Seymour Duncan Ssts 2S CRE Triple Shot Switching Les Paul® – Mounting Ring Set Cream

If you have a 2 humbucker guitar and are looking for some more subtle flavours these are a clever and discrete way of obtaining some new sounds. However there is a caveat. I have a Gibson Les Paul Studio with the original 4 core 490 and 498 humbuckers. The original wiring came with 2 coil split push pull volume pots on a pcb. Unfortunately Gibson for whatever reason now use 400k pots which dull the sound and modern wiring which means if you turn down the volume even a fraction the tone goes too. So to get the natural tone of the Les Paul back to a premium I replaced the pots with CTS 500k and wired it in 50s style thus allowing me to turn down the volume with no loss of tone. This meant losing the coil split option - though in the original wiring the coil splits were weak and dull. So I decided to get these babies. Although the 4 wire colours on the Gibson Pickup are the same as Seymour Duncan the confguration is different. Only the white lead is the same. It wasn't a breeze to wire these in. The solder plate is held to the back of the pickup with a sticky pad (one fix only) and the cable joining it to the triple shot is not very strong. In fact it was broken in the neck pickup and I had to go to the supplier for a replacement. So be careful and if you can check out all the switches work with a circuit tester. In the end I have both working and they sound great. Though 2 slight negatives. In each pickup the 2 different single coil options sound more or less identical as does the parallel setting though without the hum. There is perhaps a little more tonal difference on the bridge pickup but really a parallel / series switch would give the same tonal choices in a simpler way. The second negative is that is not easy to operate or see the settings in a gig situation.