We tested five modern takes on the Holy Grail of humbuckers. Here’s how they stacked up.

TESTED BY DAVE HUNTER

Cream T Pickups Super Scanner Series Billy F Gibbons Whiskerbuckers  and Sunbear Pickups ’59 SB-PAF Custom Hand-Aged set

 Bare Knuckles the Mule with aged nickel tops

Rocketfire Guitars 1959 set, ReWind Electric Creme Brûlée set,

BELOVED FOR ITS dynamic touch sensitivity, clarity, openness, juicy harmonic richness, and an addictive blend of biting attack and forgiving compression, the original Gibson PAF — Patent Applied For — humbucker of the late 1950s has long been the Holy Grail of vintage pickups, and a challenge to reproduce. Several admirable re-creations have emerged in recent years, however, many of which are getting closer to cracking the code. We’ve rounded up several of these in the pages of Guitar Player in the past, usually logging a batch at a time every couple of years, and this issue brings us the latest such investigation.

Most makers today agree on the essential components and construction of the original PAFs, though some differ in the formulations of some of these parts. After all these years, there’s still plenty of debate about which approach best achieves the desired PAF-like result. Do you source the most accurate components you can find, put them together in a way you determine to be closest to that used at Gibson in the late ’50s, and trust that will get you there? Or do you let your ears guide you, and create “vintage-style” humbuckers that might not rigorously adhere to the recipe, but which are tuned by ear to sound like an acclaimed set of originals?

This roundup evaluates pickups from makers that take both approaches. We should note that this is not intended as a shootout, as such, but as a roundup of products already deemed worthy of consideration, each of which likely offers characteristics that will prove best for some players out there.

All pickups below are priced as per a set of two, including covers, and were reviewed with two-conductor vintage-style wiring, though many makers offer four-conductor wiring where coil-splitting options are desired. Each of these five sets falls broadly into what we might call the “medium-wind” category as regards DC resistance and relative output strength, although while that DCR measurement is given for all pickups, it is in no way an accurate indication of their power or sonic merits. All sets were tested in a 2019 Gibson Custom Shop 1958 Les Paul Reissue, with upgraded pots, tone caps and wiring, into a tweed-Deluxe-style 1x12 combo, a Friedman Small Box head and 2x12 cab, and a Fractal Axe-FX III into studio monitors.