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joepampel

Getting a used Les Paul & dialing it in

Updated: Apr 10

Some hopefully helpful tips about getting your own guitar & dialing it in.


I really wanted a Les Paul, but with vintage pricing in the "house" range I needed to be creative. Heck, Mark Knopfler's just sold for over $800,000. Mansion money. Hard to believe! The '59 Les Paul is rightly famous, and rare, and it would seem that Gibson got a lot right as fate would have it.

So I should just go grab a re-issue right? But even the 1959 Re-issue (known as the "R9") was up in the "Blues Lawyer" price range, I think list was around $8k at the time. When you are going to gig at a small club and take home maybe $80-100, hauling $10k worth of gear to do that makes no real sense. That's what, 1,250 gigs at $80 a night? These are not instruments for working musicians. But I am stubborn.


So I looked around the used market. At the time, a 10 year old R9 was going for around $4k. Still a lot of money, but much closer to earth. They still used Brazilian Rosewood on the fingerboards up through 2003 so these were worth paying extra attention to. I watched the various sales, and read up on the various internet groups to see what the buzz was. The good news is that the custom shop guitars are made with their best wood by their best luthiers. That's certainly a fine place to start. They also hold their value well so if it didn't work out I was comfortable that I would be able to re-sell it. So while I do not like buying guitars sight unseen, I felt like this had some good points going for it. I also believe just based on experience that guitars get better with age and use. Nothing scientific there, but if anyone wants to put up grant money I would be all over it. So a 10+ year old guitar made as well as Gibson could make one seemed like a good bet.


The bad news is that Gibson still had quality issues despite that "noble birth" and also made changes that were likely driven by what they perceive as market forces. You know the story; everyone "wants" the old guitar but in reality they want some set of tweaks to make it more contemporary. The vast majority of us have probably never held a 1959 Les Paul, let alone spent quality time with one. I've played some old ones, but never a 59. It has to be tough to make those calls as a manufacturer, but I am definitely from the "don't call it a re-issue and then go change stuff" school. My own tweaks here would be of the "getting the details right" variety. My own bias is that the thing is famous in its 'as delivered' state and before I change anything, I should start at the beginning.


I found one that looked good finally, was a 2003, it was priced well - and it was somewhat local. I messaged the seller and he agreed to let me come pick it up in person so we could avoid having to ship it. It was gorgeous, a flame top, a big fat vintage neck, even a pink Lifton case with all the candy. I bought it and brought it home.


The good:

Gorgeous, comfortable to play and much more affordable than a new guitar or a real vintage Les Paul.

It had the proper neck to body angle of the older guitars so it plays like butter.

The Bad?

The nut was poorly cut. That was hard to believe.

It badly needed a proper setup. Depending on who you ask, this is BAU on a new guitar but I have trouble swallowing that on an expensive custom shop instrument.

These guitars despite being "re-issues" don't come with vintage style pickups, they come with "Burst Buckers" which are a hotter, more modern pickup. Nice, but not if you want that sound.

Along those same lines, the controls are wired in a modern way rather than how the originals were wired. That probably sounds like "cork sniffery", but I can assure you it is not.


Step one:

I set the intonation and action as best I could. The LP is bit different than a Tele or Strat which are what I am used to, the bridge goes up and down as a unit and then the saddles go back and forth and the tailpiece moves up and down. On Fenders the saddles go up and down and back and forth and the bridge does not move. It was better but not great. Every guitar has its "things" and I had to learn more things about the Les Paul. I did not try to tweak the neck. I wanted to go slow and it seemed ok anyway. To help me figure out where I was, I did a bunch of gigs to get comfortable with what it could do and how the different scale length felt. Would I even be able to play it effectively?


Step 2a:

With some experience under my belt I felt like I had a better idea of what was needed. I ordered a pair of Seymour Duncan antiquities. SD has been winding pickups about as long as anyone and does a fine job IME. You can certainly spend more and there are a lot of models to choose from from as many winders. These pickups are not as hot and have a clearer sound than the stock Burst Buckers. Interestingly, like the 50's pickups I put in my partscaster Tele, these are also using the "weaker" AlNiCo II magnets but the sound is completely worth it.

If I was playing more modern rock, like the Foos, I would have left the BBs. They have that midrange push and sound great doing high gain but I was looking for something else. I grew up with Led Zep, John Mayall, Bad Company, Aerosmith, Free. I wanted that clear, open sound they got - lower output pickups into 4-hole Marshalls. The Antiquities do a fine job here in my experience. I could not be happier with them.


Out with the old:


Step 2b:

While I was in there installing the pickups, I also re-wired the guitar and installed VIP potentiometers (aka "Pots") The potentiometer is the electrical name for the control you are turning when you turn a knob on your guitar. It is just a variable resistor. There are 3 terminals, beginning, end and then one for the "wiper" - the piece the moves. As you turn it, the value changes between the wiper and whichever end you have hooked up. Now there are a variety of approaches to how that value changes as the thing turns - called "tapers". There is linear taper which is just nice and even all the way along. Then there is "Log" aka "Audio" taper which is logarithmic. And then even within "audio taper" there are a variety of values. Why? Well, firstly your own hearing is log. While there are some circuits where a linear control is fine, most often you will see volume controls be audio taper so that they work better for humans - so that the changes on the control relate intuitively to the changes in what you hear. And within that, the specific taper is crucial to "what happens where". On the proper pots, rolling off the volume to about "7" cleans your guitar up nicely for rhythm and as you bring it up you pick up gain quickly as well as some brightness for leads. To get that to work, you need the right taper. This is the kind of tweaky thing that falls into the "special sauce" category but it is hard to over stress it. On amps it can determine a lot about the character of the amp based on what happens where on the knobs and how quickly. There are sounds you might not even be able to get because they happen inside of too small a range on some controls.


How it started:


On the original "50's" wiring scheme, the Tone control also affects the output of the guitar, so rolling off the treble actually lowers your volume a tiny bit. While this is not for everyone, if you can get used to it there are some wonderful sounds to be had and it is easy to switch them around on the fly. You can see here that the guitar came wired as "modern". They did a very clean job of wiring at the factory. The tone caps are supposed to emulate the original "bumble bee" capacitors in the originals.


With the new pickups and authentic style of wiring it did what I have read is the 59 thing - it sounds like a "Super Tele". It has great clarity, clear highs and a twangy bass. No more 1990s mid bump.


It is important that the pots be 500K in order for them to work as expected with the PAF style pickups. The worst factory set up I have seen to date was my bandmate's '70's LP that had 1 Meg pots that were linear taper; moving them around did almost nothing until you were down by 2 or 3 and they didn't let the pickups sound right. One from the "what were they thinking?" file. I have also seen some very low valued pots, down around 3-400K which is also not good. Something worth checking if you are not sure if your own guitar is at its best. I re-wired his Les Paul properly and it really came alive and sounded very similar to my own in the end.


While the two wiring schemes look similar there are some important differences.

The taper of the pots (which you can't see) and then the way the tone control (the two pots on the right hand side) load the volume control. You can see that the capacitor (the disc-shaped component in the diagram) is connected from the output of the volume to the middle of the tone control in the modern scheme. In the 1950's scheme, it is wired from the wiper of the volume to the tone control. The difference from a player's point of view is the modern approach has a more consistent volume roll off as you roll it back at the expense of some high end, and the 1950s responds a bit differently and tends to have a nicer high end. Whichever you prefer it's easy to try out and revert if you don't like it. But give it a chance.





From the VIP site: they are emulating the resistance curve of the centralab controls used in the old guitars. Most modern audio-taper (log) pots use what is commonly called a 20% taper. That means that at half rotation ("5" on a 1-10-knob) they will read 20% of their total resistance. That is where the "other" line falls on the chart above. This is fine for most amplifiers, but is not quite there in this case in a specific guitar application. The old Centralab pots used were (by this chart at least) about a 10% (?) and you can see that nearly half of the resistance available is found between roughly 7 and 10. This is what makes them so responsive when you are going from rhythm to lead settings on the guitar. You only need to brush them with your finger to get pretty helpful changes while playing. I think it's really great.

If we graphed a linear pot here, it would have 10% of its resistance at "1", 50% of its resistance at "5" and so on. It would be a straight line.


Step 3: the cherry on top

The factory nut was frankly pretty bad. The string grooves were unevenly spaced and it was still hard to keep the guitar in tune for a length of time. I am spoiled because my Strat will stay in tune for days or longer. I took the guitar to John Frondelli who has forgotten more about luthiery than I may ever know and he did an amazing set up along with cutting a new nut for the guitar. This was the cherry on top; now it plays like butter and has great intonation as well. Here is old vs new. The low E was pretty far off. John also does a thing where he angles the nut slots for the strings to help them bind a bit less. A straight pull would be ideal but a LP is never going to be able to do that with its headstock layout.


I still use Big Bends nut sauce, but the guitar is worlds more stable now and the strings don't typically bind in the nut anymore. The intonation is great and it is a joy to play. Life is good.


Old vs New




























References:

Special thanks to John "JR" Frondelli for answering a million questions and taking such great care of my guitars!

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