ItsaBass
New member
Re: SD T-Top Replicas
I like T-Tops fine. They are great bridge pickups for low-headroom amps – not too thick like some PAFs can get at the hotter end of the range. They're actually very well made pickups. Very neatly wound, and very consistently wound. They happened to appear in Gibson Guitars during a period of cost cutting under remote corporate control, so that indirectly gave them a bad rap. I.e. it isn't so much that the pickups sucked, but that they would often come in guitars that could really suck. I really have no complaints about the pickups themselves. I can do pretty much anything I need to do, humbucker-wise, with one or a set of 'em.
That said, I don't see a need to reproduce them. You can get the same basic tone many different ways. It used to be they were cheap, so they were a nice alternative to high end aftermarket pickups. Nowadays, you might as well order a Duncan Custom shop pickup instead of buying an old T-Top.
FWIW, at one time I had three SGs with vintage-style humbuckers. I had a '68 Standard, 100% original with Maetro Vibrola (IIRC, these are basically T-Tops, if not actually T-Tops), an '02 Japanese Epi open-book half guard hardtail Standard that I'd put Gibson '57 Classics in, and a 2012 SG Special Faded hardtail with a factory 490 set. I A-B-C'd all three in recordings, and I couldn't tell a damned difference between them in terms of in the basic tone between them. The most distinctive one was the '68, but ONLY because it was a bit more prone to squealing at high volumes (old pickups in comparison to the other two sets of heavily wax potted ones). As far as the actual tone itself, nobody would be able to hear the difference in a real-world playing situation.
I like T-Tops fine. They are great bridge pickups for low-headroom amps – not too thick like some PAFs can get at the hotter end of the range. They're actually very well made pickups. Very neatly wound, and very consistently wound. They happened to appear in Gibson Guitars during a period of cost cutting under remote corporate control, so that indirectly gave them a bad rap. I.e. it isn't so much that the pickups sucked, but that they would often come in guitars that could really suck. I really have no complaints about the pickups themselves. I can do pretty much anything I need to do, humbucker-wise, with one or a set of 'em.
That said, I don't see a need to reproduce them. You can get the same basic tone many different ways. It used to be they were cheap, so they were a nice alternative to high end aftermarket pickups. Nowadays, you might as well order a Duncan Custom shop pickup instead of buying an old T-Top.
FWIW, at one time I had three SGs with vintage-style humbuckers. I had a '68 Standard, 100% original with Maetro Vibrola (IIRC, these are basically T-Tops, if not actually T-Tops), an '02 Japanese Epi open-book half guard hardtail Standard that I'd put Gibson '57 Classics in, and a 2012 SG Special Faded hardtail with a factory 490 set. I A-B-C'd all three in recordings, and I couldn't tell a damned difference between them in terms of in the basic tone between them. The most distinctive one was the '68, but ONLY because it was a bit more prone to squealing at high volumes (old pickups in comparison to the other two sets of heavily wax potted ones). As far as the actual tone itself, nobody would be able to hear the difference in a real-world playing situation.
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