PAF Repro Roundup

BELOVED FOR ITS dynamic touch sensitivity, clarity, openness, juicy harmonic richness, and an addictive blend of biting attack and forgiving compression, the original Gibson PAF — Patent Applied For — humbucker of the late 1950s has long been the Holy Grail of vintage pickups, and a challenge to reproduce. Several admirable re-creations have emerged in recent years, however, many of which are getting closer to cracking the code. We’ve rounded up several of these in the pages of Guitar Player in the past, usually logging a batch at a time every couple of years, and this issue brings us the latest such investigation.

Most makers today agree on the essential components and construction of the original PAFs, though some differ in the formulations of some of these parts. After all these years, there’s still plenty of debate about which approach best achieves the desired PAF-like result. Do you source the most accurate components you can find, put them together in a way you determine to be closest to that used at Gibson in the late ’50s, and trust that will get you there? Or do you let your ears guide you, and create “vintage-style” humbuckers that might not rigorously adhere to the recipe, but which are tuned by ear to sound like an acclaimed set of originals?

This roundup evaluates pickups from makers that take both approaches. We should note that this is not intended as a shootout, as such, but as a roundup of products already deemed worthy of consideration, each of which