Best SG Pickups?

Looking for some pickups to plop in my Epiphone SG, as an excuse to gut the whole guitar and put in some new electronics. I like the stock pickups, the 700T is a good humbucker that has a nice beefy sound. I'm looking for something a little warmer and more responsive in the neck, and something a teensy bit darker and warmer in the bridge. Any suggestions?

EDIT: Bonus points if you suggest some fat and mean Pbass pickups.

I like late 60s or early 70s stock gibson humbuckers, the so-called T-tops, in my SGs... they're low wind but very agressive. Strong midrange focus but articulate even under heavy distortion. Very 70s rock sound. They're getting pricey. An alnico 5 PAF style like a duncan '59 is a good option too. Same basic output but a differnt, looser feel due to the longer magnet of the PAF design versus the t-tops that have short bars.

Awesome. I'm really going for a tight mid response, so those sound great... I'll do some sniffing. I might also look into a PAF, but I'm not as sure. Definitely going to enjoy that '70s sound with my new fuzz that's for sure!

PAF style pickups are so variable because PAFs are... acurate ones are on the bright side and don't come alive until they're pretty distorted where the ahrmonics pop out of the midrange like a ghost note. But they're loose sounding. To hear the difference between these pickupsin an SG compare Cream to early ACDC. Same basic amps, marshall superleads and both guys are wielding SGs, but clapton ahs a very early SG (although some of it is a 335, also with alte PAFs) and Angus used a stock late 60s SG with T-tops. It's subtle but its there. If you try PAF style ickups innan SG aim for alnico 4 or 5 magnets since alnico 2 was more prevalent in the early, pre-SG PAFs.

I think a used T-top will cost you about the same as a really good PAF copy by Throbak or Stephens Design these days. To give you an idea I usually get mine at guitar shows and trade effects for them... usually vintage effects.

Thanks for the solid advice Jim, excellent as always. The internet is proving you very right on the pricing haha.

Any shots at my bonus question?

I'm not picky about bass pickups. I like the stock fender mexico p-basses just fine. If I'm going to change up from the split p-bass pickup sound I like a totally different bass like a musicman stingray or a Gibson eb-0

Incidentally, the current Gibson 490,498, and 700 etc buckers are all relatives of the t-top. The 400 numbered ones are alnico 5 and the lower numbers are lower winds and tend to be closer in sound to a T-top from the 70s where the numbers >498 use ceramic magnets with the hot winding for a really hot output while better preserving treble with the bright ferrite bar magnet and tonally could be said to split the difference between a T-top and the notorious Gibson Dirty Fingers. What you have is in that ceramic, overwound zone and is definitely as closely related to a Duncan JB as a T-top. So if you want a more of the same only better consider a JB.

EDIT: You may want to contact my friend Ken at http://www.angeltone.com/ and ask him about a custom set. If you describe what you want exactly he'll make it for you. He generally will let you send them back if they're not right and he'll re wind them or change magnets free of charge. Last time I had him make me a full custom set it was exactly what I wanted right out of the gate but I really knew what sound I wanted and had ideas about the magnets, wire, and baseplate material etc to get me where I was going. I'm pretty knowledgeable about pickup construction and how it influences tone, but I really think that if you can describe YOUR sound to Ken he'll find it for you using just his experience building. If you just want straight replica pickups he does that too and replica T-tops from him might come in a bit cheaper than old ones which are starting to cost hundreds per pickup.

Sweet, awesome. I'll totally contact him, I'm sure he can help me find my tone! In terms of the bass pickups, I have an indonesian Squier VM and I just want some p-bass pickups with tight low end. The bass on mine is way too loose-feeling for me.

make sure to change the pots to true 500k whn you change pickups. CTS are the classic, but if you want less fight from your knobs when you make pinky adjustments try Bourns. If you're really worried about vintage accurate audio taper you can look at RS guitar works and spend a fortune.

Will do. I think mine are 250k right now so that might not be a bad idea to do.

that's eating all of your actual treble and some of your upper midrange zing... 250kohms is too much impedance load on a humbucker because of how much higher the resistance of 2 series coils is than even 2 coils in parallel like the in between strat positions. The difference with the same pickups might be subtle through some amps but its unmistakably there. its night and day through some of my gear. You can also play with your tone cap values. I thinks tock Gibson should be .022uf and fender is .047uf... if you go to .01uf on the neck pickup you can get the Clapton woman tone with tone at 0 instead of having to fiddle for in between settings. If that's your bag. I did it on one of my guitars a while ago and I legitimately like it into a fuzz.

What about the bass? What would you recommend for the p-bass and j-bass pickups? I think it's got 250k or 350k pots

as I said, fender is 250k and .047uf... although they experimented with some higher values in the 70s

Hmm, okay. If I put 500k in them, think it would sound good? I've next to no experience with pot values and how they affect my sound.

its a bass, by letting more treble through your amp will 'hear' less lows. You can only push so much bandwidth through a given amount of headroom without sacrificing something and with both controls wide open you will have to compensate in the tone stack to re-establish a familiar balance of bass and treble. Imagine you are pushing an equal volume of oil and water through a small pipe, whichever has more pressure will inevitably come through the pipe in a larger quantity. YMMV based on the tonestack of your amp and your speaker cab's low end. Once you have a brighter volume pot value you can't really take that treble away at the volume control but a 500k tone control turned down a bit will become 250k. The resistance value goes down as you turn it down but the tone capacitor is more or less bypassed at 10 so there's just a tiny bit of additional loading with tone at 10 (some people hear it, others don't... it jumps out at me, but tis subtle and very dependent on how you wire the tone cap and pot, there are different methods that yield different coloration), but the minute you roll it down it creates a full on low pass filter and 250k volume control tones will be in there although the slope of the low pass filter probably won't be a dead match for the direct pickup loading of a wide open 250k volume pot into a wide open tone control. You can play with the cap value to change the cutoff point of the filter until you get a spot that sounds right to you. I highly recommend alligator clips if you're going to fuck around with the classic formula. If you want a classic, stock sound look up stock 60s Pbass wiring and just use those values. If you wanna experiment go ahead. As long as the pot values are going up and the cap values go down you will have some leeway to approximate stock sounds with the tone control if the new brighter sound doesn't suit all the music you want to play with your bass. Keep in mind most of the sounds you are used to hearing on records are stock wiring schemes. Whether a modification is an improvement or not objectively, your ears are trained to hear thigns a certain way... which is why we all hate 250k and 300k pots ina Gibson. We're used to hearing the pre-80s 500k wiring on classic albums ;-) Maybe a little darker isn't worse, some folks like that, but most of us are expecting one thing from an SG or LP and we're thrown when we just can't find the top end.

Okay, I got it. Awesome summary, thanks Jim

Thanks. I'm always trying to make acoustic and music electronic ideas understandable to people who don't have a strong interest in the science. Usually I just bore the shit out of them.

By the way, I have gotten back in the recording biz part time and have been mixing records for some Philly acts... if you would like me to mix your next album, send me rough mixes and we can negotiate a flat fee. I am not charging hourly since this isn't my main gig and I tend to multitask.

Will do, thanks! We're recording right now in a cheap studio, so if I don't like the job of our producer, I'll email you the demos.

if you wanna hear some finished cuts from the album I'm finishing right now elt me know. I can fwd mp3s or link you to higher res versions via the google drive folder for the client. I'll need your email. Dunno if I have it already...

[email protected] is it.

ok, I'll wing you over some stuff from this... you may want to turn it up a bit, its not mastered and the elvels are down at -14lufs so it'll be the right volume for spotify as is and thenw e can goose it up for other formats from here.

EDIT: I just google drived you to our backup folder for current 16bit 44.1k masters... if your guy can do better than this with literal garage band recordings I'd like to hear that