Neodymium pickups / Les Paul Personal

[Sabicas]

About 10-12 years ago, I bought a Les Paul Personal/Professional copy from a UK company, Revelation Guitars. It was about $400 which is insane for how well this thing is built and for it having so many things that are not standard, like the angled end of the fretboard, the larger than Les Paul Standard body.............and the pickups. These are Entwistle Neotrons which are stacked high-impedance humbuckers with neodymium magnets. These have a seriously strong magnetic field and I've had to lower the neck pickup pretty much flush with the guitar's top to eliminate "strat-itus". Amazingly, this didn't affect the tone very much. The tone is very bright, crisp and "tight" so I end up EQing it to get a good thick jazz tone. These are excellent for a base for EQing as there is such a broad range of frequencies and it's not difficult to get many different tones out of them. The pickups can be coil-tapped, put out of phase, and there's even a knob to lower the DCR. I'm wondering why there aren't more neodymium pickups out there. Has anyone here experimented with them?

[Woody Sound]

That might be a great guitar. Can you show a pic of the back or the neck joint? And the output jack?

[Sabicas]

I’ve never had anyone request a photo of an output jack before. Here ya go.

[sgosnell]

Perhaps this is a reason for these not being popular.

These have a seriously strong magnetic field and I've had to lower the neck pickup pretty much flush with the guitar's top to eliminate "strat-itus".

Not every guitar allows lowering the pickup, either by enough or at all.

[Sabicas]

Yep. I had to replace the pickup screws with longer ones to get it low enough. It’s strange they put so much work into this model and didn’t discover what seems like an obvious issue.

For example: I just removed the back plate and discovered the innards are lined with copper foil and CTS pots. I bought it new so it wasn’t modded/upgraded.

[entresz]

I have a 1973 Les Paul Recording which is easily my favourite solid body guitar. The passive low impedance electronics are so versatile, and in many ways, I wish Gibson persevered in that direction. Who knows what might have come next? I've used that guitar as a conventional jazz guitar, and in rockabilly/country/western swing settings in place of a Telecaster where it sounded incredible too. It probably against Les Paul's pursuit of extreme clarity, but I particularly like the sound of mine with heavy flatwounds on it.

I remember seeing these Revelation guitars and wondering how they compared to the 'real thing'. They were a steal for the price if they're as good as the OP says.