"So recently I had been considering a pup swap. I was not happy with the 496R/500T combination in my Les Paul Classic. Last night in a last ditch effort to try to get the tone I was after- I broke out the flat head and started turning pole pieces. BINGO! After some minor adjustment I was able to get the exact tone I had been looking for- tight and articulate, fat and punchy. I adjusted the poles on the 496R to match the string radius, giving this pickup a more bell like tone…somewhere between bucker and single-coil. Finally the clean tone I’ve been dying to get out of my Lester! The 500T took a bit longer to beat into submission. :bonk After a lot of screw turning, I was finally able to get a tight and articulate tone from it. I ended up dropping the bass side of the pup and raising the poles on that side as well. It resulted in clearing up the mud and giving me a fat punchy tone. The middle position now sounds balanced and full. All three positions are now more that usable, they actually sound great no matter where the toggle is at. I’m very excited with the results and wanted to share. I didn’t think I was going to be able to salvage these pups, but now they perform exactly the way I wanted them to. The Lester sounds damn good now."

"Congrats SFW !! That is the secret with 'em Classics. You just gotta tweak it and you will come across the sweet spot.I've done this trick when i first got my Classic 6 years ago and havent changed the pups yet,for i see no reason.I though of giving it a chance to grow and did all this tweaking and havent looked back ever since.It's all stock still.A lot players tend to do thid with their axe.Swapping it before giving it a chance to grow on you.It's what a Classic should sound like,therefore being different from others.Right On !!! Hope your happy."

"Hey, that's too cool! I did nearly exactly same thing with the stock 496R and 500T pickups in my '96 Classic, they are tweaked very similarly to the way you describe.

I also spent some time resetting the heights of the polepieces, winding up with a stagger very similar to that of the poles on '50s Fender Strat pickups. I raised the 6th/Low-E pole to nearly double the usual height, lowered the 1st/High-E to nearly flush, raised the whole pickup till they just touched the Es, and adjusted the middle-four poles to just touch their respective strings. Then I lowered the pickup back down to what seemed a normal height, and further adjusted the middle-four poles by ear till there was a perceived balance between all six strings. I did pretty much the same for both pickups.

The bezel for the neck-pickup on mine was apparently cut at too shallow an angle, so that the "slug-coil" of the neck-p'up is farther below the strings, and the "screw-coil" is closer to them, than usual. I once compensated for this by carefully bending the brackets on either side of the pickup, where the height-adjusting mounting-screws thread. After I spent a little time playing it with the neck-pickup's coils quite equally parallel with the strings, I wasted no time in changing it back to the way it had been before!

The polepiece-tweaking, along with the shallow angle of the neck-pickup beneath the strings, resulted in a nice, almost Strat-like sound and punchy attack when using the neck-p'up. Big bell-tone on steroids! Sounds great clean, overdriven, or heavily distorted, single-notes or chords.

The bridge-pickup has plenty of bite, but not too bright, certainly not tinny or screechy at all. Enough attack and stringy articulation, with a satisfying fullness and warmth. Again, great whether clean, overdriven, or distorted.

All around, surprisingly crisp low-strings, and round warm full high-strings, largely due to the tweaked stagger of the polepieces."

Thanks for all the answers, keep them coming!
This is what caught my attention for the Bare Knuckle "Mule" Pups:
http://it.youtube.com/watch?v=nre-ddVAsaQ&feature=related

Is this just dropping into single coil mode with a switch on the volume knobs?

Great tone in that clip. I think pickup demos need to be a bit less overdriven than shown here, but, man, this guy's LP sounds fantastic. In the first segment it's amazingly Strat-like when he goes to the 12th fret, really SRV-esque. There's some mention of "push-pull" in the info, but without a better understanding of French I can't tell what he's saying. Is this just dropping into single coil mode with a switch on the volume knobs?

Scott Fraser

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH.... I bet you're right, I bet that this is a coil-splitting get-up with a push-pull pot for the volume-knob...

Yeah, THAT would get you a little closer to a Strat type sound!

2000 Les Paul Standard equipped with BareKnuckle "The Mule" pickups with push/pull on the neck pickup (series/parallel)

Boy, I'd like to see more about pole-piece adjustment. The only thing I ever read on it was Ted Nugent saying to lower them all flush with the surface or they sounded like crap. From what I read above, it can make or break a humbucker's tone.