more your pickups? IDK, what i know is that swapping pickups is always a great thing, but not the only. Pots and bridge made the step for me many times, after switching pickups sound improved, but the caracter wasn't there!
Ciao Jens,me li consiglieresti per la mia Sheraton pro ll,anche io trovo che i probucker soprattutto al ponte siano un po' impastati ciao grazie e vivissimi complimenti per i tuoi video jazz , Grande 🎸🤩
The difference you presented here is noticeable in your example, but it's nothing a bit of eq'ing could make impossible for the human ear to be accurate regarding which pickup is which no less....keep practicing!
The two sets are pretty similarly voiced, so it isn't hugely surprising they sound similar. I didn't run the samples through audacity but it sounds like there is a slightly bigger peak around the 3-5k range from the Ellis and less around 100? You should pop them into a spectrum and see the response.
Are the Ron Ellis pickups wax potted? unpotted pups are a bit clearer. also same magnets? there are several variables in pups. I did hear less compression in the RE pups. Enjoy!
the reason there is little difference is that these are all 59 paf styles, meaning magnet strength, wire and dcr are all similar. the only thing that may make a very small difference is the scatterwind. The fact that we’re just talking about brands, not inductance and resistance, and magnet type and wire says a lot. I think most pick up builders are just taking advantage of the fact that guitarists are math and science illiterate and think this is complicated stuff.. it’s super basic though - wind some wire around a magnet, do you want stronger magnet, a weaker magnet, more turns, or less. I would guess 99% of the guitar market just flies blindly with brands and names and has no idea what they’re actually buying or what tone the pickups have.
So this is why "your guitar" looks different lately - different guitar! In your chord/melody bake-off, I couldn't hear a frequency difference, but the Ron Ellis pickups sound looser, in a good way. Less staccato. Then again, I've never owned Bare Knuckles pickups, but they're a gold standard for PAF reproductions.
I don't hear a difference big enough to justify changing the pickups (if someone had that in mind, I guess you did it for the experience and because they were free :P). At this high level of quality in terms of pickups I guess what makes the difference is the player and your tone would probably continue to be very similar and great with other high end pickups in the same guitar.
@@JensLarsen I meant the feeling of better sound. The tube amp moves more air, has more punch and overtones - all this attracts the feeling I would say. Thats why playing at home is sounding much better with an (tube)amp than a modeler. For recording modelers do the job as good as an amp...
@@hermeneut No, I think I feel the difference through my modeler live as well. At least I play the guitar 50x as much. I just can't illustrate it with a recording. Let's not get into too many vague descriptions that don't have real definitions it gets a bit tinfoil hatty.
Considering that's $800 for the set and I've never seen you play on the bridge pickup I think you've been had 🤣 I am, however, looking forward to the sweet sounds you'll be getting from them in the video
More of a blues/jazz blues player than a straight jazz player. The BYO Blizzard of '59 pickups work for me. It's a basic PAF clone with decent materials and wax potting if you want to wander into rock. For around $90 a set they give you that early PAF sound on a ramen budget.
Pickups will never do what a good speaker does. Your $800 pickup swap could be avoided by just getting better speakers. The science speaks for itself. I like buying pickups often for aesthetic reasons. The most important part of your rig is the speakers- that's the last part of your sound and is where all the potential energy from your sound is converted to acoustic energy. Pickup companies will have people believing that the special unicorn pubes they use to wire their pickups will make your guitar sound great- which they won't if you have poor speakers. I know I just keep saying the same thing over and over, but it's true. Guitarists will spend thousands on pickups before they spend $80 on a high quality speaker that will actually improve their sound. Slayer, Metallica, and Zakk Wylde all use EMGs. Do they all sound the same? And before anyone tries to tell me "tone is in the hands"- if that were true then you wouldn't need any of your pedals and speakers would never matter, right? Guitar players- it's 2023. Smarten up. No respectable studio engineer cares about your pickups. They care about your speakers.
I don’t hear any difference sorry man. Tougher though when it’s not live, plus anything sounds good with your playing. I only hear pickup differences going from single to humbucker or their positions. Otherwise they’re all the same to me.
The difference is psychology. Your brain is telling you it sounds $800 better. Listening from here it doesn’t. But if it makes you feel like your playing better, fine. It’s healthier than spending it on powders or pills. Guitarists are suckers for woo.
Don’t care what anyone says. You’re all wrong to some extent, and right in another. People just want to be right and seem knowledgeable. Who cares if you wouldn’t pay that much for a pickup! Go cry about it somewhere else
I don't think there's a guitar pickup alive that should cost more than $200 !!! High priced pickups are just as much of a scam as high priced saxophone mouthpieces!.. so the same for them!!🫨
Ah pickups wound with gold-rhodium alloy wire, wrapped tightly around ivory bobbins by the hands of a blind gypsy, utilizing the rarest of meteor magnetite for pole pieces, and finally potted with the blood of a virgin.
My Sheraton 2 has Gibson 57s with coil cutoffs. For me this is a completely acceptable option. The rest can be adjusted with an equalizer and compressor. Your new sound search is also great. The guitar has dynamics and that's great!
I’ve Swapped Out Stock Epi Pickups with a Gibson 57 and a Gibson 57+ in a Few Guitars Over the Years of Course You Need to Upgrade to the Proper Pots and Caps as Well However with Doing That the Much Better Increase in Tonal Quality is Distinctly Audible ! I Suggest to Those That Deny This to Have Your Ears Checked and/or Cleaned ! As Further Actual Proof I Had a Set of Seymour Duncan Custom Shop Hand Wound High Voltage by “MJ” Which are Thee Set Angus Young Uses Even the Luthier I Brought Them to With My SG Was Excited I Scored a Set Back in 2020 !!! No Longer Available Hand Wound by MJ Who’s Made Pickups for MANY Big Name Guitarists She’s Pretty Well Known For it ! Now the High Voltage Set is Machine Made 😢 But MY SG Screams WITHOUT ANY PEDAL 🎶♥️🎶‼️‼️‼️
Electronic engineer that is also a guitarist here. The resistance, capacitance and inductance of the pickup combined with the resistance and capacitance of the volume/tone harness will have a certain frequency response, this frequency response cuts frequencies (no boosting unless you're active) picked up from the string vibrations in the magnetic field of the pickups. If you change the pickups you will change the frequency response of your guitar, unless you change it to something with the same characteristics. A much cheaper and versatile way of changing your tone is to swap the pots and/or caps in the volume/tone circuitry to get the brighter or darker response you're after. You can even change the circuit to do 'shape' the frequency response more towards you preference. Alas, there's way too much cork sniffing and 'magic' attached to all manner of things when it comes to guitar tone.
magnet strength and pole piece height, along with number of winds has an effect too. These influence the signal as it's being picked up, so it's slightly different. Although the number of winds dictates the capacitance, resistance and inductance of the pickup, along with the wire gauge, insulation thickness etc. Anyway, that's a whole different ball park, and assuming you have enough winds for the pickup not to be too feeble, you can play around with capacitors and resistors and get far more variation in tone from a few dollars than you can from hundreds by buying pickups.
@@nsjohnston Finally, someone that is knowledgeable in the comments. I completely agree. I would argue that all of the tonal differences that he noticed were because of the magnets. He went from the Epiphone ProBuckers which were AlNiCo 2 to the BKP Mules which were AlNiCo 4 to the Ron Ellis which (my educated guess would be) are AlNiCo 5. The more powerful the magnet, the more pronounced the U-shaped frequency response gets (everything else considered equal).
@@ErebosGR I'd like to hear an explanation of this "The more powerful the magnet, the more pronounced the U-shaped frequency response gets", I can't think why the magnet strength would have an effect on the frequency response unless it's dampening the string vibration, there could be something there.. Not really my area of expertise. I'm unsure what a U shaped response is either. Supressed mids? I'd expect it to be mostly a low pass filter with a bit of extra stuff going on because of the inductance etc. in the pickup.
This all depends on what $800 means to you. If its a drop in the bucket - yeah, why not. Mainly, Im impressed you still have an Epiphone E on your pickguard. Ive had acouple and those things fall off in less than a week.
Your "E" is still on there because your guitar is a Samick or Unsung-built Sheraton Jens...and not a modern day Chinese one. The Korean buillt Epis are far superior in terms of build quality. I know...I've had dozens go through my workbench.
@@christoguichard4311 makes sense. Do you know when they switched production away from Korea? I bought a Casino in Korea maybe 15 years ago and I believe it was Chinese.
The Ellis are something else. Of course, using modellers and compression in recording will take away most of their shine. Perhaps we should all go back old school, those Blue Note recordings with simple amps and high end mics. To me they remain the reference for classic jazz guitar sound.
The first or at least an early video you did on this sheraton is why I later purchased a used one from a pawn broker. It was a 1997 model. I gotta tell ya, until I later purchased a fender ultra luxe, it was my favorite guitar. Number 1. Unfortunately I lost both guitars and many other things in a house fire a couple months ago. But a Sheraton or maybe a Rivera will be my first purchase when selecting replacement guitars. And these RE pups are gonna be next. Thanks for another cool video sir.
That is really great to hear 🙂 Congrats on that Epi! Edit: Crap, I didn't read the whole comment. Horrible that your house burned! Hope you get that sorted out and that you are insured!
I had my Epi 335 dot's stock pickups replaced with Lollar low-wind P-90s and like you, I was blown away by the difference. (Especially from the stock sound.) However - I also had the wiring replaced and the nut - after those changes the guitar's tonal colour changed completely. And I removed the pickguard :)
Depends on who you ask, surely? To the sales person, "why not buy two sets?" To a parent, "Johnny, your guitar is perfectly fine!" To a tone chaser, "may be I need those pickups AND one more guitar!" Me, "nah, I can think of custom pick up winders who can very proficiently and way more than adequately meet my needs." On a side note, if I had to spend $800 on guitar stuff whilst a $400 guitar is in my quiver so to speak, I would use that budget on a better amp BEFORE a pickup swap. Just my 2 cents.
This whole concept of diminishing returns is intriguing. From the original Sheraton you bought, did the initial switch from the MIK PAFs to Bare Knuckles PLUS the new wiring harness deliver the biggest tonal improvement… and the Ron Ellis PAFs just provided additional icing on the cake? Or was it more than that?
It's gonna be a no from me, chief. No pickup is worth that much. They are not worth half of that, I can't understand even how people regularly pay a quarter of it. It's not a quantum computer, we are talking about the most retro piece of tech imaginable.
Agreed. Same tech that holds things to your fridge. Unless total garbage pickups I think it's pots, amp, string gauge, distance to PUs, position of PUs etc. Over the years I've learned the expensive lesson that the only way to make your guitar sound like the one you want is to buy the one you want.
Yeah, I'd rather get a guitar worth 800+400. At least you get better build, better worksmanship than a 400-guitar. Sorry, pickups at this price range are just stupid.
Winding pickings is actually quite a difficult skill and to do it at a truly high level requires a great deal of knowledge, training, and expertise. Not to mention, the taste that is developed over years of experimenting to give a customer a consistent, reliable product that sounds the way it claims to. Just because technology is “old” doesn’t make it cheap or less valuable. In fact, in many cases the opposite is true.
I think the most important crucial detail that consumers miss when they talk about pickups. It's almost always "I changed the pickups in my cheap $100 guitar and it made a difference" In my honest opinions those guitars are intentionally gimped to sound bad and have bad pickups so you shell out more money for higher end guitars. If you buy any midrange guitar changes are the pickups on it are completely fine these days.
Jens do you use flat wound strings? I’ve been using half wound and like the brightness without the squeak. We guitarist are always looking for that elusive sound.
I find the biggest change occurs when I use heavy strings on the top to reduce the snappy-ness and lighter strings on the bottom to reduce the boom. Also backing the pickups down just a bit on the bass side helps with the boom. Standard PAF’s are fine for jazz, that being said, I’ve been using the Benedetto A-6 in the neck position for jazz which I feel is a bit better. Even still, setup is the key to finding the sound I like for jazz.
Just got me a cheap ibanez jazzbox that came with their cheapest and really hot humbuckers. Have an old pat metheny super 58 coming that im going to put in it. I can get good tones from the stock pickup but expecting a enough of a difference to notice.
Nope...😊 Its all "snake oil"...as Lee Anderton admitted. If you want to change your sound...change your amp or effects EQ, or change your pots and wiring. Pick-ups hardly effect the tone in comparison to these.
I have the same guitar that you have. I replaced switch, tuners, pots, caps and pickups! I am using the locally made TV Jones pups - highly recommend them!
I recently thought about buying a cheap guitar and switching the pickups. This will sorta answer that question. I wouldn’t want the cost of both to be more then I’m willing to pay on just the guitar considering I want it to be my cheap guitar, like a sleeper
^This! I managed to get a guitar for cheap, and some pickups also quite cheaply. Together with professional installation the guitar overall costs the same as a stock new one. I'll lose money if I sell, but I planned on keeping it from the start. It needs at least a fret dress now, or better yet, a refret, but I have had so much fun on it I am glad to have walked this road, even if only a short distance.
I've said this before on one of your previous pick up videos, but I changed the stock pick ups in an Epiphone Les Paul for Gibson Classic 57s and it made huge difference. Went from muffled and unclear to a rich, old school tone
Yes, the question really is are the expensive pickups better than cheap stock pickups? Not whether is worth the money or boutique vs boutique. People want to know if adding good pickups to expensive guitar improves the sound? YES! I also added 57 Classics to an Epiphone 335. Big difference! Stock pickups weren’t bad. 57s were better though.
Hey Jens. Great video. You came to the same conclusion I always come to. Of course I hear a difference...right...maybe...I'm not really sure...they kinda sound the same to my ears. Coincidentally, last week I did my first pickup swap EVER in 30 years of playing. I have an affinity strat with the perfect neck and I wanted to see if putting in a set of $300 920D Customs would make a difference over the $30 ceramic pickups that came stock. While I was slightly disappointed by the lack of output from the the 920Ds, I was pleasantly surprised at how much of a difference I FELT. Pretty big difference in touch response. I'm going to try changing the height of the pickups and see if that adds a bit of output because I love the clarity and articulation. Are they night and day better? Not to my ears. Are they worth the upgrade for a serious player? Probably. I'm just not that good. Thanks. Mark
Jens, love the cameos in your videos and thought bubbles , can’t think of any guitar videos that get a checkin from Monk and Carl Jung in the same day 😆 I play a $400 Ibanez jazz machine and I’m thinking of upgrading the pickups. You have convinced me , though I doubt I’ll go in for $800. Any suggestions on $100-$150 jass pups?
@@JensLarsen True, but I have one here with me! I don't think the pickups are that important! Except the output power. Your devices can compensate for the small differences! Maybe you're used to the sound of the Ibanez! As we all know, they like to sound clearer!
@@JensLarsen True, but I have one here with me! I don't think the pickups are that important! Except the output power. Your devices can compensate for the small differences! Maybe you're used to the sound of the Ibanez! As we all know, they like to sound clearer!
Although really the only "different" pickups I've ever played are Wilde pickups, I must say these seem to bring a nice top end to your sound. Maybe the Bare Knuckles are way too hot also?
Jens Larsen I say yes, with one understanding. That life is short and you should play what you love. I think they do ring a little clearer, revealing the upper registers in jazz chords. Beautiful. And yes the law of diminishing returns is real, but when you spend years mastering a instrument, I say play what inspires you. You earned the best. Love your playing and videos, keep it up and GOD bless you, and your family. ❤
Добрый день, Jens! Вы не могли бы подсказать, - вот пришла мне новая бас-гитара Squier Affinity Series Precision Bass PJ Laurel Fingerboard с интернет-магазина, - красивая и внешне качественная, НО - довольно сильно фонит! Прикоснёшься рукой к крутилкам или к струнам, сразу тишина, убираешь пальцы, сразу высокочастотный фон! Дело не в шнуре, и не в усилителе, так как менял по всякому, не помогает. При игре стоит шорох и раздаются щелчки от прикосновения к струнам.. Такая картина - это же ненормально? Гитара стоит 400 долларов.. Или же и другие гитары, подороже, также создают фон!? И можно ли что то теперь сделать с этим? Очень жаль отправлять обратно в магазин эту гитару...
I've got Bare Knuckles in my Les Paul, but I've got a Riff Raff in the bridge - very mid focused - and a Stormy Monday in the neck. The Stormy Monday is described on the BK website as being more hollow and it seems to me more like the way you're describing these new pickups. Either way, it's a terrific jazz pickup. I also have one of their humbucker sized P90s (the Manhattan) in an Ibanez archtop and that's also stunning.
What do you think? Are there pickups you recommend similar to these Ron Ellis pickups?
✅The great $400 guitar I used on 5 albums 🎸
ruclips.net/video/bIQiWfeWLA4/видео.html
No, I'd recommend swapping speakers before I spent $800 on pickups. Pickups aren't made of magic powder and unicorn farts and don't do as much as changing a speaker would. Lots of pickups claim to do a lot of different things but the differences are often minuscule when compared to the differences a high quality speaker will do
The new pickup felt like it catches the middle strings, maybe it's preferred for rock music than jazz. And I don't know but I'm sure of one thing for a good sound you surely need a good guitar and good strings. Anything else is more of an individual choice. Hope it makes sense
Pickup can change sound for sure! Especially with clean sound playing. Nice video.
Thanks George! Hope you are well!
Thank you for this video! i changed my Prs american model McCarthy pick ups for Seth Lover pick ups and suddenly the guitar played by itself. Also changing pickups changes the identity sound of both guitar and player, which is good thing! We can't all sound alike using our Gibsons! Again, thank you Mr Larsen
Exactly how I felt about this :) Glad you like the video!
Hi Jens, thanks for great content, I`ve been watching your stuff for a few years already. As for the pickups change - in my opinion it`s mainly psychological difference, similar as in hi-fi equipment snobbery, based on the mechanism "I`ve spent more, I feel it`s better". It`s all happening in your head.... just as anything else we see, hear, smell, etc. Keep up the great work 😀
Thanks! Sure, that makes sense 🙂
Wow. Maybe play guitar more. pickups make a huge difference. Doesn't matter if they are 800 or 80 dollars, they all read the strings differently. the only thing that smells is your mom.
It seems like the issue is a tonal one, more than overall 'quality' of the sound. I'm curious how the Bare Knuckle Stormy Monday set would sound compared to both sets you used in the video, as this is apparently the set Bare Knuckle typically recommends for ES-335 style guitars. Even BK's tonal chart for the Stormy Monday set shows a much more prominent Bass frequency character, which might help with that 'nasal' midrange sound you noted from the Mule set. Thanks for sharing the journey, Jens. Cheers from Canada!
Yes, I don't think this in anyway shows that BK pickups are bad, both RIchard and I say that several times in the video.
It is indeed a bit random which pickups I have tried, and I have never tried the Stormy Mondays. The Ellis pickups are very bright which I think works well with the guitar, and the nasal character might also be about the guitar being like that 🙂
It’s amazing how much you can get almost any guitar pretty close to a guitar you don’t own for a sound you want with an EQ pedal.
You can have one guitar and a new pedal and a piece of paper for different presets you can dial in quickly and you can basically get different guitar sounds.
You can make a single coil sound like a P90 or a even close to a humbucker if you dial in a Boss GE7.
Can’t recommend a modded (less noise) GE-7 enough.
It’s cheap and it works pretty well.
I get along more using a Strat and eq/boosting it to sound like a humbucker than I do with the guitar I have that has humbuckers - but this is because until a year ago I only ever played strats and teles so maybe it’s psychological.
The pickups sound brighter and cleaner, but did not sound to me like an improved tone. I would try using the Bare Knuckles set at lower height (back off the screws by 1 full turn), and maybe use a cleaner amp setting. I personally prefer the demo of the Bare Knuckles as they seem to compliment the guitar pretty well IMO.
As I also said in the video, it will be a question of taste 🙂
I had Ellis LRP pups in a Les Paul. The clean sounds were outstanding: sweet, pleasing, nice clarity. But when I played blues gigs with low gain at a very modest volume they squealed uncontrollably. I don't use a lot of gain nor volume, but I finally had to give up and sell them. I hated to do it because those cleans were so sweet and clear. But the guitar became unuasble for me. I especially love the Humbuckers from Jim Rolph which are excellent. I have them in a ES-333.
It may be not a big difference in sound, but there is a difference. The main thing is that the player will react to that and this changes what is played. The average listener will perhaps not notice the difference in sound but will get a performance by a more inspired musician. It is like changing the pick, wich can make a huge difference in sound but maybe even more in the playing.
My old 90s Japanese-made Telecaster always sounded a bit flat and the volume was always very low compared to the rest of my guitars, so I put a Seymour Duncan Little 59 set in it - a Vintage Stack noiseless pickup in the neck, and the Little 59 humbucker in the bridge.
Almost nothing changed, except that now when playing through the neck pickup on my Quilter amp, the guitar is so, so bassy I cannot play at any reasonable volume without sounding ridiculous, even with the bass completely cut on the amp. I'll likely never change pickups again.
I got lucky with a 1980 Gibson 335-S Professional Deluxe. It has original Tim Shaw designed Dirty Fingers humbuckers and a coil tap switch. I play through a Marshall DSL40C. I never played anything else. I love my rig. I've been told that my pickups are too 'hot' for jazz, but I don't have any problems. My teacher used to say that it had everything to do with my pickhand, not my pickup. He was right.
It’s a little easier getting a solid jazz tone versus others like using distortion ect !!! Good vid man !!! Thank you 🙏 🎸
I'll go against the current and say "Sure", if it gets you where you want to be. It's still *only* $1,200.00 total, and you're a high-level professional who knows what he wants. I don't know (yet) exactly what the pickups offer you, but crossing the line into "diminishing returns" territory can for sure be worth it, to me. Aesthetic experience, beauty...compared to the value of money, surely a purely personal thing?
You cannot accurately remember sound for longer than about 7 seconds. The whole audio industry hinges on people being unaware of this, be it Hi-Fi or instruments. So your perception of the sound in the workshop after the switch probably was more influenced by expectation, blurry memories etc. than the actual sound. In the recordings you can hear a slight difference in the frequency response, as you described. But are the pick-ups less mid focused because they are more expensive? Or are they just expensive pick-ups that happen to be less mid focused? You could easily switch the price tags and say "listen to this amazing bass response in the Bare Knuckles" and so on.
I am not saying the Ellis pickups are better than the BKs, I am just saying that I like the more. For you it could easily be the other way around 🙂
Pickups act as inductors, which have a low-pass filtering property. The strength (inductance) of that inductor, in combination with the tone circuit (capacitor and pot) in your guitar gives you fairly flat frequency response up to a corner frequency, after which volume falls off steadily with frequency, and may give you a bit of a resonant bump at the corner frequency. The biggest difference between pickups (aside from sheer volume, which you can compensate for with a volume control) is just where that corner frequency is, and how much of a bump you get there, given your tone circuit arrangement.
The biggest difference between normal humbuckers and normal single-coils is just that the single coils have a higher corner frequency.
If you want tonal variation, your two best bets are (1) having a coil-split switch so that you can use your humbuckers as single coils (just using one of the two sides of each pickup) and make your Gibson sound like a Fender, or (2) an EQ to effectively move the corner freqency up or down. (You can roll off the highs starting below the pickup's corner frequency, to put the knee lower, or boost the highs somewhat above the corner frequency to effectively move the corner frequency up.)
One very versatile arrangement is an HSH (humbucker-singlecoil-humbucker) strat with coil splits on the humbuckers. (The Nashville-style Tele used by a lot of studio guitarists in Nashville is just a Telecaster with HSH (& coil split) pickups like an HSH strat; it's one guitar that can do all the things people expect from electric guitars.)
They certainly sound as you describe, but maybe I'm just very suggestible 😂
I'm all for putting in pickups that are worth more than the guitar itself, I've got a Lollar Charlie Christian in a cheap ply- and balsa wood guitar and it sounds great.
The new pickups are more articulate. Like language, the right amount of the frequencies around the consonants defines the word. In guitar, that frequency defines what you're playing. I like a mellow tone that has a defining edge. Hank Garland was one of my favorite tones. Nice video.
I missed any earlier videos about the Mules, were these suggested by BareKnuckle as their “jazz” pu’s? Great tone and playing
any PAF copy would be a "jazz pu". I Don't think that is really a thing?
1. While watching the video on lower quality speakers, I preferred the sound of the Bareknuckles, but with headphones I prefer the RE's
2. An EQ + compressor/clean boost before any effects/preamp can do what a pickup change does for the guitar's tone but with much more range and versatility. It's not EXACTLY the same thing as a pickup swap but all effects-using guitarists should consider this option before spending unnecessary money
Ron Ellis pickups are expensive, but god damn they’re incredible, 3D, sweet and beautifully sounding
I wonder if the difference between the pickups is being lessened by running your setup through the FM3. The FM3 does a great job at making disparate inputs sound similar. Running both pickups through a simpler set up might explain your initial impression at the workshop
I think you are misunderstanding something, my reaction is still the same, it is not so that I am less enthusiastic because it really feels so nice to play also on the FM3 or on my twin or my AER. There is no real difference there.
I can say from experience that upgrading pickups can make a dramatic difference, especially in low priced guitars. I wouldn't pay $800 for pickups, though. Glad you liked the end result! You do you!
Pickup builders definitely know how to "voice" them. I struggle with "fairy dust" and "snake oil" type products as much as the next guy. That and there's about $10 of material in a pickup. I decided to swap my Seymour Duncan HB Jazz set out of my '06 Epiphone SG for P90s. Was ready to do some Fralin's or something and bought both sets of Toneriders for the same price(wasn't sure if I would think the neck was hot enough or bridge too hot). Alnico II(Vintage) Neck and Alnico V(Mean) bridge. Sounds beautiful. Same "new guitar" feeling for $200. Same type to same type, in the mix(live or recording), I doubt I would notice. We eq with tone knob, fingers, the mix. It sure is fun, though! I have no hollow or semi and have a hankerin' for that Ibanez JSM20.
If you reduce the space between the low E-String and PU mulm in most cases goes away! Fine tuning with the hight of the pole-screws. But I do here some more grit on the Ellis, a hint more definition, maybe a higher output level? I made the experience that replacing cheap stock-pus with better ones make a huge difference. Replacing good pus with good pus ends like your records. Mostly a matter of taste IF there are differences.
When I want more clarity from a humbucker I turn the pole piece screws so that they come out a little.
what to expect? i changed the stock-humbuckers on my "Aria Pro II (330-full hollow)" against, an used SD_SH-2 on the neck and a '57 Classic Plus Gibson on the bridge.
I would give it a 5 of 5 stars!
Great video! For me, changing pickups in my 335 is a sickness (chronic)... I changed the original Gibson classic 57 humbuckers for some Seymour Duncan, and those were nice but not that much different, then later put in a set from Harmonic design (another boutique), and then still later a set of Ron Ellis LRP. I actually ended up recently swapping those out for a set of Lollar (which are slightly higher output). All this is basically because this 335 (which I love otherwise) is itself very bright and seems to lack a certain amount of upper-mid, so all this has been to try to get the tome a bit warmer. The Lollar's do finally seem to help there (but the guitar basically still sounds mostly the way it always has).
I love your videos - keep them coming! IMHO I think old school P90s sound best overall for all styles. I am not afraid of a little potential 60 cycle hum (easily filtered out if need be) and with a clean jazz style little to no overdrive tone it almost never manifests in my experience. I like P90 loaded guitars, but just a P90 in the neck position is PRIMA - for jazz, blues, rock, everything. Try them out for fun - I love hearing you play and am inspired to learn more jazz through your channel - thank you!
Sonically the difference is definitely very subtle, but I think in the focus on "tone" the feel to the player tends to be a more under-appreciated aspect. There are lots of examples where very subtle differnces may not be that audible to a listener but depending on the player it can make a huge difference to the perofrmance and its hard (basically impossible) to subract the subjective element here because its all so individual (which in my view is kinda cool and why in the world would you want to remove the subjective element in the first place?).
Hello Jens,
I wonder what you think about Lenny Breau and Ted Greene, since they are not as famous as the players you usually cover in your videos, but just as great.
There is so much stuff that nobody else did in his playing that i am curious what you took away from them to use it in your playing or what you think about them in general.
Great channel by the way!
Ok, I see videos on Ted Greene all the time, so I am not sure I agree that he is not talked about that much? Both are of course fantastic and mind-blowingly skilled players but also primarily solo performers and I always found myself gravitate more towards people who play in bands, which is why I rarely do videos on solo guitar performances, but that is also something that people like Tim Lerch and Sandra Sherman do all the time, so I don't think there is a real shortage of that.
I do have to disagree about the difference for metal pickups, some play nicer with distortion than others. I swapped out a bridge dimarzio tonezone for a Titan on my ibanez, and it was a night and day difference (especially boosted with treble dimed). I've also had great experiences with Fishman Fluence pickups sounding clearer through layers of distortion.
I own an IBANEZ ASV73 which was fitted with THE MULE Bare Knuckle pickups. I exchanged them for PAF Vanson '57 Alnico II style humbucker pickups for 45€ (ebay). Not far from 10 times cheaper, but they sound better to my ears. I tested them on a Les Paul and to my great surprise, they sounded great for playing the blues and approaching the sound of B.B King. I also bought the 59' Vanson and found them not as good!
Many claim pickups are the only thing that maters in guitar tone. I think there are many factors actually. Many are subtle maybe, but still contribute. Does his hollow body sound different from a solid body?
I think the difference here, is more a compression matter, more than tonal. Maybe the thing that blew your mind in the workshop, was the reaction that the amp has... Maybe due that kind of amp suitted more your pickups? IDK, what i know is that swapping pickups is always a great thing, but not the only. Pots and bridge made the step for me many times, after switching pickups sound improved, but the caracter wasn't there!
Ciao Jens,me li consiglieresti per la mia Sheraton pro ll,anche io trovo che i probucker soprattutto al ponte siano un po' impastati ciao grazie e vivissimi complimenti per i tuoi video jazz , Grande 🎸🤩
The difference you presented here is noticeable in your example, but it's nothing a bit of eq'ing could make impossible for the human ear to be accurate regarding which pickup is which no less....keep practicing!
Did you use brand new strings for both tests? Changing the strings effects the toan a lot
The two sets are pretty similarly voiced, so it isn't hugely surprising they sound similar. I didn't run the samples through audacity but it sounds like there is a slightly bigger peak around the 3-5k range from the Ellis and less around 100? You should pop them into a spectrum and see the response.
Are the Ron Ellis pickups wax potted? unpotted pups are a bit clearer. also same magnets? there are several variables in pups. I did hear less compression in the RE pups. Enjoy!
You should try to remove cover from pickups. Sound will be more open and clear
the reason there is little difference is that these are all 59 paf styles, meaning magnet strength, wire and dcr are all similar. the only thing that may make a very small difference is the scatterwind. The fact that we’re just talking about brands, not inductance and resistance, and magnet type and wire says a lot. I think most pick up builders are just taking advantage of the fact that guitarists are math and science illiterate and think this is complicated stuff.. it’s super basic though - wind some wire around a magnet, do you want stronger magnet, a weaker magnet, more turns, or less. I would guess 99% of the guitar market just flies blindly with brands and names and has no idea what they’re actually buying or what tone the pickups have.
How do Bare Knuckle and Ron Ellis pickups compare to the Gibson T Type Humbuckers, which most 335's are equipped with? Thx!
So this is why "your guitar" looks different lately - different guitar! In your chord/melody bake-off, I couldn't hear a frequency difference, but the Ron Ellis pickups sound looser, in a good way. Less staccato. Then again, I've never owned Bare Knuckles pickups, but they're a gold standard for PAF reproductions.
Hello, what pick up with a good sound very smooth, mine is s 58 on ibanez AFM 95?thanks
I don't hear a difference big enough to justify changing the pickups (if someone had that in mind, I guess you did it for the experience and because they were free :P). At this high level of quality in terms of pickups I guess what makes the difference is the player and your tone would probably continue to be very similar and great with other high end pickups in the same guitar.
It's maybe a huge differnes in the workshop because you played over a tube amp and not a modeler which do while recording at home...
No, that's not it 😁 otherwise I could have heard on that recording as well.
@@JensLarsen I meant the feeling of better sound. The tube amp moves more air, has more punch and overtones - all this attracts the feeling I would say. Thats why playing at home is sounding much better with an (tube)amp than a modeler. For recording modelers do the job as good as an amp...
@@hermeneut No, I think I feel the difference through my modeler live as well. At least I play the guitar 50x as much. I just can't illustrate it with a recording.
Let's not get into too many vague descriptions that don't have real definitions it gets a bit tinfoil hatty.
what was the result?
Considering that's $800 for the set and I've never seen you play on the bridge pickup I think you've been had 🤣
I am, however, looking forward to the sweet sounds you'll be getting from them in the video
I do play music for a living and it isn't all jazz 😁
@@JensLarsen of course, the metal band you moonlight with - hence the long hair 😁🤘. (I'm only jealous, having gone bald at 25.)
Alan Ellis looks so much like Chase Maddox the guitarist/youtuber
More of a blues/jazz blues player than a straight jazz player. The BYO Blizzard of '59 pickups work for me. It's a basic PAF clone with decent materials and wax potting if you want to wander into rock. For around $90 a set they give you that early PAF sound on a ramen budget.
Honestly put an eq pedal 1st in the chain and spend 100$ instead of 800$ if you care that much about having more treble or mids.
Haven't you get Glen's point? He talks about heavily distorted sounds, not clean jazzy sounds. Please listen carefully with understanding.
Lol 800$ pickup? That isnt worth in any guitar
No is the answer.
Pickups will never do what a good speaker does. Your $800 pickup swap could be avoided by just getting better speakers. The science speaks for itself. I like buying pickups often for aesthetic reasons. The most important part of your rig is the speakers- that's the last part of your sound and is where all the potential energy from your sound is converted to acoustic energy. Pickup companies will have people believing that the special unicorn pubes they use to wire their pickups will make your guitar sound great- which they won't if you have poor speakers. I know I just keep saying the same thing over and over, but it's true. Guitarists will spend thousands on pickups before they spend $80 on a high quality speaker that will actually improve their sound. Slayer, Metallica, and Zakk Wylde all use EMGs. Do they all sound the same? And before anyone tries to tell me "tone is in the hands"- if that were true then you wouldn't need any of your pedals and speakers would never matter, right? Guitar players- it's 2023. Smarten up. No respectable studio engineer cares about your pickups. They care about your speakers.
Putting pickups in your guitar that are worth twice the guitar is a exactly why I bought a Jackson Dinky.
That doesn't have pickups?
I don’t hear any difference sorry man. Tougher though when it’s not live, plus anything sounds good with your playing.
I only hear pickup differences going from single to humbucker or their positions. Otherwise they’re all the same to me.
You can buy great after-market pickups for thirty bucks. The rest is all hype.
As long as you do not try it with a cranked Engl amp and Vitage30 speakers you will never know the truth.
The difference is psychology. Your brain is telling you it sounds $800 better. Listening from here it doesn’t.
But if it makes you feel like your playing better, fine. It’s healthier than spending it on powders or pills.
Guitarists are suckers for woo.
🙏🍀❤️🎵🎶👌🎼✌️🎸
I cannot hear the difference...
💔🖤🤍💚
In a word NO
Don’t care what anyone says. You’re all wrong to some extent, and right in another. People just want to be right and seem knowledgeable. Who cares if you wouldn’t pay that much for a pickup! Go cry about it somewhere else
😂
No
The bare knucke are so much better…. The Ron’s are thinner in a very bad way
800 for pickups is just silly
I don't think there's a guitar pickup alive that should cost more than $200 !!!
High priced pickups are just as much of a scam as high priced saxophone mouthpieces!..
so the same for them!!🫨
Ah pickups wound with gold-rhodium alloy wire, wrapped tightly around ivory bobbins by the hands of a blind gypsy, utilizing the rarest of meteor magnetite for pole pieces, and finally potted with the blood of a virgin.
I almost spit out my coffee when I read “by the hands of a blind gypsy”
😂😂😂
My Sheraton 2 has Gibson 57s with coil cutoffs. For me this is a completely acceptable option. The rest can be adjusted with an equalizer and compressor.
Your new sound search is also great. The guitar has dynamics and that's great!
I’ve Swapped Out Stock Epi Pickups with a Gibson 57 and a Gibson 57+ in a Few Guitars Over the Years of Course You Need to Upgrade to the Proper Pots and Caps as Well However with Doing That the Much Better Increase in Tonal Quality is Distinctly Audible ! I Suggest to Those That Deny This to Have Your Ears Checked and/or Cleaned ! As Further Actual Proof I Had a Set of Seymour Duncan Custom Shop Hand Wound High Voltage by “MJ” Which are Thee Set Angus Young Uses Even the Luthier I Brought Them to With My SG Was Excited I Scored a Set Back in 2020 !!! No Longer Available Hand Wound by MJ Who’s Made Pickups for MANY Big Name Guitarists She’s Pretty Well Known For it ! Now the High Voltage Set is Machine Made 😢 But MY SG Screams WITHOUT ANY PEDAL 🎶♥️🎶‼️‼️‼️
Electronic engineer that is also a guitarist here. The resistance, capacitance and inductance of the pickup combined with the resistance and capacitance of the volume/tone harness will have a certain frequency response, this frequency response cuts frequencies (no boosting unless you're active) picked up from the string vibrations in the magnetic field of the pickups. If you change the pickups you will change the frequency response of your guitar, unless you change it to something with the same characteristics. A much cheaper and versatile way of changing your tone is to swap the pots and/or caps in the volume/tone circuitry to get the brighter or darker response you're after. You can even change the circuit to do 'shape' the frequency response more towards you preference. Alas, there's way too much cork sniffing and 'magic' attached to all manner of things when it comes to guitar tone.
magnet strength and pole piece height, along with number of winds has an effect too. These influence the signal as it's being picked up, so it's slightly different. Although the number of winds dictates the capacitance, resistance and inductance of the pickup, along with the wire gauge, insulation thickness etc. Anyway, that's a whole different ball park, and assuming you have enough winds for the pickup not to be too feeble, you can play around with capacitors and resistors and get far more variation in tone from a few dollars than you can from hundreds by buying pickups.
@@nsjohnston Finally, someone that is knowledgeable in the comments. I completely agree.
I would argue that all of the tonal differences that he noticed were because of the magnets.
He went from the Epiphone ProBuckers which were AlNiCo 2 to the BKP Mules which were AlNiCo 4 to the Ron Ellis which (my educated guess would be) are AlNiCo 5.
The more powerful the magnet, the more pronounced the U-shaped frequency response gets (everything else considered equal).
@@ErebosGR I'd like to hear an explanation of this "The more powerful the magnet, the more pronounced the U-shaped frequency response gets", I can't think why the magnet strength would have an effect on the frequency response unless it's dampening the string vibration, there could be something there.. Not really my area of expertise. I'm unsure what a U shaped response is either. Supressed mids? I'd expect it to be mostly a low pass filter with a bit of extra stuff going on because of the inductance etc. in the pickup.
No 800 is ridiculous
This all depends on what $800 means to you. If its a drop in the bucket - yeah, why not. Mainly, Im impressed you still have an Epiphone E on your pickguard. Ive had acouple and those things fall off in less than a week.
Certainly! Didn't know those E's came of at all? 😁
Your "E" is still on there because your guitar is a Samick or Unsung-built Sheraton Jens...and not a modern day Chinese one.
The Korean buillt Epis are far superior in terms of build quality.
I know...I've had dozens go through my workbench.
@@christoguichard4311 makes sense. Do you know when they switched production away from Korea? I bought a Casino in Korea maybe 15 years ago and I believe it was Chinese.
The Ellis are something else. Of course, using modellers and compression in recording will take away most of their shine. Perhaps we should all go back old school, those Blue Note recordings with simple amps and high end mics. To me they remain the reference for classic jazz guitar sound.
coiled copper wire is just coiled copper wire... no way $800 is justified
The first or at least an early video you did on this sheraton is why I later purchased a used one from a pawn broker. It was a 1997 model. I gotta tell ya, until I later purchased a fender ultra luxe, it was my favorite guitar. Number 1. Unfortunately I lost both guitars and many other things in a house fire a couple months ago. But a Sheraton or maybe a Rivera will be my first purchase when selecting replacement guitars. And these RE pups are gonna be next. Thanks for another cool video sir.
That is really great to hear 🙂 Congrats on that Epi!
Edit: Crap, I didn't read the whole comment. Horrible that your house burned! Hope you get that sorted out and that you are insured!
I had my Epi 335 dot's stock pickups replaced with Lollar low-wind P-90s and like you, I was blown away by the difference. (Especially from the stock sound.) However - I also had the wiring replaced and the nut - after those changes the guitar's tonal colour changed completely. And I removed the pickguard :)
I removed my pick guard what a difference ❤
Always awesome to see the experimentation of different gear. Definitely helps different situations and tone purposes. The new pickups sound bright!
Depends on who you ask, surely?
To the sales person, "why not buy two sets?"
To a parent, "Johnny, your guitar is perfectly fine!"
To a tone chaser, "may be I need those pickups AND one more guitar!"
Me, "nah, I can think of custom pick up winders who can very proficiently and way more than adequately meet my needs."
On a side note, if I had to spend $800 on guitar stuff whilst a $400 guitar is in my quiver so to speak, I would use that budget on a better amp BEFORE a pickup swap. Just my 2 cents.
This whole concept of diminishing returns is intriguing. From the original Sheraton you bought, did the initial switch from the MIK PAFs to Bare Knuckles PLUS the new wiring harness deliver the biggest tonal improvement… and the Ron Ellis PAFs just provided additional icing on the cake? Or was it more than that?
It's gonna be a no from me, chief. No pickup is worth that much. They are not worth half of that, I can't understand even how people regularly pay a quarter of it. It's not a quantum computer, we are talking about the most retro piece of tech imaginable.
Of course can some be, what if it’s out a 59 Les Paul?
Agreed. Same tech that holds things to your fridge. Unless total garbage pickups I think it's pots, amp, string gauge, distance to PUs, position of PUs etc. Over the years I've learned the expensive lesson that the only way to make your guitar sound like the one you want is to buy the one you want.
Yeah, I'd rather get a guitar worth 800+400. At least you get better build, better worksmanship than a 400-guitar. Sorry, pickups at this price range are just stupid.
@@pookachu64maybe is the 59 les paul comes with them. But pickups alone. No way.
Winding pickings is actually quite a difficult skill and to do it at a truly high level requires a great deal of knowledge, training, and expertise. Not to mention, the taste that is developed over years of experimenting to give a customer a consistent, reliable product that sounds the way it claims to.
Just because technology is “old” doesn’t make it cheap or less valuable. In fact, in many cases the opposite is true.
I stopped falling for the boutique handwound hype after getting a set under a 50 bucks which sounded absolutely perfect
What kind?
@@zbthunderwoodtonerider, donlis etc
I think the most important crucial detail that consumers miss when they talk about pickups.
It's almost always "I changed the pickups in my cheap $100 guitar and it made a difference"
In my honest opinions those guitars are intentionally gimped to sound bad and have bad pickups so you shell out more money for higher end guitars.
If you buy any midrange guitar changes are the pickups on it are completely fine these days.
Jens do you use flat wound strings? I’ve been using half wound and like the brightness without the squeak. We guitarist are always looking for that elusive sound.
No, I use roundwound strings
I find the biggest change occurs when I use heavy strings on the top to reduce the snappy-ness and lighter strings on the bottom to reduce the boom. Also backing the pickups down just a bit on the bass side helps with the boom. Standard PAF’s are fine for jazz, that being said, I’ve been using the Benedetto A-6 in the neck position for jazz which I feel is a bit better. Even still, setup is the key to finding the sound I like for jazz.
Just got me a cheap ibanez jazzbox that came with their cheapest and really hot humbuckers. Have an old pat metheny super 58 coming that im going to put in it. I can get good tones from the stock pickup but expecting a enough of a difference to notice.
Nope...😊
Its all "snake oil"...as Lee Anderton admitted.
If you want to change your sound...change your amp or effects EQ, or change your pots and wiring.
Pick-ups hardly effect the tone in comparison to these.
I have the same guitar that you have. I replaced switch, tuners, pots, caps and pickups! I am using the locally made TV Jones pups - highly recommend them!
👌🎧✨🤍💫 Merry Christmas and a happy new jazzy year 2024 🎅🏻🎄🎅🏻🎄🎅🏻
Thank you! You too!
Love your hsoutout to Jim lill
I recently thought about buying a cheap guitar and switching the pickups.
This will sorta answer that question. I wouldn’t want the cost of both to be more then I’m willing to pay on just the guitar considering I want it to be my cheap guitar, like a sleeper
^This! I managed to get a guitar for cheap, and some pickups also quite cheaply. Together with professional installation the guitar overall costs the same as a stock new one. I'll lose money if I sell, but I planned on keeping it from the start. It needs at least a fret dress now, or better yet, a refret, but I have had so much fun on it I am glad to have walked this road, even if only a short distance.
I've said this before on one of your previous pick up videos, but I changed the stock pick ups in an Epiphone Les Paul for Gibson Classic 57s and it made huge difference. Went from muffled and unclear to a rich, old school tone
Yes, the question really is are the expensive pickups better than cheap stock pickups? Not whether is worth the money or boutique vs boutique. People want to know if adding good pickups to expensive guitar improves the sound? YES! I also added 57 Classics to an Epiphone 335. Big difference! Stock pickups weren’t bad. 57s were better though.
Correction: Adding good p/u to cheap guitar…
Hey Jens. Great video. You came to the same conclusion I always come to. Of course I hear a difference...right...maybe...I'm not really sure...they kinda sound the same to my ears. Coincidentally, last week I did my first pickup swap EVER in 30 years of playing. I have an affinity strat with the perfect neck and I wanted to see if putting in a set of $300 920D Customs would make a difference over the $30 ceramic pickups that came stock. While I was slightly disappointed by the lack of output from the the 920Ds, I was pleasantly surprised at how much of a difference I FELT. Pretty big difference in touch response. I'm going to try changing the height of the pickups and see if that adds a bit of output because I love the clarity and articulation. Are they night and day better? Not to my ears. Are they worth the upgrade for a serious player? Probably. I'm just not that good. Thanks. Mark
It's not easy to hear differences just as a listener compared to what you can hear when you are actually playing.
Jens, love the cameos in your videos and thought bubbles , can’t think of any guitar videos that get a checkin from Monk and Carl Jung in the same day 😆
I play a $400 Ibanez jazz machine and I’m thinking of upgrading the pickups. You have convinced me , though I doubt I’ll go in for $800.
Any suggestions on $100-$150 jass pups?
Okay, I think the sound of the original pickups is completely okay. Sorry for my opinion!
You never hear the original pickups in this video? I had already changed them out for the Bareknuckles 🙂
@@JensLarsen True, but I have one here with me! I don't think the pickups are that important! Except the output power. Your devices can compensate for the small differences! Maybe you're used to the sound of the Ibanez! As we all know, they like to sound clearer!
@@deHelli Sorry, I don't speak German after learning Dutch.
@@JensLarsen True, but I have one here with me! I don't think the pickups are that important! Except the output power. Your devices can compensate for the small differences! Maybe you're used to the sound of the Ibanez! As we all know, they like to sound clearer!
Hey Mr. Jens, not sure sure if you have answered this but what are your thoughts on William Leavitt guitar books, if jazz guitar is my final goal?
I never used them, so I don't really have an opinion on them
Although really the only "different" pickups I've ever played are Wilde pickups, I must say these seem to bring a nice top end to your sound. Maybe the Bare Knuckles are way too hot also?
Jens Larsen I say yes, with one understanding. That life is short and you should play what you love. I think they do ring a little clearer, revealing the upper registers in jazz chords. Beautiful. And yes the law of diminishing returns is real, but when you spend years mastering a instrument, I say play what inspires you. You earned the best. Love your playing and videos, keep it up and GOD bless you, and your family. ❤
Добрый день, Jens! Вы не могли бы подсказать, - вот пришла мне новая бас-гитара Squier Affinity Series Precision Bass PJ Laurel Fingerboard с интернет-магазина, - красивая и внешне качественная, НО - довольно сильно фонит! Прикоснёшься рукой к крутилкам или к струнам, сразу тишина, убираешь пальцы, сразу высокочастотный фон! Дело не в шнуре, и не в усилителе, так как менял по всякому, не помогает. При игре стоит шорох и раздаются щелчки от прикосновения к струнам.. Такая картина - это же ненормально? Гитара стоит 400 долларов.. Или же и другие гитары, подороже, также создают фон!? И можно ли что то теперь сделать с этим? Очень жаль отправлять обратно в магазин эту гитару...
I can't troubleshoot that from a comment, sorry 🙂
I've got Bare Knuckles in my Les Paul, but I've got a Riff Raff in the bridge - very mid focused - and a Stormy Monday in the neck. The Stormy Monday is described on the BK website as being more hollow and it seems to me more like the way you're describing these new pickups. Either way, it's a terrific jazz pickup. I also have one of their humbucker sized P90s (the Manhattan) in an Ibanez archtop and that's also stunning.