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Mfr Date: Spring 1990, bought January 1993 used
Color: Ebony
Pickups: Stock Gibson pickups.
Nobody has actually been able to give me an official name for these.
These are usually referred to as "Lawrence" or "circuit board" pickups.
The switch was made sometime in 1990 to the 490 series humbuckers.
They're labeled HB-R and HB-L on the neck and bridge respectively.
See Gibson's Page
here.
Mods:
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Added Schaller strap locks,
1993
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Added new "dressing"
components. Bought new knobs, pickup rings, pickguard, switch
washer, switch cap and a 496R neck pickup. 5/2001.
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Refret job done 4/2006.
Used kind of an odd fret wire I had used before. It's tall, but not
too wide. Measures 0.095"Wide x 0.046" Tall. I wish I had done
this a long time ago.
-
Jimmy Page mod done,
4/4/2006. I used 4 DPDT push/pull pots to make this setup. The
two volume pot switches split the coils of their respective pickup.
The bridge tone pot switch reverses the phase of the bridge pickup so that
when you have both pickups on, you have that cool out of phase sound
similar to the Peter Green mod. The neck tone switch puts both
pickups in series (a stock Gibson is wired with its pickups in parallel).
This is a lot of fun to play. It's also a cool mod because you can
still just get regular Les Paul tones out of it when all the switches are
off. It gives you a ton of versatility of tone, yet doesn't change
the appearance of your guitar or its ability to have its tone from the
factory. Read about this mod here.
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Had microphonic feedback
issues with this guitar, so I decided to learn how to pot pickups. I
did this for the first time and did 4 pickups. Worked like a charm.
Read about it here. Did this 9/2006.
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Had this guitar refretted and
Plek'd by Phil Jacoby of Baltimore. The frets were not really
installed well from the previous refret. Since they weren't seated
that well, but had already been leveled, there would have to be a done of
material removed to get them even, and they could still move. Phil
recommended a total refret, which I had considered anyway, and I went a
long. It now plays great and I'm glad I did it. It wasn't
cheap, but he does great work and was very easy to talk to and deal with.
Even with shipping, I'm planning on sending future work to him as it comes
up. Check him out at
www.philtone.com.
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