Dating Gibson T Top

[freefrog]

I also kinda go with the thought that if T-Tops were so great (and I suppose one could also include PAFs or Pat # pickups in this argument too) then our guitar heroes who are tone moguls such as Gibbons, Perry, Whitford, Slash, etc would be finding and buying them and installing them in their guitars.

Conversely, if T-Tops were/are good enough for Jimmy Page, Angus Young, Randy Rhoads or the Schenker brothers, they are good enough for me.


And AFAIK,, pro players are often "using pickups from today's era" for other reasons than their basic tone...
Examples?
-necessity, in some cases : I've changed a couple of pickups for a touring pro just because he had killed the previous ones. He didn't care about tone on stage, he just wanted working pickups;
-willing to use cheaper and more accessible gear on the road / on stage while expensive vintage gear stays at home. The touring pro evoked above did/does that too: he's the owner of the SG evoked in my previous messages and claims to be stunned by its tone each time he plays it... IOW, he seems more than happy to have had the bridge T-Top of this guitar repaired by the humble freefrog;
-specific conditions like a very hi-gain at a very high volume, requiring potted pickups (vintage Gibson coils being very tricky to pot, at best);
-sophisticated gear and/or sound engineers at disposal, making the difference between pickups secondary if not irrelevant - I think here to Gibbons who used a complex multiband EQ emulating the sound of "Pearly Gates", while this old lady was staying safe at home...

Non limitative list. And "boomy bottom end" is not a bonus for all players - guitar sound living in the midrange. ;-)

EDIT - changing the tonal balance of passive pickups is easy, that said: it only requires to tune resistive/capacitive loads. It's true for T-Tops as well as for other HB's.

 

[Cdntac]

Conversely, if T-Tops were/are good enough for Jimmy Page, Angus Young, Randy Rhoads or the Schenker brothers, they are good enough for me.

I agree with you on that although one could argue that those pickups were pretty much what was only available back then. Nowadays we’re fortunate to have a plethora of choices.

 

[freefrog]

I agree with you on that although one could argue that those pickups were pretty much what was only available back then. Nowadays we’re fortunate to have a plethora of choices.

Yep, old pickups were the only available back then. That's why they did set our aural memory IMHO.

It doesn't imply they"re "better": all passive pickups are very crude low-fi devices to some extent. But the first ones did "tune" the ears of listeners.

Being an old geek, I'm actually glad to see so many possible choices today, that said. I just wish some products advertised as "vintage sounding" were factually closer to keep their promises (even some models having kept the same names don't sound like their older equivalents and the result is not always an improvement). ;-)

 

[Aceman]

While I have a couple of T-Tops and like them, I find they lack the boomy bottom end of SD pickups.

Like a.....Jazz!