nitro":3bubve3y said:
There are so many of the so called van halen pickups out there that to me the majority are just money makers and a lot of BS myth.The only pickups there were around back then(mid 70s)were Gibson pickups,Dimarzio and Mighty Mite that's it . Seymour Duncan started to sell pickups in 1979. Van halen 1(first album) was recorded in 1977 and released in 1978 so Edwards choses were the three brands(Gibson-Dimarzio-Mighty Mite)that were only available.
Well, Seymour was rewinding pickups in 1976 and 1977 and Ed could have gone to him and it looks like that's what Ed did because Ed mentions Seymour and rewinding in some of Ed's earliest interviews from 1978.
Ed says he has to get the PAF's rewound otherwise they don't sound right.
Swapping a magnet is like child's play to Seymour, so if Ed wanted more oooooomph then a ceramic magnet swap into a rewound PAF would have been easy for Seymour to do and that's basically what the Custom is/was and Seymour was trying to sell it as the EVH pickup in 1979 when Seymour started selling his own line of pickups.
Pickups are only one variable.
If anyone has changed speakers on an amp, then they will know that speakers are a variable too and some pickups might happen to work better (subjectively better) with some amps/speakers than with others.
Another thing is that just because Ed might have used a Les Paul or a Flying V or whatever Gibson on a track, it doesn't mean that the pickups are stock PAF's and they could have easily been rewound.
From Ed's first interview in mid 1978
http://jasobrecht.com/eddie-van-halen-c ... nterviews/
"Your main guitar with the Charvel body and neck – you have one pickup in it?
Yeah, just one. It’s a rewound P.A.F., an original old Gibson pickup. I had the coil rewound to my specifications."
"Do you modify your Pauls?
No. Just the pickups. They’re P.A.F.’s also, rewound.
You really like those P.A.F.’s.
Oh, yeah! Like on the record, I like the way they sound. They really sound different. They’re not stock, though. Like this one right here, I just bought that gold-top because it’s got two original ones in it, but they don’t sound quite right, so I gotta get ’em rewound."
