Quote:
Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
P-90...can be a little noisy if you play in places with old wiring/neon/fluorescents...
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Some of that can be alleviated by positioning yourself correctly in relation to your amplifier - that's how guys did it in the old days (still do it in some venues with my single-coil guitars) - or taking advantage of the modern wiring scheme on many such instruments, where the middle (both on) position on the selector switch places the pickups into humbucking mode. Although there have been humbucking variations on the P-90 theme on the market for a while now (I owned a '90s ES-135 with factory P-100 stacked soapbars for a number of years) I find them one-dimensional and soulless compared to the original; while humbuckers may have become the dominant jazz pickups over the last 60 years, with Guild's reissue of the DeArmond 1000/1100 suspended pickups and the new crop of P-90 jazzboxes like the Godin CW II players are rediscovering the classic tones that formed the foundation of jazz guitar as we know it today. For the uninitiated, playing a P-90 guitar through an old-school tube combo, at moderate volume, can be
highly addictive (speaking from personal experience here) - there's a sweetness and definition to the upper mids that you're not going to get from any other pickup, which lends clarity and articulation to your tone (the Beatles made good use of the P-90/Vox "chime" during the
Rubber Soul era); frankly, until I played (and immediately bought) a P-90 LP goldtop in 2011 I didn't realize that was the sound I had been chasing for nearly fifty years - and between the goldie and the Godin I've got just about every style of music covered...