Epiphone "Blues Power" Les Paul Custom
The Jared James Nichols “Blues Power” Les Paul Custom is the third signature model from the blues-rock powerhouse and Gibson Brand Ambassador who hails from Les Paul’s hometown of Waukesha, Wisconsin. The Jared James Nichols “Blues Power” Les Paul Custom pairs with the brushed nickel hardware, including Grover Locking Rotomatic tuners and a wraparound Lightning Bar bridge for rock-solid tuning stability. A single Seymour Duncan Jared James Nichols Signature JJN P90 Silencer in the bridge position ensures righteous tone and hum-free performance, and the included EpiLite soft guitar case helps keep this standout guitar safe and secure.
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Seymour Duncan JJN P90 Silencer
Jared James Nichols burst onto the scene as a throwback to the P90 playing power trio titans of the 70s. To deliver his signature sound, he needed a P90 that was voiced with limitless range that could cover everything from sparkling cleans to barking dirty tones. In his own words, he needed something “delicate and strong, like a grizzly bear and a paper airplane landing.”
After years on the road playing different venues coast to coast and abroad, he’s encountered a variety of unique hum inducing sources. Having a pickup that could retain the quintessential tone and appearance of the classic P90 pickup without hum was a must. The JJN P90 Silencer was custom voiced specifically to Jared’s unique tone without the hum. The pickups are drop-in replacements for any standard P90 route.
“Simply put, the Seymour Duncan Jared James Nichols P90 Silencer is my dream pickup.”
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H90 Standard
These low-wind pickups offer snappy and brighter single-coil tones for those in need of more chime and less power, and can be ordered with custom wood tops.
P90 – Humbucker
Boasting clear lows, thick mids, and percussive highs, this vintage-voiced P-90 was designed for versatility, clarity, and snarly midrange, and is available in a number of finishes.
Dream 90
These P-90s are reported to provide fat, warm-yet-crunchy body, and can offer full humbucking performance when both pickups are selected, because the neck pickup is reverse wound.
Heavy House P94
Based on the company’s House Special P-90, this pickup brings all the power and tone of a true P-90 but in a humbucker package—measuring 7.4k for the neck and 7.8k for the bridge.
Humbucker Sized P-90
A faithful recreation of a vintage P-90, these pickups feature spec plain enamel wire, alnico 4 magnets for the neck for clear and fat sounds, and alnico 5s for the bridge for bite and grind.
Pro-90
For those chasing authentic tone, these pickups duplicate the construction, materials, and growl of a vintage ’50s-era P-90 by using the company’s proprietary Vintage Core specifications.
Hum-90
Housing alnico 2, 4 , or 5 magnets and 43AWG coil wound around its humbucker-sized P-90 bobbins, these pickups are said to offer single-coil tones with clarity, presence, and a defined voice.
Fat Bastard
These single-coils are designed to offer plenty of crunch by capturing the classic P-90 tone of the 1950s with “a little South Texas funk” thrown in.
V-90
Regardless of your style, these degaussed alnico 5 pickups were made to be touch sensitive, respond well to pick attack, and provide tight lows, grinding mids, and singing highs.
Name: Conrad Warre
Location: Boston, MassachusettsGuitar: The Beecaster
As the guitarist for the Boston-based, acid-blues band Bees Deluxe,there were two different guitar problems I needed to address. We sometimes play shows that can last more than three hours, and we occasionally play venues that have prehistoric electric wiring in the building, especially if they’re running older kitchens for their dinner crowds. The extremely long shows could be helped by my playing a much lighter-weight guitar than I typically play.
The older (more venerable) venues who haven’t shielded or upgraded their electrical wiring properly result in my single-coil guitars picking up local television news stations and re-transmitting their signals or merely humming along with them tunelessly, and require some level of humbucking support. So I commissioned a local expert luthier, Michael McCarten of Athol, Massachusetts, to build me a single, noiseless-pickup guitar made of the lightest appropriate wood.
McCarten specializes in building archtop guitars, mandolins, resonator guitars, ukuleles, and pocket violins, and proved very amenable to collaborating with me on the design. We chose basswood for the single-cut body, a maple set neck with ebony fretboard, and a Seymour Duncan Noiseless Stack Neck P-90. I wanted him to install a P-90 because they aren’t as far removed from single-coil pickups in timbre as full-blown humbucking pickups. I need a certain amount of bite in the guitar sound to cut through the similar keyboard frequencies in the band.
In order to enable the guitar to have as wide a range of “voice” as possible, we threw in two push/pull pots. The single volume and single tone pots each push-pull. The volume is positioned as close to my right hand as possible to enable “violining” and switches the pickup output from series to parallel, and, at McCarten’s suggestion, the single tone pot changes the capacitor in use, bringing a sharper, spankier, brighter, more Telecaster flavor to the P-90 when needed. The Beecaster weighs less than 6 pounds, so now as soon as the venues in the Northeast reopen, and we get back on the road headed north and south, I’ll be ready to play the guitar tirelessly from dusk to dawn, like a musical vampire.
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