498T

[lovatobarry]

I think I got lucky,

I don't have a lot of money, and I love Gibsons, I have a Epiphone SG-400, and I wanted it to sound more like my gibson les paul. so I set out to get educated on gibson pick-ups. I decided I wanted to put 490 pick-ups in the sg, so I looked on line and found e-bay and used 490s. you never know what your gonna get. I found a chrome or nickle set, ( I think they are chrome covers), but I had to bid on each one separately, at the last minute someone out bid me on the bridge pick-up so I lost it. I then started bidding on several pick-ups. I wanted chrome covers cuz that's whats on the sg and it looks good. IMO. I also have an epi dot studio with no covers on the pick-ups, so I figure I can always put them on it too. I end up winning 2 490T pick-ups and 1 490R with no covers. as I was paying for the 490R with the chrome cover I messaged the guy telling him I wished I could have gotten the pair but missed out. He e-mailed me back telling me he still had it, the guy that out bid me was from out of the country and he didn't ship outside the us. so he sold me the pick-up, cool I got what I wanted, plus a few I didn't.

I am a procrastinator, 8 months or a year later I still haven't put them in yet, so last week I was bored and decided to do that. I seen a way to do it without removing the strings from the pegs, so I clamped on the capo, loosened the strings and removed the bridge, set it aside and began. I had marked the pick-up ( I thought) when I got them 490R / T. but I decided to check my self because I had read that the pole piece spacing is different. I discovered I had miss marked them, and when I put my metal tape across the pole pieces to measure them I notice that the Bridge pick-up had a very strong magnetic pull, much stronger that the neck pick-up, I thought I had a bad neck pick-up at first, so I checked the other 490s that I have and they all felt less than the 1 chrome cover bridge pick-up. I then broke out the ohm meter and checked the resistance, the bridge chrome cover pick-up had 13.99 ohms, all the other 490s had between 7.5 and 7.8 ohms. so I went to the web to see what was up. I know Gibson does not list ohms value for there pick-ups so I kept searching, and then I found a site that sell the pick-up and listed an ohms value, the 498T had the value that my pick-up has, and I believe the stronger magnetic field is due to the alnico V magnet on the 498T where the 490s have an alnico II magnet. I thought the guy that I bought these pick-ups from said they came off a 04 les paul. I know they use these on some les pauls and some SGs. I only changed the bridge pick-up cuz I wanted to see how it sounded first. WOW I really like it. and another cool thing is, before when I would switch to both pick-ups the guitar did not sound good at all, now with the 498T and the original epi neck pick-up it sounds good together, I still plan on changing the neck pock-up to the 490R chrome cover pick-up, but for know I am enjoying my epi SG.

any feed back would be greatly appreciated, I have no one to talk to about this stuff that understands or is interested.

[Dynadude]

I like the tone you get with a hotter bridge pickup, and a fairly tame neck pickup. It seems to give you a much wider range of tone when using both.

 

Every set of custom wound pickups I buy have the bridge pickup overwound 10 - 15%. If the pickups are too closely matched, it really seems to limit the range of tone and volume.

 

I know that most guitars are engineered to have a certain range of tone/volume, and that is great, IF the tone/volume they produce is within the range you use, but I tend to be all over the place, as far as tone/volume, so I want the option of the expanded range.

 

Also, if you use a tube amp for the natural distortion, you will appreciate how a slightly overwound pickup will push the gain.