The pickups are replaced with what many of you may balk at as there are so many opinions about Les Paul pickups and tone out there. As always, Bill Nash simply builds a guitar that he would use and leave it at that. So, in his arsenal of personal guitars, his favorite and most versatile LP setup is using a DiMarzio Bluesbucker in the Neck and a DiMarzio Air Norton in the Bridge.
They then re-wire the guitar so the pickups breathe better as well as use the neck pickups tone control as a coil tap for the Bluesbucker, which gives you an amazing strat-like sound from that pickup. Between 1 and 8 on the tone knob it works as a regular tone control, between 9 and 10 it shuts off the second/dummy coil. This gives you a tap without adding switches of push pull pots.
The Air Norton give you bigger output and rich harmonics without going over the top into the tone spectrum of faceless, modern, high output sound that so many specialized humbuckers are susceptible to. These pickups have a lower string pull and a much higher sensitivity to your dynamics and playing style.
Also, as many of you may have figured out, the method Gibson uses for wiring the pots is not optimum. The tendency towards the guitar getting muddy or sounding choked when anywhere but "10". This gets re-worked when we re-wire.
