Do you know what PAF stands for? Look, I know most of you who read this do...but some might not. I've always been a big believer in trying to provide explanations for "dumb questions." Whenever someone asks a "dumb question" they typically feel dumb about not knowing the answer already, or assume the rest of us will think they're dumb....and that's just not right. We should all be more cool to each other.
ANNNYWAAAYYY I'mma get off this high-horse now
PAF stands for "Patent Applied For" which was a sicker that was place on the back of the early, Seth Lover designed humbucker pickups that are famously featured in the now gazillion-dollar 1958-1960 Gibson Les Pauls. They just didn't yet have the patent for the humbuckers, hence the stickers conveying it. We even made a shirt of the sticker. Check it out here.
The sound of that PAF humbucker is arguably the most famous guitar tone ever, that of Billy Gibbons, Eric Clapton (Bluesbreakers era), Jimmy Page, Peter Green and a whole freaking bunch more that I'm not gonna list here.
The funny thing is, right after the PAF sticker humbuckers came the "Patent Number" stickers. They finally got their patent, and a new sticker. From what I can remember, they're no different from the PAF pickups, but the PAF sticker ones go for what a nice new car would cost.
This is one of just a myriad of things Gibson/Fender/Martin etc. related that we obsess over and hyper-inflate $$$ values over that the folks who made them back in the day could never be aware of. They just put cheap little stickers on their thing so you wouldn't try to steal their idea.
Now with the context out of the way...we've jumped on the PAF bandwagon with the new Filterbilly PAF Vintage Spec Filtertron style humbucker! We had these designed to our specs, boasting an output of ~7.5K Neck, ~8K Bridge. We made a little video demo that you can see below. Watch it- it's super short, I promise.
I'm really excited about these pickups. Mega versatile. They can be fizzy or chime-y, depending on what you do with them. You can split the coils, but honestly, I don't think you even need to. A clean tone with compression gives you agreat "snap" like a single coil, but as soon as you add overdrive or fuzz, the dual-magnets really show you their sweet humbucker tone.
This is the latest example of how we work hard to offer our customers really cool, special-feature guitar pickups at an affordable price. I really hope you'll check them out, because I think you'll love them.
Oh, and to circle back, there are not "dumb questions," even though there might be plenty of jerks who will make you feel dumb for asking.
Rock & Roll, friends! I'll catch you later.
JT