GFS Brooklyn Pickups

[Pearly Gator]

Just received a pair of these from Guitar. This weekend I installed them into an Ibanez Artcore AG75 hollowbody to test. These measure around 8K ohms and are a ceramic magnet single coil pickup, per the advertising.

Sonically, they are very clean with nicely balanced lows, mids and highs. By “balanced” I mean the sound is as the tone from an acoustic dreadnaught guitar. These pups sound very clean. IMHO, these pickups are cleaner than Strat clean. In the hollowbody I can get a great country clean tone. I can also emulate Eddie Cochran’s tone, clean or overdriven through my Pignose G40V tube combo. The hum is surprisingly low for a single coil pickup. Much lower that my Strat with Seymour Duncan alnicos. Using the neck and bridge pickups together, they are hum canceling. Tone wise these are nothing like a P90.

Being as I have a country gig this weekend, I test drove the pickups while practicing tunes by Brooks and Dunn, Chet Atkins, Johnny Cash, Garth Brooks and Alan Jackson. Twang and chicken picking tone was perfect. It will do the job this weekend and I can’t wait for my band’s weekend to come up at church. I am VERY impressed with these in the hollowbody because they deliver the instrument’s natural tonal character to the amp. WYSIWYG, or in the case of guitar, what you rear acoustically is what you get out of the amp. I highly recommend these pickups.

Gary

[Brad]

Nice review PG...thanks. I just traded a tele neck pup for a brand new set of the Retrotron Brooklyns. I've yet to install them in anything, but was curious as to how they sound. Your excellent reveiw gives me a better idea of the tonal properties.

You mentioned the overdriven tone. Can you elaborate on that a bit? Are you talking cranked amp or pedal overdrive? Have you used them with pedals? If so, what ones and what were your impressions?

Would you say they are more along the lines of BIG sounding strat pup? How is the tone with both pups on? Is the neck tone more along the lines of strat?

Thanks again. Appreciate the review.

[Pearly Gator]

Well, Brad it actually is a lot like a big strat pickup. The distortion tones I liked were with pedals. Since it's humbucking in the middle position only, it still sounded great with OD.

PG

[Brad]

Well, I tried one in the neck of my chambered tele for a few weeks and enjoyed it. A big Strat pup is spot on in describing the tone. I had a great deal of fun with this pickup. In the end though, it came back out in favor of a new humbucker. While it cut through the mix and blended well with the bridge pickup, I much prefer this guitar with a nice bucker in the neck.

One thing I've found with the several GFS pups I've tried is how they have all suffered from not responding well to my guitars tone control. I've worked long and hard finding hte correct pots and cap for this baby and have it tweaked to my liking. The other pickups I've used have respoonded very well and produced quite a nice range of useable tones. The GFS seem bright right to #8-9. Then, it's off! Of course, YMMV and this is just my experience. Still, I'd be interested in hearing fom others if they find the same problem.

Still, these are very nice sounding pickups and would be wonderful for warming up a dull guitar. I have a nice little import, hollow body that is just begging for these!