What Is The "P.A.F." Sound?

[Music] when you look back at the history of the electric guitar and the music that spawned from the instruments that were created in the late 40s through the early 60s there's a few elements a few pieces of gear that exist in that time frame that are so prolific and had such an impact on the sound that we wouldn't have the music we have today without them think defender telecaster the gibson les paul the marshall plexi and one of those pieces of gear that i think is crucial to blues and brock and all of the different genres that spawned from that is the paf pickup the patent applied for pickup this little collection of weak magnets copper wire and plastic has been the weapon of choice for countless guitar heroes from the late 50s on through today so in today's video of what is the sound we're gonna take a look at the paf [Music] pickup [Music] [Music] in the mid-1950s gibson was looking to develop a new pickup for their guitars in the 20 years previous to that they had developed the charlie christian pickup and the p90 which had proved to be immensely popular but they all had one drawback much like fender's single coil designs they were all susceptible to noise what we call 60 cycle hum so gibson set out to create a noiseless pickup and it was seth lover a gibson employee who spent most of 1954 developing this the dual coil humbucking pickup or as we now call it the humbucker now quick side note here there's another character in this story who often gets left out and that guy is named ray butts raymond butts who was at the same time as seth lover developing his own humbucking or noise cancelling pickup which later became known as the filter tron the gretch filtertron now there is some debate about who was actually first to develop the humbucker a lot of people say it was seth lover but according to what i could find online it appears that rey actually got the patent first just barely but apparently ray butts is actually the first guy to patent the humbucking pickup or the noiseless dual coil guitar pickup now the reality is filtertrons deserve their own video in this series and they'll get their day but for now we're to focus on the paf the [Music] humbucker [Music] so [Music] now if you're like me for a long time i was confused about the nomenclature what what does paf mean patent applied for why would you name a pickup after a patent kind of confused me for a while but it's actually an interesting story in june of 1955 gibson and seth lover filed jointly for a u.s patent for a dual coil noiseless guitar pickup aka the humbucking pickup and in early 1957 they started transitioning their line of les paul guitars the gold top from p90s to these early humbuckers and on the back of these humbuckers they had a little black and gold sticker that says patent applied for patent applied for paf the path pickup the paf you get it now i'm a huge fan of the paf sound in fact i own several guitars that are equipped with paf style humbuckers everything from gibson reproductions to more boutique options like this curtis novak in the bridge position here but i figured in order to cover something with as much lore as the paf pickup you really need an expert so i reached out to john gundry john is the owner of throwback pickups and in the world of modern pickup manufacturing john knows as much as anybody out there when it comes to pafs and how they were made and manufactured back in the day so we jumped on a zoom call so i could pick his brain about what the paf sound actually is yeah a paf really the design is an adaptation of the p90 so they use the same magnet the p90 has two of the same size magnet whereas pf has one but both of them essentially have the same number of turns of 42 gauge plant m wire and both of them use the same magnet same style pole screws except a paf now has slugs as well my feeling is and there's evidence for this based upon the machines i have that those very early ones were wound with p90 machines adapted to wind pafs so the very first the very first ones tend to be a lower resistance because the the machine in which they were wound for p90s was which i have one of them is only capable of making a pickup that would top out at about 7.5 7.7 k the very earliest ones are going to be you'd be hard-pressed to find one much hotter than that now what john's talking about there with the early pafs is their output which is oftentimes measured in resistance or ohms now if you're new to pickups and you don't know essentially that reading gives you an idea of how hot the output of the pickup is going to be the higher that number the hotter or higher output the pickup is going to be now one common mistake that people make when looking at pickups and their output rating is comparing pickups of different types the resistance measurement is not the same across the board you really can only compare pickups of the same types so for instance you can only compare a paf style neck pickup to another paf style neck pickup because there's a lot of variables that go into the output rating of a pickup so you shouldn't for example compare a paf bridge to a telecaster style bridge they're incomparable in terms of resistance and ohm readings but um i've managed to get two of the machines actually were used in the factory so one of those machines is a very early machine that gibson purchased i believe in 1950 i've got the record for it it has all of the fixtures still on it all of the gearing and so that machine was initially purchased for p90s and you can see from just the fixtures on it that they ran both p90 and paf bobbins because it has a little imprint from the bobbins on the fixtures that's amazing yeah so so but if from that machine they specifically set the machine up so it would be foolproof for the user and from a strictly production standpoint it made sense but it had all of these changes had an impact on the sound of the pickup i don't know that gibson was really thinking about it in these terms hey we're going to change it because we want them to sound a little different i think they were just looking very simply at it as far as hey we need to make these efficiently with as few mistakes as possible and uh the more we can bobbins we can put on the machine the better so as the timeline goes on there are quirks about the the wire distribution and the turn per layer of each machine that affects the sound of the finished pickup now what john is talking about there is actually one of the most interesting things about original pafs in my opinion and that is they're actually pretty inconsistent see these pickups were machine wound but they were run by human operators and the machines john told me didn't have auto stop features on them it was up to the operator to stop the winding machine within a certain range of wines on the pickup and this coupled with differences in magnet material and things that gibson could get their hands on over the years led to these pafs these patent-applied four pickups being pretty different from one another each one kind of has their own character so that's something to keep in mind when you're looking at modern reproductions of old pickups you have to consider which particular paf was that manufacturer trying to clone was it something out of peter green's guitar or paul kossoff's burst or jimmy page's double cream uncovered pafs or dwayne almonds pafs each one of those 59 to 60 burst les pauls has a slightly different sounding paf humbucker installed so i think that's actually one of the coolest parts of the paf sound so how how would you describe the paf sound i'll kind of compare it to a p90 because since they have similar construction there are similarities in the if you're playing very clean and a recorded environment you might have a hard time picking out with equivalent guitars which is which if it's just clean but compared to p90 a paf has a bit more dynamic range from low to high and clarity and dynamic range is kind of a hallmark of a paf p90s the low end you start to notice it more in the low end becomes compressed much quicker than a paf will and you get a you can have just a little bit more um depth for pick dynamics with a paf than you do with a p90 when it's distorted now i think john is spot on there when describing the overall sound and tonality of the paf pickup especially in a guitar like a les paul now if you're coming from a more modern humbucker you may not realize how different a paf style humbucker is to its modern counterpart and a big part of that has to do with the magnet material in the pickup modern humbuckers tend to have ceramic magnets whereas the paf style has an alnico magnet and this plays a huge role in the overall tonal characteristics of the pickup now these pickups in this less paul are actually not gibsons these are from a company called whiz and like throwback and a bunch of other boutique manufacturers they are faithfully reproducing the paf sound but i think these are a good example of what an original paf actually sounds like now to me the best part of a paf is the clarity even on a big low e chord like that going through a pretty overdriven amp you can still hear every note in the chord to me that's the hallmark of a great pickup there's clarity in there there's definition and they're also incredibly touch sensitive so i can determine how much gain i want from the amp depending on how hard i pick if you lighten up your touch you get a cleaner tone [Music] and if you dig in harder it gets dirtier and the neck pickup has similar characteristics it's round and warm but not muddy or overpowering in any way [Music] since paf and p90s for that matter they're not wax potted you have treble overtones from the acoustic feedback from the guitar that come mechanically through the pickup i think it translates into just more more touch sensitivity and better dynamic feel to the guitar some of it you hear is treble overtones i've done a video on comparing waxed and non-wax potted in a recording it's not as obvious yeah but i think for the player that's there is a real feel difference and you you feel you're getting a little bit more response from the guitar it it does translate to you're getting some of the acoustic properties of the wood of the guitar which presumably are a big part of why you chose the guitar and the other important factor here is wax potting now wax potting is a process in pickup manufacturing where the actual pickups the bobbin and the windings and the magnets are all dipped in different waxes paraffin wax beeswax and the idea here is to seal up the pickup so it doesn't become microphonic literally acting like a microphone where any sound gets picked up and amplified now pafs are actually not wax potted which means you can hear what's going on around the guitar [Music] now this is important because as john points out it's not just picking up the strings vibrating through the magnetic field of the pickup but all of the different elements the construction and the type of wood of the guitar and this especially comes out when you're playing more percussively or harder [Music] so all of these different elements come together to create what is in my opinion one of the best electric guitar sounds out there what to you is is the the epitome of like the paf sound uh musically well personally peter green but the interesting part of that one is there's two parts of his tone that are not straight gibson factory paf tone one is the out of phase middle position which did happen randomly with uh with the pickups coming out of gibson but the other is that neck pickup in the peter green's les paul was repaired and there's lore as to what exactly happened there the repair on peter green's guitar was done by sam lee i've talked to people that there were contemporaries of his and part of the tone of that pickup is how that repair was done although it seems like the quintessential pa of tone it's it's actually a little different but based upon customers feeling this quintessential pa of tone it's going to be jimmy page peter green dwayne allman dickie betts paul kossoff billy gibbons so that is the paf sound but what about getting the sound hit home what should you look for in a set of paf pickups it can be a little overwhelming because like i said earlier there's such a wide range and wide variety of paf sounds and different winders and people that are making them both big and small so what do you look for in a paf so if for you or anybody that's looking at getting pickups of a paf style there's two things i say well i ask like do you have a preference as to do you know whether you prefer a slightly more scooped mid tone or a little bit more mid prominent tone that can kind of point help point you into what magnet is the best choice altico 2 is slightly scooped in comparison to aluco 5. and then the other is is clean headroom really important to you with the ampere plane so if you're playing a lower wattage amp then you might want something that's below 8k and that'll give you just a bit more room to have a clean tone without pushing your amp too hard so that is the paf sound i want to thank john for coming on this video now i have the full interview with him linked here and down below if you want to go check that out if you are a pickup and guitar nerd like me he drops some serious detail and some serious knowledge about pafs and the pickups that he makes i highly recommend you check it out now i should point out that i have no relationship or sponsorship with throwback i've reached out to him because he was recommended to me by some friends of mine as being the paf guy but after talking to him i am going to purchase a set of throwbacks for this guitar here so if you want to know more information about throwback and what he's doing i'll have his website linked in the description box down below he's also got a youtube channel where he's done videos comparing wax potted versus non-wax potted pickups and a lot of really detailed cool stuff that if you're into this kind of thing again i highly recommend you check out if you're interested in learning more about tone and how to get great guitar tone i made a video course dedicated specifically to that it's called the tone course you can check it out in the description box down below as well as some affiliate links to the gear that i use to make these videos if you buy something through one of those links i earn a small commission which really helps me out in keeping this channel going so thank you don't forget october 10th that is a couple of weeks from now we have the next backstage live show coming up we're doing something a little bit different for this show called a case study i'm not fully ready to announce what we're doing yet but it's going to be really cool so don't forget saturday october 10th 5 pm eastern standard time backstage live episode 4. don't forget to follow me on instagram rhett shul subscribe here to my youtube channel and thank you guys so much for watching i will see you on the next one you

Channel: Rhett Shull

Views: 500,220

Keywords: les paul, patent applied for, best humbucker, humbucker paf, gibson paf, 1959 les paul, jimmy page, gibson humbucker, guitar pickups comparison, paf humbuckers, Rhett Shull, What Is The Sound, Peter Green, ZZ Top, Billy Gibbons, vintage guitar, paf pickups

Id: LR30sDBnquc

Length: 19min 0sec (1140 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 30 2020