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Maybe my ears aren't good enough these days to distinguish the finer points but I think that as well as the pickups so much has to do with the wiring, the body wood, the fingerboard, the fretsize, the neck thickness, the cable, the pedals, the amp, the speaker, the room...
yep - only other thing would be the players pick attack and feel. I've known players who could probably make The Beast sound crap!
View my feedback at www.thefretboard.co.uk/discussion/comment/1201922
Any boutique winder worth his salt should be able to make you a VERY good PAF style pickup ... its not rocket science, and the parts for these are are reasonably readily available. You should be able to tell your winder what signature PAF characteristics are most important to you and he should be able to accentuate those tones in the final pickup.
I would be wary of any 'holy grail' claims mind, as there are in truth several different 'grail' tones!
Formerly TheGuitarWeasel ... Oil City Pickups ... Oil City Blog 7 String.org profile and message
I'd like to add with different playing styles, guitars, amps etc different types of PAF's (and any other pickup) will please listeners in different ways.
What i would be after is a smooth clarity in the neck and some nice power in the bridge.
Again im sorry if this is wishy washey.
Formerly TheGuitarWeasel ... Oil City Pickups ... Oil City Blog 7 String.org profile and message
View my feedback at www.thefretboard.co.uk/discussion/comment/1201922
Also different guitars react differently to different pickups - I put Seymour Duncan Seth Lovers in a Tokai 335 clone I had and it sounded *off the scale* good. I put another set in a different 335-alike and they were a bit 'meh'.
A good pickup maker will be able to tailor the wind (number of winds, tightness and shape of the wind) to the magnet (strength, type etc) to suit exactly what you want. But to do this, you will need to be able to describe what you are searching for rather than "a PAF".
Good luck in your quest - but don't get too wrapped up in chasing a tone down a rabbit hole!
I had a set of Monty's PAFs in a 335 and whilst each pup sounded great in isolation, I play 90% of the time in the mid position (tweaking the respective vol and tones to taste for a given song) and there was always an odd mismatch / almost frequency-specific cancellation effect that I was never totally happy with (..they were in phase, it was much more subtle than that) regardless of how much tweaking I did.
Ultimately I flipped them
As I understand it from taking to Matt, he uses an A5 in the neck and an A2 in the bridge and my experience has put me off mixing magnet types, but just wondering if there's a 'thing' there, or whether that was a one-off?
It still sounds absolutely fine, but it's lost that bell-like immediacy it used to have. Listening to either pickup in isolation you'd never predict that the combination would be a little lifeless.
Shamed though I am to admit this, reading your post has got an old Sheryl Cole shampoo advert stuck in my head
<add you're own Jordie accent >
"..weak, limp, lifeless.."