This past winter, I bought a used Gretsch Billy Bo from an awesome local shop for a great price. It rapidly eclipsed all of my other guitars in playing time, it's just that good.
But what really bothered me was that it just didn't sound like "me". It has TV Jones Powertrons, which are overwound filtertrons meant to sound partway between a filtertron and a PAF. I own another guitar with TV Jones Classics (his baseline 'tron model) and they're superlative, but they're about as "fat" a pickup as I enjoy. I'm a singlecoil/noiseless singlecoil kind of guy, and the Billy Bo was edging too far into Les Paul territory for me.
The thing is, the Powertrons are really nice, and absurdly expensive, and it's a Gretsch 125th anniversary model, so this is one guitar I was afraid to mod. That didn't keep me from kicking around the TV Jones web site a lot though, and then I found this:
Now, one of my biggest complaints about pickup winders has been how they publish DCR but not inductance for most of their pickups, which is by far the more useful measurement for understanding output and tone (higher inductance = higher output, more mids, lower resonant frequency), though it's still only a part of the overall picture. It was really helpful to see this across all his models.
I noticed immediately that the Powertron Plus in the bridge position is a whopping (for me) 6.77 Henries! Well over double the 2.5H of the bridge TV Classic. A vintage strat pickup is 2-3H, and a vintage PAF Is around 4-5H. The neck Powertron, at 2.77H, is also a good 50% hotter than the neck TV Classic (which I enjoy on my other Gretsch).
So, one day as I was staring at the guitar wondering what to do about it (ok, to be fair, I was playing the guitar but happened to be looking at the pickups), I suddenly remembered a mod I mention on here from time to time but never actually do because I don't own any traditional style humbuckers - the six screw mod. It's where you remove the six adjustable polepieces of a PAF to drop its inductance (dropping output, raising resonant frequency, sounding "more single coil). It's also the mod that WRHB players used to do to make their guitars sound more like a typical Fender. Essentially, you end up with one single coil from a magnetic perspective, but a humbucker from an electric perspective (the second coil now acting as a dummy coil).
Realizing that these Powertrons really have inductance to spare (to my taste, that is), and that Filtertrons have twelve adjustable pole pieces to choose from, I realized I could try this mod on these pickups with little effort and no downside. After all, Hilotrons are essentially a single coil of a filtertron, and this mod would more or less yield an overwound and humcanceling hilotron. I decided to go all G&L Z-coil/WRHB mod on these guys:
And you know what? This thing frigging rocks now. It's spanky as all hell, with essentially an exaggerated version of the filtertron "kerrang" to the string attack that i love, while still being noiseless. And, with the tone knob down partway, it can still sound a lot like a lower output regular filtertron. With a mid and gain boost, it then gets back to a similar tone to the original, unmodified Powertrons.
It has totally cured me of my desire to change the pickups. This could easily be a dedicated model in his lineup and people would praise it as being the perfect middle ground between a classic Filtertron and a low-output Hilotron (or TV-HT, in his nomenclature). The only thing I think I'll do is to take a toothpick and try to dig out the potting wax you can see in the empty screw holes during my next string change. That's the white gunk you see in some of the holes in the photo - those screws were covered in it (even the heads, it was peeling off just from turning them with a screwdriver).
).