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i haven't been bowled over by both the noisiness and wooly-ness of the stock soap bars in the toronado, so i finally took the plunge on addressing it with a matched set of GFS Gold Foil P90s. seventy'ish bucks later, i'm now awaiting their arrival. this will be the first time i've hot rodded a guitar in about 10 years or so, and it's the first time ever using both the "kwik plug" gimmick GFS offers as well as the gold foil series. reviews have been mostly good, though there aren't that many; at this price point, i think i should be okay considering every other GFS product i've purchased has punched well above its weight. should be a unique sound and setup. i'll post before and after photos, but for now...

Nice! I’ve thought about getting gold foil soap bars for my goldtop for a while. The way exchange rate, tax and shipping from the US goes nowadays I might as well buy local boutique instead of gfs

Be interested in hearing your thoughts!

Obviously these things vary insanely as no two pickups of the same type are guaranteed to be similar, but I love the Mojo "goldfoils that look like Firebird pickups" I have in my Silvertone; bright and gnarly, sorta Tele bridge pickup-meets-P90.

Hope these work for you, the look is nifty as fuck

I hope they ain’t shit bigman.

Thanks for the encouragement, gents.

G, I'll post up some sondz so you can judge for yourself. If you like what you hear, we can prolly work out a way for me to ship you "spare guitar parts". Even if it costs $30ish to ship a pair, you'd still be dozens or more to the good.

Lol, just realized this thread is public, so I'll edit should we go down that road.

The equivalent of installing a Dual MP3 stereo from Walmart in your new Porsche.

Hope they sond kool even though I personally think this is ghetto af.

meh, we'll see. the strat pickups of theirs i've used were fantastic, and nobody who plays my hh jag with GFS humbucker-sized p90s has any complaints about build quality, tone, or noise. to each his own, tho, for sure.

Congrats! Looks great and the fact that you picked the ones with Alnico magnets is probably even better. The real deal ferrite magnet gold foils are famous for not cleaning up when you roll the volume pot back

The kwikplug thing is cool if you don’t want to (read: very bad at) solder, like me. Definitely do an demo dot

tried just a drop in replacement of the pickups, but the buzz is still there which would indicate some kind of ground issue, so ima re-wire the whole thing from scratch now. it's been a minute, but i got a new iron and some flux paste, so i'm good to go. will post sondz when completed!

just take a fucking photo

gahhhhh


totally rewired THE WHOLE FUCKING SCHOOL, and the buzz is still there. it's definitely a ground issue as touching the input jack with your finger kills it. i know with older teles folks used to connect a lead from the ground to their own bodies, but i ain't got any interest in that. need to get this fixed right.

funny thing is i think a previous owner dealt with this before, and their solution was to solder grounds to three of the four pots and then ground those with small wood screws throughout the cavity. i've never seen that before, and it didn't work anyway. it's supposed to be grounded to the bridge post, and there is a lead going from the neck volume through a tiny hole/route that appears to reach the lower bridge post (you have to remove the post to see the wire at the bottom of the post's cavity). my assumption after completely re-wiring it according to a gibson LP spec that the issue is the ground wire is somehow compromised and not actually grounding the guitar.

before i take this to the technician down the street, is there any other advice or tricks that won't require tools/skills i don't have?

Check that ground to bridge

Take the bridge out and use your phone torch and a pair of tweezers to fish out the wire a bit so when you screw the bridge back in it will definitely make contact, they’re not soldered and it probs has settled or been pushed down over time

Sorry edit

thanks a lot! that's where i strongly believe the problem is, too, but am concerned with making it worse. i'll give it a go after i get some tweezers long enough to reach the bottom of the cavity as that's where i can see the end of the wire.

cheers!

Good luck! You can’t really do any harm. I’d try to coil it like a spring or scrunch it up as that will help it keep contact and be self supporting. My Gretsch has this exact problem.

ah, makes sense. i hadn't seen this problem be so insistent before as every guitar i've ever done a re-wire on came out great.

SCRAPE ALL THE CHROME OFF THE PLATE. The wire wont ground to chrome

A good luthier could have probably diagnosed and fixed this issue for half the cost of a pair of dodgy Chinese pickups with silly extra holes cut all over them.

I think Nick was bullied by a goldfoil pickup in high school or something

Doog wrote:I think Nick was bullied by a goldfoil pickup in high school or something

I think the pickups in the og Silvertone Bobkat I had were considered goldfoils...I really liked them, decent output and tone and had nice natural compression.

I doubt these are anything beyond some standard alnico arctecs with added speed holes, a thin sheet of foil and a snakeoil salespitch.