JJ's Guitar Pickups: SOVEREIGN '59 Alnico V Set

Australia's Ben Bailey makes superb pickups at his company, JJ's Guitar Pickups. The Sovereign '59 Alnico V set is Ben's take on the classic from the same year. It's all in the detail and these pickups sure have plenty of that! I might as well just glue them into this Les Paul because they won't be leaving anytime soon. 10/10.

Today's tools:

Guitar: 2002 Gibson Les Paul Classic Honeyburst
Amp: Marshall SV20H 1959SLP + Greenback IR (via Fractal Audio X-LOAD and hosted by Axe-FX III Turbo)
Cables: BOSS
Strings: Ernie Ball
Camera: GoPro HERO10 Black and Canon D60
Soundcard: Fractal Audio Systems Axe-FX III Turbo
Computer: 2017 Apple iMac Pro, 2.5 GHz 14-Core Intel Xeon W, 64 GB 2666 MHz DDR4, Radeon Pro Vega 64X 16 GB

[MichaelSorensen-blec]

Very expressive. Great playing. They sound great!

[ditchgator]

Letting your playing speak for these pups was pure genius 😎👍

[murrayguitarpickups]

I've been looking forward to hearing these.

[musicmann]

I love all the tones. Very nice pickups! It's not common for people to demo pickups. The fact that you have to uninstall the originals and install the ones that you're demoing requires a lot of work. I realize you had your buddy do the installation, but not a lot of people would go through the time and bother. So, nicely done. I liked these pickups in all positions. Kudos!

[colhad]

What a pleasure to listen to ur guitar journey...
I have a question : You would buy a Schecter guitar or a Reverend one ? if you have an experience of them...

[rullya]

Brett, man, where is you band? What about Brett Pit?)

[glennlilley]

Well, they're a bit tasty
With all excellent boutique guys out there, I'm liable to go skint buying guitars to put the buggers in

[asmol]

As for me, it's a clone of Seymour Duncan '59 for the English market, IMHO... Nothing personal, just the sound seemed similar to me. My strat has Hot Roded pickups, in HSH configuration, all from Duncan (920D custom brand). I like the sound in general, but yours seemed sharper to me and I will think very hard about replacing my pickups with Duncan '59 if I can't get a good sound on what I have. I'm still a big conservative. ;)

So it goes!