Jimmy Page Tone Figured Out

I think I figured it out, and it may or may not be common knowledge.

So to Tim Mills (Bare Knuckle), "That one [neck pickup], when you played it, had the most hollow and woody Strat-like tone I’d ever come across in a neck pickup. When I measured it, it had a DC resistance of 8.97k, I seem to remember, which is extremely hot for a PAF. Normally, that would sound as thick as river mud!”

I was thinking about this and I also heard him say that it was extremely bright which could contribute to his articulate playing style (I can't find that one).

If it's bright and strat-like while still being 8.97k, this immediately rung a bell in my head that the coils in the neck pickup are very imbalanced and asymmetrical. This would make sense if the slug coil was the hotter one, since the pickups screws in Jimmy's pickups are so low that people thought that he removed them!

It also makes sense for the eq curve of his tone. His tone is scooped in the low mids and boosted in the high mids, and that is very typical of an asymmetrically wound pickup (for example, the Dimarzio PAF Pro).

These are my conclusions, and I would like to hear all of your thoughts on this.

Acey

(watching this thread)

I think that I remember James (of Rewind pickups) that Page's #1 neck pickup was a very bright one for a neck pickup. Page, having recently acquired his #1 maybe liked what he heard in comparison to his favored Tele, and decided the Les Paul would work for him especially in live performance. The other aspect of his #1 was Page's mention of the sustain. Sustain back in the late 60's was highly sought after by guitar players.

Classicplayer

My thoughts are that...

1) "Resistance is futile", to tell it in a humoristic way. If JP's neck pickup was wound with a thinner kind of 42 AWG, its coils might measure 8.97k without hosting more turns than a P.A.F. wound with thicker wire.
BTW, James did a whole topic about DCR:

2)Asymetric coils are a way among others toward brighter tones, but not the only way. During a shoot-out here on MLP, in 2012, my ears made me win a free test of boutique P.A.F. clones which were super bright albeit symetrically wound.

3)I've several other sets of P.A.F. replicas which are also very bright sounding (including the PU's made with NOS parts in my LP number one). To me, it's rather a norm than an exception when it comes to real P.A.F.'s. See how the P.A.F. took as reference was described in this comparison from 20 years ago:

If a vintage LP has a warm muddy tone, it might be due at least partly to its wiring harness, BTW (if humidity has contaminated the cotton insulation of braided shielded wire and made it 4 times more capacitive than in dry air, for instance). And to me, the idea of warm sounding P.A.F.'s is overhyped by mass builders who use materials and apply mass production process giving a dark tone to humbuckers (so they haven't any interest to admit that real P.A.F.'s were bright more often than warm)...

Mileages may vary but those were my thoughts. ;-)

Footnote: it's possible to make any humbucker super thin and bright without added components, even with overwound coils. The trick is to wire the coils in series and out of phase... but it will defeat the humbucking ability of the PU.

FWIW - Two cents at best, probably...

Or it was actually a Strat or a Tele or a P-90. Through a Supro combo or a Vox.

Just my unsolicited input. Ed A is a well known player in the MLP forum arena. Ed is a Page aficionado and a very fine player. I was with Ed and his neck tone is some of the best I have heard in a long time. The neck PAF in his Les Paul is also in the upper 8.0 range. If I remember correctly, it was 8.9 or somewhere around that. He gets some great Page tones, too, and some great "honk" in the neck PAF. His neck PAF is stronger than the bridge PAF which seemed the opposite of what I always thought regarding PAF positions...hotter in the bridge. My PAF's are neck 8.1 and bridge 8.34 and are well balanced. Not necessarily any Page tone but I am sitting quite happy with my 1952 conversion and my PAF's. That said, I never went for anyone's tone. I just want the best tone I can get from my guitar, my amps, my hands and my imagination.

When I spoke with James Finnerty (Rewind Pickups) the ohm number means little to the sound of the pickup. I think James said it was the inductance that matters. It is possible for an 8.1 PAF to sound brighter than an 8.5 pickup and vice versa. James taught me to pay little to no attention to an ohm number...it is just a number and means little to the sound character of the pickup.

Edited to make my correction from resistance to inductance.

freefrog said:

2)Asymetric coils are a way among others toward brighter tones, but not the only way. During a shoot-out here on MLP, in 2012, my ears made me win a free test of boutique P.A.F. clones which were super bright albeit symetrically wound.

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How would someone go about making a brighter neck pickup that is symmetrically wound? Could be useful for some guitars of mine.

mdubya said:

Or it was actually a Strat or a Tele or a P-90. Through a Supro combo or a Vox.

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Only for the first album (besides You Shook Me which was a flying v), the Stairway to Heaven solo, and Ten Years Gone. A lot of people think he used it for LZ2 which he confirmed is entirely Les Paul in his anthology.

Johnnyslim said:

Just my unsolicited input. Ed A is a well known player in the MLP forum arena. Ed is a Page aficionado and a very fine player. I was with Ed and his neck tone is some of the best I have heard in a long time. The neck PAF in his Les Paul is also in the upper 8.0 range. If I remember correctly, it was 8.9 or somewhere around that. He gets some great Page tones, too, and some great "honk" in the neck PAF. His neck PAF is stronger than the bridge PAF which seemed the opposite of what I always thought regarding PAF positions...hotter in the bridge. My PAF's are neck 8.1 and bridge 8.34 and are well balanced. Not necessarily any Page tone but I am sitting quite happy with my 1952 conversion and my PAF's. That said, I never went for anyone's tone. I just want the best tone I can get from my guitar, my amps, my hands and my imagination.

When I spoke with James Finnerty (Rewind Pickups) the ohm number means little to the sound of the pickup. I think James said it was the resistance that matters. It is possible for an 8.1 PAF to sound brighter than an 8.5 pickup and vice versa. James taught me to pay little to no attention to an ohm number...it is just a number and means little to the sound character of the pickup.

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Ummm... That "ohm number" is a measure of the resistance.

However, it is correct that DCR is meaningless on its own and is really only useful when comparing two pickups that were wound with the same wire and are otherwise the same as a means to comparing how much of that same wire was wound around the coil. However, even at that point, two pickups wound from the same spool with different tensions are still apples and oranges due to the differences in coil geometry.

But in the case of the Jimmy Page neck pickup, the two coils (more than likely wound from the same spool of wire on the same machine with the same settings) being wound with different amounts of wire absolutely makes sense. It's a common technique of pickup builders these days. Back in the PAF days it was merely inaccuracies of the winding process that nobody was worried about. It's why some PAFs are magical and some are duds.

Acey said:

Only for the first album (besides You Shook Me which was a flying v), the Stairway to Heaven solo, and Ten Years Gone. A lot of people think he used it for LZ2 which he confirmed is entirely Les Paul in his anthology.

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No.

mdubya said:

No.

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Which part?

Acey said:

How would someone go about making a brighter neck pickup that is symmetrically wound? Could be useful for some guitars of mine.

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"How" has to do with the art of making pickups. ;-)

"Why" some humbuckers can be bright with perfectly balanced coils has to do with the following factors among others...

*Low inductance. Depends on the iron content of the magnetic circuit / magnetic cores (including magnets themselves) and on the number of turns on each coil. So, low DCR pickups have often a lower inductance than others...

*Low parasitic capacitance. Often there with scatter wound coils, which are often hand wound - albeit I've here machine wound coils with a very low stray capacitance... see my stance about the "art of making pickups". ;-)
Hint: low capacitance wiring can help here. And unpotted coils are spontenously less capacitive than potted ones.

*Hi Q factor. IOW, pointy resonant peaks. Often present with tightly wound coils, which also tend to exhibit a higher strat capacitance... It's not that easy IME to obtain a high Q factor AND a low stray capacitance. again, see my stance about the "art of making pickups".
Hint: higher pot resistance or no-load pots make the Q factor higher (and lowering a tone pot does nothing else than lowering the Q factor during 70% of its rotation).

*Low eddy currents, efficient magnetic circuit... an uncovered pickup with fiber baseplate, hi-carbon content magnetic poles and a powerful magnet (ceramic or A8) will most likely sound extremely bright if its coils are not overwound. But there's a balance to find here since efficient magnetic circuits can bring a pretty harsh tone.
Hint: thin covers without brass layer under their finish are better for less eddy currents.

Non limitative lists but those are the factors coming to my mind right now.

The unpotted hand wound Skatterbrane Twangbrane's that I've won here in 2012 have clearly a low parasitic capacitance and a rather low inductance. Even with A2 magnets, they were initially super bright and snappy.

For a bandmate, I've repaired a SG from the 70's with patent sticker T-Tops whose brigthness was due to different reasons: in this case, the low parasitic capacitance was due to the naturally short wiring in the guitar and the coils were bright albeit perfectly balanced because of a high Q factor... The neck pickup of this guitar is gorgeous: it makes unfretted low E sound a bit like in a Strat - but as a matter of fact, Strat pickups have also a high Q factor. ;-)

End of my rambling for now. HTH to some extent.

freefrog said:

uncovered pickup with fiber baseplate

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Would you think a carbon fibre baseplate would work?

Johnnyslim said:

I think James said it was the resistance that matters.

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Inductance/reactance

Acey said:

Would you think a carbon fibre baseplate would work?

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Fiber as in fiberboard like a Fender pickup... Carbon is conductive, though the resins used in CF assemblies are insulators.
No telling what kind of effect a CF baseplate would have.

Acey said:

Would you think a carbon fibre baseplate would work?

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I was effectively talking about fiberboard baseplates like this:


Now, it's not a magical solution: it's just a way among others to lessen eddy currents (way that Bill Lawrence appreciated, for instance, since he has designed many humbuckers without nickel silver or brass baseplates)...

I have amassed such a pickup drawer that I'm almost certain that ONE of them is going to do a good Page neck. But I don't have a workbench right now so the sonic experiments are in hibernation for the foreseeable.

The neck seems to be the most controversial part of the mix, which is clear from a lot of the above discussion.

Obviously James is the man for this, although his Page neck uses an A5, which, even though I'm sure he's nailed the tone because...well, because he's James, I would be more inclined to try and do it the way they did it in '59, which maybe wasn't A5? I'm aware that magnet types were all over the place in the original PAFs, but I just have the feeling that the A5 era came mostly after '59.

Anyway, that's what gives me pause, and should give absolutely NO ONE ELSE pause because I'm confident I'm being unreasonable here, and I put it right up front that to consider that I know something James doesn't is patently absurd. I just have a romantic notion that there's probably more ways than one to skin that particular cat, and I'd prefer one that wasn't A5.

It would be cool if someone who knows could confirm or debunk the mismatched coil thoughts.

Anyone tried the Wizz Pageys or the older Stephens Design Page set that he made before he was 'encouraged' to stop? Or did anyone have a particularly good Page sound experience from another brand/model other than the Re-Winds?

I think it also really depends on what "era" of Page's sound you're trying to get - obviously the first album was a Tele, but even #1 on Led Zep II through IV had the stock Gibson PAFs, and those sound a decent bit different to me, even on the studio albums, than the commonly accepted PAF neck/T-Top combo that was in there from 72 to a little after Zeppelin broke up. They're fairly distinct, with the obvious constant being Page's actual playing & feel for his instrument.

My two cents: my fave incarnation of Page's sound was when #1 had the original PAFs in it. His guitar and playing obviously sounded phenomenal with the PAF/T-Top combo - i've toyed around with the idea of having one of my Les Pauls converted to that particular spec (including the wiring harness), I just haven't had the willingness to scratch that itch yet - but for me, the slightly hotter/beefier sound it had from 69 to 72 (think Royal Albert Hall in particular) has always been the most appealing incarnation of his sound, to me anyway.

BlondieMcFilthy said:

I think it also really depends on what "era" of Page's sound you're trying to get - obviously the first album was a Tele, but even #1 on Led Zep II through IV had the stock Gibson PAFs, and those sound a decent bit different to me, even on the studio albums, than the commonly accepted PAF neck/T-Top combo that was in there from 72 to a little after Zeppelin broke up. They're fairly distinct, with the obvious constant being Page's actual playing & feel for his instrument.

My two cents: my fave incarnation of Page's sound was when #1 had the original PAFs in it. His guitar and playing obviously sounded phenomenal with the PAF/T-Top combo - i've toyed around with the idea of having one of my Les Pauls converted to that particular spec (including the wiring harness), I just haven't had the willingness to scratch that itch yet - but for me, the slightly hotter/beefier sound it had from 69 to 72 (think Royal Albert Hall in particular) has always been the most appealing incarnation of his sound, to me anyway.

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The pre vs post tone consideration is a bridge question. The neck was consistent throughout.

I think it's a given that everyone in this thread knows about the Dragon tele, and the DT pickups are pretty well nailed simply by sets like the Don Mare Zep-O-Tone. It's just not the mystery that Les Paul #1 presents.

I was humbled recently to learn that one of my fave Page "Les Paul" sounds was in fact his B-Bender '53 telecaster, so I understand that there's lots of room for poor assumptions. I was grateful/relieved to find out about the '53 telecaster, because that is also more easy to replicate than his PAFs.

Both eras of his pickups were awesome, but unfortunately for us the neck is something of a weirdo, which makes it the tough nut to crack.

BlondieMcFilthy said:

i've toyed around with the idea of having one of my Les Pauls converted to that particular spec (including the wiring harness), I just haven't had the willingness to scratch that itch yet

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If you're thinking of of doing the push-pull pot thing he had on his #2:

Don't

I did it myself and I had pretty much zero use for it, since it's not committed to muscle memory like rotating a volume and tone knob is (I fiddle around with those a lot).

Page didn't even have it in his number 2 until the 80s, and on his number 1, there's only a phase push-pull on the bridge tone that he had added with the Duncan.

I just ended up swapping it back since my normal pots were smoother. Waste of time but YMMV.