Lollar Novel 90 Set NRMB

...and neither had you, honestly. these are way beyond good, great and huge, beyond even my wildest expectation and imagination.

i have installed them onto a Ibanez MMM1, an old baritone [neckthrough] mahagony plank with 28" scale length that I string with Elixirs 012–068 and tune to B, and they make her... scream, moan, sing, laugh and cry, whoa!

the stock humbucker were there since it left the factory, and some really refined ones, same as George Benson's and John Scofield's, not your cheaply dead humbucker. then, over the years, i've gradually brushed my taste and grown a passion for full bandwidth, whole spectrum, great attack, (way) huge dynamic headroom, on both clean and dirt, and rotten, too, with a touch of growl at any latitude.

well, these Lollar Single Coils in 'mbucker format are quite the thing. and massively. it's like if i now had a Telecaster on steroids, with a sound bigger than a Les Paul, colored the hues of golden Dolomites, and i can still can pick harmonics as clear and liquid as the bluest of oceans.

they actually work wonders with the stock 500k pots, which run smooth as a pool marble top, and while the tone circuit would now enjoy a higher cutoff, these pickups respond to my Neutrik Ultimate TonePlug-equipped signal cable with 3 distinct, different, defined voices (plus their own real tone) that they're all to die for.

on a side note, maybe of interest to DSP-pedal junkies (and noise freaks) like i am, i was afraid of the proverbial hum that P90s are renowned for. i was totally off track, my fear entirely unjustified: they're actually as quiet as the [fully shielded] P90s of my Yamaha Revstar RS502, and get away totally unscathed by my tablefull of wailing banshees, not a tad noisier than the humbucker they've replaced.

there's an icing on the cake: the way these two giants have been matched as a set results in them adding to each other in a way that's so much different than the tone of each of them alone... and i wonder if the same result may have been reached by buying them individually instead of "as a set".

my Ibanez now's got highs and harmonics crisp and siliky, attack like a machine gun burst, and lows as deep and focused as the tightest of active hi-powered ones, but all of this happens at any gain.

this is my first set of Lollar singles that i've bought as parts, and though i've had a guitar that came stock with Lollars before, experiencing how they now make this wood glow in the dark and throw sparks and wrap you in hot chocolate, all the while grinding granite when you play it, i'd be temptied to explore Lollar's whole catalogue and place others in other guitars, honestly.

EDIT: one month later, i took the liberty to replace pots, capacitor and wiring, to check if there was still something to gain. i used 500k (audio) CTS pots, i wired everything with the same shielded cable that comes with the pickups (actually, i literally took the excess of it from both), and chose a 15nF Orange Drop capacitor instead of the stock 22 that was on the guitar before. i can't say there's a difference that can be proved, it sounded wonderful before and so does it now, the capacitor puts the response in a wider (and, to me, more usable) range, and i'm still positive that i couldn't ask for more.