Switching Les Paul pickups?

[red5]

Alright I just received an offer to sell my Les Paul pickups to my friend and my Rat pedal for $180 which gives me almost enough money to buy new pickups for the Les Paul... SWEET!

I have replaced pickups in strats a few times, piece of cake and all. But with Les Pauls it seems like it might be a pain in the ass... have to feed wires through holes or something? Maybe I will take the pickups out, look at them and be like "piece of cake" but I don't know...

Any tips from anyone who has done this would be nice!

Dean

[rufes]

New pots (500K) and new caps are a must IMHO before replacing the pups.
The 50s wiring mod is a great improvement too.

[red5]

Damnit!

Cant I just bypass my pots? I never use them anyway - they kill tone, all of them do!

[Strat Man Dwight]

Sure, it'll be a piece of cake for you. There are tons of wiring diagrams online, but if you got the live leads soldered to your volume pots (lugs # 3), ground the negatives to the back of a vol pot, or to the centre ground of the metal base plate, if so equipped. Back of vol pot grounding is correct.

You can bypass the tone pots and run wide open. To do that, remove the capacitors which run from the same lugs (#3) of the volume to the centre lugs (#2) of the tone pots. This is based on a standard Gibson Les Paul wiring configuration. SMD

[rufes]

Originally Posted by red5

Damnit!

Cant I just bypass my pots? I never use them anyway - they kill tone, all of them do!

I have done everything and more to a RG550 I bought in 1999. Now it has just an SD-EVH in the bridge, the volume pot, a little cap and the plug. That's all and it sounds GREAT for what I want.

I would definitely leave the volume pot.

[red5]

I put in the new pickups today. Pretty easy. Kind of tough soldiering them in though because the soldier I had didnt remelt easily. I lost a spool that was great.

Have yet to try them as I am at work and I put them in at work....