Mistakes Guitar Players Make About P90 Pickups

today we're going to be talking about my absolute favorite type of pickups P90s I'm a huge P90 fan most players think a P90 is basically a single coil just in a bigger footprint they're more like a humbucker than you think first of all they do have less hum than a traditional single coil because the bobbins are so large you can get so much wire on there that you end up getting them to sound very similar to a humbucker but with more mid-range and high-end Clarity like a single coil okay so I've switched to a strat because I want to show you something I think this illustrates P90s better than anything else if a P90 is doing what it's supposed to do in my opinion what it's going to do is going to do everything a single coil does but with more mids and low end frequency and bigger so I'm going to use this boss EQ pedal to show you here is a single Hill Strat neck pickup running through a fender supersonic 22 mic'd up with an sm57 I'm using a cream back 112 cabinet and I'm just going to play something simple [Music] foreign and now I'm going to go back and forth between not using the boss pedal and using the boss pedal to show you how just boosting a couple of the mid frequencies the bass and the highs and just a little bit of gain gives you more of a P90 sound out of a regular single coil pickup foreign [Music] so like I said a P90 is going to sound like a single coil like a strand or single coil but bigger Fuller and it's going to do all the things that sometimes you don't like about single coils where you don't feel like they're cutting through or they're they're beef enough mostly it's just they're not beefy enough it does all of those things basically a single coil on steroids now you still get 60 cycle hum unless you go noiseless but if you're into single coils you understand you just have to learn to deal with that so let's check out these P90s for the P90 demonstration part of this video we're gonna be checking out some Dylan pickups from Dylan talks tone he hand wound these for us so we can check them out I also thought it'd be fun to check out the packaging and how they come in case you're interested in buying his pickups a couple interesting things you get some stickers and some magnets and I love this card here that's a scannable code that takes you to wiring schematics keep in mind one of the things that sometimes people forget is that when I say these pickups are Dylan pickups they're made by Dylan what I call Artisan sometimes people people use the word Boutique I like the term Artisan what that means is the person whose name is on the product made that actual product this is a nice set and reasonably priced in my opinion and they designate on both of them what they are this is the bridge and this one is the neck and packaging is also important if you look at this packaging this is something I highly believe in as well notice that he's using paper not a whole lot of plastic he's not using a lot of wasteful packaging it not only keeps his cost lower to do this but it's also better for the environment okay so we're gonna go to the bridge and uh start with a little bit like actually you know what let's go to the neck go to the neck and play actually that same riff here's Dylan's P90s with a alniko 5 magnet [Music] okay so what he's done already I can tell is he's solved a problem that P90s have most the time when they're made I don't want to say incorrectly but when they're made in a way that I'm not a big fan there's just a lot of low end and kind of like what I did with that EQ pedal yeah it fattened up the Strat tone but it gave a lot of mud and that and that low end came at a cost of definition these do not have that problem because they're pushing almost all mid frequencies [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] I like this neck pickup so much that I'm almost scared to go to the bridge because I actually think this sounds really perfect in that pocket for me it's like the warm frequencies the warm sounds the mid sound sound really really Pleasant not a lot of low end which means the bridge might be a little bright let's just try what happened wow it's even more mids so he's really focused on keeping you in the mids are what I call the nasal qualities of things and the reason I always do that in every video is because I want you to point out that when mids are right they are Musical and when they're wrong they sound like this instrument's got a cold and uh I know that sounds silly to sound like that but everybody's heard that it's like when you're eq'ing things sometimes everyone's felt the frustration of okay the low end sounds good the highs sound good and the mids just ruined everything when mids do what they're supposed to do like I said they're musical and they're magical and when they're not they're just really that so this that's good [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] what I like about this is he's really left a lot of room for a boost so I think in these rated rated out at about 8K which is going to put them in that same territory so you know as a paf humbucker so think about this these pickups are as the whole you know kind of not exactly but basically just as hot as a paf so if you have a paf and you switch to these you're going to have about the same push on the amp the amp is going to be about to see the same uh gain response um but they're going to see more harmonics [Music] from only being one coil instead of two coils each the other thing I want to point out on the single are in the middle position he's reverse round wound one of them so if you buy them in a set from him one is going to be reverse wound which is important because that means the middle Position will not have a 60 second hump [Music] [Applause] thank you yeah it's got a little bit breath there that sounds great uh let me switch the amp to clean and see how they sound on clean okay we're gonna start with the neck pickup here we go [Music] wow yeah it's really defined [Music] [Music] what I'm listening for is I want to hear I don't want it to go up in volume or in frequencies more than what the strings are doing so foreign [Music] that's nice [Music] okay middle position yeah that's good really pulling the highs back on those upper mids right here thank you foreign [Music] [Music] yeah and that's got that mid yeah it sounds good I think for clean it's all about to me it's this neck [Music] [Music] I went around the middle position one more time because I really like that [Music] foreign [Music] I hope that kind of showed you not only the Dylan pickups which is important but also the P90s and maybe gave you guys some considerations on maybe looking at some P90s if you haven't given a try now of course if you're a P90 fan I'm sure you're going to put comments down below about how you love them because I think that's one of the things about when you discover something like this it's one of those things you think everybody knows and the reality is not everybody's the P90 fan they should be in my opinion so let me know in the comments down below if you're a fan but if you aren't a fan let me know if you'd actually consider P90s now and like I said I would definitely like to you to consider Dylan since he actually supported this video by sending these pickups out so I can make this video but also more importantly uh you know because he's a small Builder and you know who else would you want to support but other than the actual people out there making things so uh that's what I want us to end with today as always I want to thank all of you for your time especially the ones that made it to the end of the video it means a lot to me until the next time know your gear [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Phillip McKnight

Views: 180,997

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Id: ZKciDLOgZgA

Length: 10min 21sec (621 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 19 2023