Re: NGD Finished the Les Paul project
What made you choose the JB humbucking pick ups by SD? What do you like about them sound-wise? We need a full review like a vintage wine report.
;>)/
I guess the main reason in a nutshell is because they were available to me. This particular set is fairly rare, the original run was 800 units, but I do think you can order a set from the Custom Shop special order. In any event, they don't come up for sale used all that often. My buddy who owned this guitar before me and sold it to me, had these pickups in it when I first played this guitar, and I loved them. He eventually took them out to use them into another project that he never got around to, and installed a set of Pearly Gates in this guitar to play it in a Skynyrd cover band he had joined. He at the time had about 5 Les Pauls, and having played them all this one was by far my favorite. I loved the big neck shape. He on the other hand liked narrow profile LP necks and had been trying to sell me this guitar for about two years. He eventually offered me the stripped body so he could buy a different stripped body he had his eye on at Stratosphere.com That I could afford, so I jumped.
So I was now officially in the market for pickups and I found this Geppetto Camelot pickup set that seemed to be just what I wanted. There was a video on their site of this guy playing them in a Les Paul, and I thought they sounded great, plus they were pretty cheap. I wanted a set that could cover blues, rock, and maybe even give you some country twang, or even a bit of jazz clean on the right tube amp. However I had never heard of this company, and I was nervous about buying them, even though the price was very reasonable. So I did the smart thing, and came here, and posted up a thread in the pickup forum and included the video I saw of this set in action, and asked for opinions. I got some very good answers, and I came to the conclusion that this set was just too much of a toss of the dice.
My buddy that I bought the guitar from, asked me if I had any pickups yet. I told I hadn't bought any yet. He said you liked the JB custom shop set, I will sell them to you for $300, because the guitar he was eyeballing on stratosphere was sold, and he missed out on it. He also offered me his pearly gates set, which I have in my LP faded brown studio and I love. I decided that even though I told my wife I would try and keep costs under control, I would go the extra money and get the JB set.
These pickups are a bit milder than the pearly gates set, but you can roll back the tone knob all the way and get that Clapton woman tone thing with no muddiness. They sound great through my SD 805 overdrive into my Princeton Reverb. You can add gain, you play clean, and the tones are what you expect a Les Paul to sound like. That was my beef with the stock pickups in my Studio faded, were that they sounded great through dirt pedals or a high gain amp, but they had zero personality clean, they just wouldn't sound good clean. I put in a 50's wiring harness and the pearly gates set; boom! New guitar, and if you played with the tone and the pickup switch you could get different flavors of clean. The Gibson pickups did NOT do that.
One more thing to note: my buddy wax potted the JB's because they got squeaky, and squealed a bit, on his Marshall amp. (*he plays a lot louder than I do) He did this after I played them through his Fender Blues DeLuxe. I don't think waxing them changed the tone in a significant way, if at all. I have a Princeton, not a DeLuxe, but they still sound great to me. Also all the hardware on my guitar was like new, and the custom shop aged the JB's, and even dinged each set in the same spot JB's original 59 set has a ding. I polished the covers just a bit with a mild polish, and then made sure I got all the polish off with vinegar. They just looked too grungy and stuck out compared to the rest of the nickel and chrome on the guitar. I didn't go crazy, just enough to make them not look incongruous with the rest of the guitar.
I finally gathered all the parts and pieces to finish my Les Paul Traditional project. I bought the body stripped for a great price. I’ve never owned a really nice Les Paul with binding and a flamed top. This was my chance to scratch that itch for a reasonable price. 
