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Thanks very much!

I decided not to for now. I can send you the complete text of the Guitar Connoisseur Magazine article. There's a lot of info there you might like.

Thanks Joris!

Thanks! You GET IT! :-)

I first announce them on RUclips, then on Burst Hunter group on Facebook. I'm still dealing with old orders which takes up a lot of time, but I have to make sets for instant purchase to keep me alive, food, water, groceries, dental work, materials etc. etc. Its alot of stress and is never ending. If you subscribe you get notified every time I do a new video, and thats where I announce them.

@@SDPickups awesome, I'm a subscriber. I'll keep my eyes peeled. I can imagine the stress being a one-man show. Your work is extremely appreciated though.

@@roberthyatt4741 Appreciate your comment. YES, being a one man show and unabashedly being THE FIRST pioneer, krazy enough to chase this dream of mine for 20+ year. This is what OCD is. I "quit" many times when I got so frustrated at hitting many dead ends. On top of that, doing these videos is a ton of work in Final Cut Pro X, the hard work of doing all the machining work, and then dealing with keeping materials in stock, and maintaining machines.......it just never ends. The older I get the harder it is to keep up.

The real vintage ABR1's can be quite sloppy, thats not a problem. Gibson's problem is they are terrible at reproducing anything accurately. When I did an acoustic test of a host of bridges, the Gibson one was the WORST. It was like making a chocolate birthday cake out of mud. Corporations tend to be pretty dumb, full of "yes" men and incompetents.

I don't off that service, sorry. It would take too long for me to do and would be very expensive for you.

The bridge proto is now. part of the PAF-X set. I'm trying to get demos of that set done this weekend here, but not sure I'll get it all done. The neck PAF in the Poll video is the Black Beauty neck. For the X set I used the same wire as the bridge, so it more round sounding, with crystal clear bite too. Thanks for watching.

The 57's are old AWC wire, its fatter lower resistance wire. This wire no longer exists because LP forum trolls who only make StewMac kit pickups complained that wire wasn't annealed enough, and felt tensioners grab too hard on the insulation. THE SAME THINGS THAT MAKE VINTAGE WIRE SOUND GREAT. The degree of intelligence of most amateur "winders" is very very low. They killed off the only wire that was very close to real vintage wire. I have a partial roll left, otherwise its all gone....

@@SDPickups Thank you so much for all your videos and the great lessons provided about PAFs, you are such an inspiration. such a shame that wire isn't available anymore, its such an interesting venture to replicate the Physics and mechanics of vintage Gibson materials, even the metallography and reverse engineering required to figure out the right alloys that affect the magnetic permeability of the magnet and coils, and how the parts where manufactured back in the day. hope one day i could own 1 set of your amazing pickups. your video about the les paul that it isn't thought me how to do a correct wiring harness and the difference its definitely there

Harness first, then the hardware. If you guitar has steel thumbsheels and stainless bridge posts (non-magnetic), replacing with the correct brass will really make a big gain sustain. Very cheap to replace. Philadelphia Luthiery website has those for real cheap and the right brass.

gibson is a lost cause. They are a corporation, they're not luthier and guitar builders anymore. Its all lies and "pretty" guitars that don't sound great. But they started on that down turn in the early 70's with their garbage Les Paul Deluxe that I bought and quickly got rid of, it was so cheaply built and bad sounding.

@@SDPickups THE Deluxe,,what were they thinking,,SOUND N GOOD PARTS AN FEELING OF A LES PAUL,,IM WORKING ON THE NECK,,BUFFING BY HAND N RAG,,THE OL WAY,,HAVE A BLESSED DAY AN STAY COOL,,FROM TEX.WESS

You're welcome!!!!

Thank you for watching and learning.

Much appreciated

Thanks. My ears were born in 1950 :-)

I have an unplated Faber, its 24 grams, so clearly its not accurrate. I have not tried it yet because of the weight and dont want to waste a set of strings. I don't think anyone has yet made an accurrate replica so far......

@@SDPickups So wich would you say comes closest ?

Some of the newer Gibson tailpieces aren't bad, but I only saw that several years ago. I like the Klusons, but I'm hearing they are now heavier? Unfortunately you just have to buy something and hope it does good on your guitar. Then you have to trash a set of strings every time you try a different one. You might even try a later tailpiece like early 60's, they might be great but then they are chrome plated, so they don't show aging hardly at all.

@@SDPickups yes, they inform 35g on their website thats why i was asking, i ended buying the faber... i mean, i dont even have a Gibson to start with, i've an epiphone standard 11', im sure it will be a great improvement, i made sure every material was as you specified, now to the harness...

Thank you very much!

Yep, its a Catrike. Haven't got much riding in this summer and summer is almost gone. Decided to replace the long chain, hurt my back and never got it on, will try again this weekend.

Wish I could reveal everything, would love to teach what I know, but I'd have to win the Lotto before I could do that....could happen?

Thanks. I'll be 75 in March. Not much time left. All my writings will be out of print and I'll probably be forgotten, but the pickups will live on for decades and their prices will be along the lines of Dumble notoriety. I've written down all the true facts about vintage PAF's and exactly how I reproduce them, that nobody knows and that I don't share since this is how I make my living. But I don't know who or what to do with that book of information so it doesn't die. Nobody is ever going to repeat what I did over the 20 years it took, it would cost thousands of dollars to get hold of PAF's from every year and work with professional metallurgists and the use of expensive labs, and the vintage wire lab work that Elektrisola did for me. The things I learned apply to ALL guitar pickups, the PAF's were my master teachers in that regard. Guitar players don't read, so I doubt anyone is going to ask for the text of this article, there's stuff in it you won't read from any other source out there, and its all factual, no "forum" mythology :-) ......and so it goes...... OMG, someone wanted the text, just emailed it to him....

Hope it helps you. Upgrading junky harnesses like Gibson makes, is the first step to getting better tones.....Even with cheap Epiphones from China gives dramatic results....

The capacitor is always in the circuit, even if you have it on zero. This is contrary what most think. If you play with no capacitor soldered into the guitar then solder one in and keep it on zero you WILL hear a difference. Its still in the circuit as long as its soldered in place. Also, anytime you add something to the harness or change the value of a pot or tone cap you'll hear a change, but you have to be careful about this, because anytime you change something, you interrupted the complete harness and it will take a day of playing before you hear what it will actually DO longterm. This even applies to the pole screws. If you simply change the direction of the slots, you interrupted its spot in the overall magnetization, and you'll hear the sound get darker until you play it some and the pole screw is remagnetized in its new direction. Its subtle, but I hear it anytime I change something. These caps got played to settle them in before I did the recordings.

Your Les Paul probably costs alot more now. These bridges are all hand made, hand cast, hand nickel plated and hand aged. Theres a LOT of money it took to get the molds made and saddles and screws made as well. They never recovered their investment. It took 3 guys 6 hours or more to make only ONE. Time is money. The best in anything is always going to cost more. Anyway, you missed the boat, as of last week there will be no more 4 Uncles bridges, this is so sad, as there is no other bridges that even come close to the originals as ours DO. One of the Uncles is very ill, the other one moved to Spain, the only one left owns his own business that he has no time to try to make them himself; one person simply cannot do all that work.

You know, as far as RUclips goes, and especially the LP forums, most guitar players don't know much about this subject at all. They buy guitars because they pick the "prettiest" one, instead of the best sounding ones. They don't know anything about harnesses, or the hardware. They don't know how bad Gibson is when it comes to anything authentic, or how much they lie about their products. I'm not well known out there because I'm not a shill, I don't do hundreds of click bait videos just to get views or make a couple dollars from RUclips. Vintage Les Pauls are rather small minority of people thirsting for actual knowledge. I stay off the forums because the children there want to fight anyone who has a public presence. Not much good information on the forums, either. Its best if you and others post my videos on the forums, but be prepared for the trolls to go after you, LOL.

He gets real busy sometimes, and I too have problems getting replies to my requests for orders. He's just one guy selling a lot of different products. So, I know how THAT goes, I get a lot of emails and sometimes it takes me days to get around to replying. They are worth the wait. Try emailing him from Gmail or a different mail account. Keep emailing until you get a reply.

I let Chris know of your frustration. Said he will get back to you. Hope so.

Cheers, I should say that he gave me a full refund in the end after getting hold of through PayPal, so a positive end

Last price I saw was $500 without shipping added. Its NOT 2%, its way more than that. Go look thru my PAF Universe videos and you can hear unplugged comparisons with my MINT vintage gold plated ABR1. I didn't get paid for the 2 years of reverse-engineering and metallurgical work, but they did give me a few for sending them email addresses of people who want them. For real world reviews go to Facebook and look for the Four Uncles Restorations page where guys who own real vintage "Bursts" who replaced their beat up originals that have notches so deep the saddles are almost cut in half, or notches in the wrong places etc. Having these on most of my Les Paul, they made a dramatic difference. Its not subtle at all and the reviews all agree. Like the originals they are hand made, hand plated, hand aged, hand cast. More than 6 hour for just one bridge. On my Elitist SG, it did something I can't even explain, especially in the vintage MANN amplifier. The solos have this amazing HOWL to them, thats not feedback or anything else but the bridge itself. The Elitists are all Brazilian fret boards, not Chinese, but made in Japan by GIBSON. They quit making them because they are higher quality than Gibson's own LP's. I own 7 of them before prices went up as people started realizing how great they are; but of course if you watched "The Les Paul That Isn't" four episodes series, I replace all the crap hardware, harness and of course the pickups, though those were rather good. I'm proud of my work on these bridges, two years of HELL to get them done right. The guys dealt with the molds and that was a nightmare too. One tiny thousandth of an inch in the wrong place and it all falls apart.

There is only one way to tell. The cover has to be OFF first of all. Look at the end of the humbucker where the leads from the coils are tucked into the end. If ALL the coil leads are BLACK, its a real PAF with a Patent number decal on them. There are a LOT of these out there, they are basically 1960 PAF's.....OR if the bucker had gold plated covers, it can be from a few years earlier, because gold plated hardware and covers weren't used a lot, so they made too many and they were sparsely used thru the next few years.

P90's are pickups I LOVE, but seldom get calls for. Go listen to Michael Bloomfield, his P90 LP sounds nearly identical to his PAF equipped LP. The reason is that all the metal parts are the same parts used in PAF's, except the pole spacing is a tiny bit different. The magnet wire is the same stuff, magnets are the same, except during the Korean War, alinco 3 was used, because Cobalt was a "war mineral," and not available commercially during those years. A3 did NOT get used in PAF's later on. Pole screws the same story. Amount of wire the same amount, 10,000 total winds on PAF and P90's. Go listen to Sean Costello's P90 gold top. I did a video a few short months ago of my replica LP Special with P90's, I dont remember what version P90 those were but they're using all the right stuff etc. I played one of those back in '68 and it blew my socks off, so thats why I had this replica made, also had the baseball neck done same as the vintage one I played. I have some wire I'm using now on the Blind Audio Poll with a prototype bridge, that wire would KILL in a P90 but am too busy to make a set for now. Will sooner than later.....

​@@SDPickups Thank you for all that info. I was curious because someone gave me a P90 in 1988 he estimated was from about 1952. I'll skip some rambling to (try to) keep this short(er). 20+ years later I discovered the winding was open. Someone rewound it for me at no charge for the opportunity to observe the winding details. He let me know the bobbin had a problem (the pole screws were loose in the threads and something else).He said the pole spacing was unlike anything he had seen and didn't have one like it. So he finished the rewind and shipped it back to me. I contacted Pete Biltoft and he had me send a photo of it lying next to a steel rule with a fine scale. He said the pole spacing was weird. Also weird was that the cover matches. So I sent it to him this week to figure out what he can identify in person. It may need another bobbin made to match. We'll see. I am still not sure where I would use it but am considering having it rebuilt to whatever period it was from. I recently bought a single P90 late 40's guitar someone had sold the original pickup from and replaced with a Duncan Antiquity. They had sold all the removeable parts and replaced them with aftermarket stuff. Since all that obscenity was already committed, it's no more obscene to consider putting a restored early 50's one on it. The guy who gave it to me decades ago had worked for a museum doing instrument restorations and Gibson allowed him access to the Kalamazoo factory if he ever needed any odd tools. So it's anyone's guess where it came from. He had so much stuff he didn't remember, and he is no longer with us. So all that typing just brings me to the question of whether uneven pole spacing is a clue you recognize...an instrument that had such a phenomenon, or who knows, maybe a very early one? I just read P13's came in two different spacings, for lap steels and regular guitars. But uneven doesn't seem to be a useful feature! Thanks for reading. I'll let you know if there were any other clues inside when I get an assessment.

@@murrayatuptown353 Too bad it was rewound. Guys almost always HAND WIND rewinds, guranteeing it'll never sound right. Hand winding kills off some of the treble response, so a rewound P90 hand wound in neck position will always be muddy. The short pole spacing is from one or two archtop models, I forgot which guitar it was, but its well known and I even have a bobbin off one with short pole spacing. If he unwound it and counted turns he would have seen it was machine wound and every turn is identical. I have a unique P90 from the 1940's, and the bobbins were made of pickguard material with laminated black and white layers. Pretty cool and its super bright and clear as it should be. Rewinding also is sad because vintage magnet wire sounds better than any modern wire does. If you look carefully at the bobbin you'll see a couple round injection mold marks that show the regular spacing which is wider. The short spacing was done by drilling instead of making a separate mold.

@@SDPickups This was identified upon inspection as having standard spacing so somehow a bad camera angle or optical distortion in the photo I sent was misleading. Measurements were made from the photo so the photo was wrong.

@@SDPickups the original winding was open. I had so some run it thru an inspection X-ray machine long ago, but there was nothing visible...too many layers and not enough resolution.

Probably age related anymore, will be 75 this coming March, Grim Reaper has my ticket....

I'm not an outstanding guitar player, I can't copy historic solos except easy stuff. I do know how to show off my work, using great amps and Greenbacks like Clapton used on the Beano album (as confirmed by Mick Grabham who has friends who were THERE. So, yeah I get trolls who hate my playing, LOL. Funny one really nasty guy said I sucked really bad, so I went to his channel and all he badly played was drop tuning heavy metal with horrible tone, LOL. I was never in a band that lasted more than a couple weeks. Singer's ego's broke the bands up every time. The best playing I was able to do was during my attendance at the Duff's Garage blues jams in Portland. The hosts were fantastic recording players, they inspired me to dump all my pedals and play straight thru a good amp. I had a Blues Junior at the time, liked it ok, but listening to them playing vintage Fender amps blew me away and eventually bought a '73 Deluxe Reverb with a blown speaker. Got it cheap, and later also got a Princeton Reverb and Vibroluxe Reverb both from '73 too. Never went back to pedals, though keep all the ones I bought from '70 and onwards. I try them now and then and they just take things away rather than improve anything at all.....

I didn't do any research on frets since guitar players can't refret their guitars. I've heard they weren't very high, all my Elitist Les Pauls, made by Gibson in JAPAN, don't have high frets, so I guess they got all of that right. I sure would not use stainless frets, they tear up your strings. I do like tall frets on my replicas, easier to bend.

"Replacement saddles" are OURs, you can only buy them from us. We also mixed the brass alloy for our saddles because modern brass didn't match vintage brass. Vintage saddles don't all look alike because they're. not, we copied the basic physical design, wider tops, lower angle, every tiny detail must be right and ours are.

NO there are NO true replicas out there except ours. Sorry. "LOOKS" don't get you there at all. MATERIALS, MATERIALS, MATERIALS. I destroyed a vintage original to get the actual metallurgy, modern bad copies don't use what was really used. If something looks like a copy but doesn't have the sound at all, its a failed product and there are a lot of them out there, including all the other hardware parts and Gibson reissues which are all totally wrong in everything. Before we started selling these, we sent a couple to a few famous players from the 70's and one famous collector and they all bought ours, and some of their vintage Les Pauls now have our bridges on them because their originals are too worn out. If you go dig through my PAF Universe videos, there are videos tracking the two years it took to copy the originals, I did unplugged videos comparing a mint original to our prototype. Ours is at least 95% or more the same tonal properties. There is one company who is trying to claim that he did the same work I did, but theirs have sharp pointed saddles, basically a copy of the look of PATENT bridges and the sound is wrong. Beware the false hype of dealers, there's a lot out there who want your money but don't have the smarts to do it right. That one guy claims he had his made in the USA, like that means anything at ALL. There are American bridges that Stew Mac sells, and they completely fail on all counts.Ours, like the originals, are completely hand made molds, hand cast, hand plated and take 6 hours or more just to make ONE. The originals were hand made as well, not mass produced. Each one of them are slightly different, but the materials are the same and originals all had the same tone. We don't sell them all the time, the hand manufacturing means we can only make about 30 in a month so they are expensive to make. You can go read reviews on the same page you can buy one: facebook.com/profile.php?id=100071770557105

No there are NOT. Zamak has around 8 versions, nobody is using the right one, which is the softest alloy, and why some of them sag if you use heavy strings. The zinc alloy they all use is way harder material, , harder brass alloys harder saddles of the wrong design, it all adds up to the sound of vintage saddles is completely missing. Nobody ever did what we DID do. In an online article in the UK, they had a vintage Les Paul with vintage ABR1, for an experiment they put a modern bridge on it. The guitar COMPLETELY LOST ITS VINTAGE GOODNESS. They were shocked, the guitar didn't sound great anymore.

@@SDPickups has anyone noticed among all the claims that there is no objective data concerning sounds? Where is the comparative in-depth “multivalent” spectrum analysis of waveforms? Seems a great way to prove something, and Pearl Drums did that years ago on their “invention” (actually Steven Volpp) of the lugless rim attachment system (the “Radial Pro” series) which leaves the drum shells sonically pure tubes unmarred by perforations… I’m not questioning the integrity or quality of your fine reproduction ABR bridges, they are near perfection in all respects, but quantifying what we allegedly hear is insightful and should be above reproach…

@@YooTooobJeff Its exactly what I DO. Go find the earliest video I did comparing vintage ABR1's to our replica, UNPLUGGED. You can't fake something like that. You really hear things that way. There has been several colleges back, that took guitar pickups into a zillion dollar school electronics and audio laboratory where they analyzed the basic guitar pickups, Tele, Strat, Humbucker. They fed them all various kinds of test frequencies, printed out all kinds of charts and recordings. What did they accomplish? NOTHING. Alot of sets of numbers and frequency charts, that tell you nothing about the SOUND, nor how to reproduce it. Tells you nothing about winding patterns and what amount those can control frequency response. Tells you nothing about the materials, what they were made of, nothing about the history of steel making, magnet wire manufacturing histories, and the history of magnets. I went through a phase where I bought a frequency network audio analyzer, bought an LCR meter (Inductance, Capacitance, Resistance). I could spot peak frequencies, test capacitance of cables and capacitors I use. In the end its not useful in actual pickup DESIGN. I don't use any of that anymore, and its my EARS now, that I use. I still use the capacitance mode to check caps before I build harnesses for customers. You never hear any pickup guys talk about DESIGN. The reason all their buckers, according to my customers, sound alike, is because they buy commercial pickup parts that are already designed to deliver a certain sound. And its nothing like a real PAF. Whats a real PAF sound like? I have a ton of demos of vintage PAF's on my channel. They all go into the same guitar for videos for the vintage PAF and one of mine. The truth is that only guys who play the real PAFs can tell them apart from everything else. This was proven in my BLIND AUDIO POLL done a couple months ago. ruclips.net/video/c_YDr-lQ9pI/видео.htmlsi=X2SPscArFtR0E9jZ Only 40% of viewers identified the real PAF's, 60% thought mine were the real ones. You can't describe sound in words, frequency charts, or numbers. I do not make any claims for my work, except that I did the work I did, that nobody else ever thought to do, nor to the depth of over 20 years of science-based metallurgy and vintage magnet wire project done through Elektrisola's generous lab analyses in their high tech factory. Claims mean nothing concrete. Guitar players want magical stories and claims that pickups will make them sound like Led Zeppelin. Or that a "reissue" is anything like what they failed to copy. One guy made claims that his vintage winding machine made "vintage tone." This is physically and physics-ally impossible. But he sold a ton of pickups in a short time. By making false claims, he had a lot of unhappy customers regret the purchase. I warned him about that and he still makes things up.... I don't ever say things to make money, I let my work speak for itself. I play the many vintage PAF's from every year through my basic no frills vintage amps and mostly Greenbacks, because they are the sound of history. My amps have no gain channels, no silicon chips, no cheap PC boards, foot switches and never any pedals. Plug in with a great guitar cord and turn it up. Play the guitar turned way down, increase to stage volumes, roll back the tone controls to hear that too. I then compare many of them directly to my work, and YOU decide if I'm a con artist or an insane researcher who never quit until I got what I wanted. My earlier videos I used my '73 Vibroluxe into a Celestion Alnico Gold speaker, which is about as squeaky clean and clear as can be. Its not a great sound, but you do hear ALL the details of the pickups, a great way to compare old versus new replicas. Mostly, I do NOT do comparisons where I tried to exactly copy any single one PAF. Most of my sets represent things from various years in a general way. PAF's are all going to be a little different depending on what year they were made and how much wire they were wrapped with. But they all sound like PAF's. Years ago, though I did exactly THAT. This double white 1959 set, I used all my knowledge to see how close I could get to this one PARTICULAR vintage incredibly expensive set. It sold for $12,000 after I fixed the coil break. The set only had one coil break that was sticking out of the tape, that I repaired, it was the only change, the other pickup was virgin and unopened. Just for yourself, this is the Vibroluxe and Alnico Gold Celestion: ruclips.net/video/r17XQ3Vj02Q/видео.htmlsi=CFL1LjkPjuMmWLzR I used the same guitar and amp settings for both sets. These days I use the Greenbacks because its the sound of Clapton's Beano album. Mick Grabham of Procol Harum, has friends who were there at the recording, so we DO know there were no alnico speakers in that session. Greenback were brand new then. Mick also built my JTM45 head replica that I use more often now, it had problems with bad solder joints and was a hellish experience to fix it, but its an amazing amp with all NOS Mullard tubes, KT66 power tubes, all NOS carbon comp resistors and mustard caps. He builds and restores British amps and makes replicas. In my recordings I use SM57 and a Ribbon mic together to capture as much reality as possible. You are right, people need to prove their point without hype, use the best means possible. I don't EQ the recordings or mess with them at all. I do use reverb a little bit because a dry recording without bass or drums is rather sterile when playing. I get what you are saying, but in the music industry hype is king. You go watch some video of a pedal being demonstrated by the factory, you buy it, and it sounds nothing like the video, its because they did it in a recording studio and used all the tricks to make it sound fantastic, but at home all the defects and digital artifacts just kill it :-) My philosphy overall is HONESTY, be honest with myself that if something I'm doing doesn't work, I will figure it out and adjust the design until it does what I want it to. Early on I bought a real PAF, that had the legs cut off so I got a deal, fixed and it became the baseline for me to compare to what I was working on to see if my ideas were working or not. Many failures over the years, but then it all came together eventually. The rest is up to the player. We all KNOW that there are guitar players out there that can make a $950,000 vintage Les Paul sound like crap. I saw a video of a guy playing one of Kossoff's Les Pauls through a giant PEDAL BOARD. It sounded awful. It takes years to gain "ears" to hear guitar tones in an educated way. Sorry this is so long, need to head to bed and get some rest......

They were cool pickups, but guitar players are too conservative and nobody bought them but maybe two guys. All they want are humbuckers and Tele pickups. Anything else scares them. They are difficult to make, but you are the only one in years to even notice them, LOL.

Dream on, I bought some of those, WD Music is who is selling them. They are just CTS pots with higher values, but they are so incredibly TIGHT, really hard to turn them, anyone who bought them didn't like that.

Subscribe to my Channel. When I have something for sale it goes on RUclips first. The guitar sold two days ago. Mostly I am only doing the vintage magnet wire sets these days, each one is different and they are expensive. I don't take direct orders for pickups now, but eventually will again.

sdpickups@comcast.net-----but for now I'm only selling the vintage wire sets which are the best of the best but quite expensive. I might have an old set of these I might sell maybe.

@@SDPickups let me know I am interested!

I use 49.6mm pole spacing which was the standard spacing. Only a few Gibson hollowbody archtops had narrower spacing on the neck PAF only. I forget which archtop it was at the moment, but ALL Les Pauls only used one spacing. Sometimes you see guys selling a PAF from an archtop, they don't really fit Les Pauls very well.

Its because they are PAF replicas, and I don't mean "PAF style," I mean they are literal point for point exact replicas of the real thing. I have over 20 years of science base reverse-engineering of these vintage pickups, and have seen them from every year they were made. Also did all the metallurgy work with the help of a top Senior Ferro Mangetics Alloys Engineer for almost 6 years, and the generous aid of Elektrisola Wire Corp. and their amazing high tech lab, examining piles of PAF and vintage P90 pickups from the classic period. There's a huge wealth of information I gained that you won't find anywhere else, and most of it I keep to myself. It sounds to me like you aren't familiar with real PAF's, my RUclips Channel is full of demo's of the real deal vintage PAF's from several years. A good one to watch is pretty recent, I did an audio poll to see if players could tell which were the real ones and which were a recent prototype. It was a blind audio poll, and I didn't say which was which. At the end I revealed which were mine and which were the two 1959 PAF's. 60% of the watcher thought mine were the real ones. The vintage PAF's were both 7.6K so they were brighter than my proto. Take a listen. Real PAF's are super clear, not muddy and warm at all. ruclips.net/video/c_YDr-lQ9pI/видео.htmlsi=XST9izJqvM5ydq-_

There's a ton of educational videos and debunking videos too. You can get a pretty good education if you browse through it all, and also learn how to make your Les Paul sound more like a vintage original. Enjoy!