matsickma said:
Anyone considering picking up one of these GSR T-500 and swapping in a set of origional Frantz pups? I certaintly gave this some thought about an upgrade to a DE400.
That would be a pretty expensive experiment, wouldn't it?
If I could even afford that guitar, I wouldn't take a drill and a dremel to it to make a set of old pickups fit.
And, contradicting myself a little here, I don't think there's thàt much voodoo at work with those old pickup I admit I dearly love. The ones I have (all early 60's) are built just like a P90, only a little cruder and sloppier, and either they have larger wire, either just less winds on the coil, but they read a good three Kohms lower on a meter than a typical Gibson P90. Physically much the same pickup, with lower resistance.
And the result is very predictable : they're twangier, have less bass and midrange and more highs, and the "midrange snarl" a typical P90 has is there, but it sits in a slightly higher midrange frequency. Still plenty of output or percieved output, even if just because there's two honkin' alnico bar magnets under the coil (a Gibson PAF has one)
And for a player like Billy or me, who love twang/rockabilly/Honky Tonk/etc...., that's wonderful because you get all that clarity and twang and treble - but I'm sure there are plenty of people who'd hate these pickups - they're definitely not what you want if your idea of heaven is fat Gibson crunch and power chords - much too wiry and thin and twangy for that. The opposite of a sunburst Les Paul, so to speak.
But the point I was going to make is - I'm pretty sure that if you drastically underwind a normal P90 (my franz pickups are between 5 and 6K resistance) you'd end up very close to the sound of a Franz pickup. Seymour Duncan knows pickups, so I'm sure they did something like that for the pickups in this new guitar, if they describe them as "Franz P90's".