If you’ve shopped for humbuckers or humbucker-equipped guitars, you’ve undoubtedly seen the term “P.A.F. pickups” floating around on product pages. It’s one of the original humbucker designs and remains one of the most popular pickup choices for modern guitarists across a wide variety of genres.

But what makes a P.A.F. a P.A.F.? Unlike Tennessee whiskey, there aren’t staunch rules and regulations on what exactly makes something a P.A.F.-style humbucker. Even Gibson, the original builder of P.A.F. pickups, changed their design over the years.

So, let’s talk about P.A.F. pickups, how they came to be, what makes a P.A.F. a P.A.F. and what’s driving its popularity today, almost 70 years after its invention.

Early Single-Coil Pickups

Though P.A.F. pickups were among the first humbuckers, guitar pickups in general are much older. The very first guitar pickups of the 1920s amplified the vibrations emitted from an acoustic or archtop guitar’s body, but those produced a weak signal and unstable feedback.

The true granddaddy of modern guitar pickups is found in the Rickenbacker Electro A-22, also known as “The Frying Pan.” This metal lap steel guitar featured a pickup designed by George Beauchamp in 1932 which focused on picking up the vibrations of the strings rather than the guitar’s body. This resulted in higher output and less feedback. The magnet-coil-bobbin design eventually led to what we now know as “single coil” pickup, which became the standard for electric guitars in the 1940s and 50s.

Wanting to design their own take on the single coil, Gibson developed the P-90 pickup in the late 1940s. The wide soap bar-style bobbin of the P-90 pickup made for a warmer and mellower sound than Fender’s Telecaster-style pickups—their main competitor at the time.

But whether players preferred the twangy, treble-forward Fender single coils or Gibson’s mellower P-90s, both pickups dealt with the dreaded 60-cycle hum, a noisy side-effect of single-coil pickups.

A pickup acts as an antenna of sorts, creating a magnetic field that converts the guitar strings’ vibrations into amplified electrical signals. But the pickup is sensitive to other electromagnetic sources like lights, radios or amplifiers, causing residual noise and humming in your signal.

Gibson and Seth Lover

By 1954, Gibson wanted to break away from Fender and offer something they didn’t have: a noiseless pickup that “bucked” the 60-cycle hum. The company enlisted employee Seth Lover, a radio engineer and amplifier designer, to drum up such a pickup.

Using his knowledge of common noise-reduction techniques for amps, radios and microphones, Lover found a solution to the humming problem: Instead of using single coils routed in parallel, Lover routed two coils with opposite wind and polarity together in series, which caused each coil to cancel out the other’s hum. The resulting sound wasn’t as bright as a single coil, but it seamlessly eliminated any trace of hum.

Lover completed his humbucker design in 1955, and he filed a joint patent with Gibson that same year. That patent wasn’t granted until July 28, 1959, but Gibson nonetheless started rolling out Lover’s humbuckers on their instruments, first on their lap steels in 1956 and then on the revamped Les Paul in 1957, replacing the P-90s found in earlier models.

During this period, each pickup had a sticker underneath the magnet that read “PATENT APPLIED FOR,” leading to the P.A.F. nickname.

Quick aside: Despite popular belief, the P.A.F. was not actually the first humbucker ever made, or even to be patented. Pickup hum was the hot-button issue in the guitar world at the time, so there were several people working on a solution. Ray Butts invented the Filtertron pickup for his friend Chet Atkins in 1954, a smaller pickup to Lover’s design with a characteristic “twang.”

Leo Fender had his own patent for a hum-killing pickup for lap steels in 1956, but his company wouldn’t formally introduce humbuckers into their models until the late 1960s (with Lover’s help).

The P.A.F.’s real claim to fame is that it was the first humbucker to catch on with a large audience thanks to a sound that inspired countless imitators.

The P.A.F. Sound

Getting rid of hum is great and all, but it doesn’t mean a lot if the sound doesn’t inspire guitarists.

So, what do P.A.F. pickups sound like? In general, P.A.F.s are famous for their full, uncompressed sound that’s slightly less bright than a single-coil. Still, P.A.F. pickups maintain a nice balance of warm lows, clear mids and crisp highs. Being hum-free, P.A.F.s maintain a rich tonal clarity and touch sensitivity even at higher gain, which is what made them a quick favorite of rock and blues musicians.

Also, original P.A.F.s are microphonic since they weren’t wax potted, meaning that they would amplify any knocks, taps or scratches happening on the guitar’s body, which some believe adds to the guitar’s resonance. However, most modern P.A.F. pickups are wax potted.

The P.A.F. Golden Age

The first years of P.A.F.-equipped Les Pauls—from 1957 to about 1961—is considered a golden age for both P.A.F. pickups and Gibson’s signature guitar. The iconic sunburst finish Les Paul, one of the most recognizable instruments of all time, debuted during this period and remains the Holy Grail for many guitar collectors. A quick scan on Reverb shows these instruments going for anywhere between 250 and 475 thousand dollars as of the time of this writing.

Concurrently, when people think of the P.A.F. sound, they’re most likely thinking of this era. A common way to describe tone from these pickups is a “Tele on steroids,” due to its deeper lows, prominent mids and just enough high end to stand out in a mix.

Somewhat ironically, the P.A.F.s made during this golden age vary wildly in tone from one another; two P.A.F.s made in the same year in the same factory could end up sounding significantly different. These inconsistencies were a result of Gibson not having the assembly process down pat quite yet, which led to the factory using whatever materials they had on hand at a given time.

For starters, P.A.F.s during this period used Alnico 2, 3, 4 or 5 magnets at random. The number refers to the magnet’s strength and will result in tonal differences. If that wasn’t inconsistent enough, Gibson also magnetized the Alnicos in groups, which made some magnets more charged than others and thus further affected the pickups’ tones.

The wiring, meanwhile, was done with 42-gauge plain enamel wire on the same coiling machines used for P-90s. These machines automatically wrapped the coils around the bobbins, but workers still had to manually stop the machine once the pickup was ready, which sometimes meant that they were over or under the desired 5,000 turns per bobbin. The result was pickup output ranging anywhere from 7.5 to 9k ohms, with the latter number producing hotter pickups with more bite and midrange.

Even the bobbins had completely random variations. While they were all made from butyrate plastic, Gibson workers freely used black or white bobbins depending on what was in stock at the factory, which sometimes resulted in the “zebra stripe” P.A.F.

While this change was purely aesthetic, rumors long persisted about the zebra pickups sounding different than the all-white pickups, and those sounding different than the all-black ones. To be clear, Lover himself stated that there weren’t any tonal differences caused by the bobbins.

Still, these inconsistencies inadvertently contributed to the P.A.F.’s lore and appeal. Some of the most iconic Les Pauls from this period featured P.A.F.s with specific quirks, from the upside down neck pickup on Peter Green’s “Greeny”—which some sources say was a factory error while others say was the result of a botched repair—to the overwound bridge pickup on Billy Gibbons’ “Pearly Gates.”

If anything, these inconsistencies added to the sound and personalities of the musicians who played the P.A.F.-loaded Gibsons made in this period: Duane Allman, George Harrison, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Alvin Lee––the list goes on.

Changes Over the Years

Starting in late 1961, Gibson started making changes to P.A.F.s to standardize the assembly process and cut costs. The first adjustment was with the magnets, switching to just Alnico 5s for all P.A.F.s (although you can still find some Alnico 2 P.A.F.s from this period) and reducing their length from 2.5” to 2.25” inches.

In 1963, the “Patent Applied For” sticker was replaced with “Patent 2,737,842” on all P.A.F.s––except that patent number was for their 1952 Les Paul trapeze tailpiece. Close enough!

By the mid-1960s, the Gibson factory had fully-automated wire machines that more consistently wrapped the coils at 5,000 turns per bobbin for 7.5k output per pickup. Other than being more tonally consistent, the P.A.F.s of this period (sometimes called numbered P.A.F.s) don’t vary much from the sound or design of the golden-age pickups.

The T Top

Around late 1965, Gibson standardized their bobbin-making process for humbuckers, which were now slightly taller and included a “T” on top to indicate the right side up for builders during assembly. These bobbins ushered in what is essentially the Gibson P.A.F. 2.0, a more cost-effective humbucker unofficially known as “T Tops” or “T Buckers.”

Along with these new bobbins and the smaller Alnico 5 magnets, the T Tops also used polyurethane coated wires for coiling instead of the plain enamel wire used on the original P.A.F.s. Finally, the maple spacers between bobbins and magnets found in earlier P.A.F.s were switched out for regular plastic.

The result of these changes was a brighter, tighter and more aggressive tone than the original P.A.F.s, and Gibson used the T Tops on all of their guitars from the late 1960s to the 1980s. While the T Top isn’t as sought-after as its predecessors, players like Jimmy Page, Chuck Berry, BB King, Pete Townshend, Angus Young, Peter Frampton, Nancy Wilson, Randy Rhoads, Mick Ronson, and Tommi Iommi all found plenty of use for its hotter sound.

Back to Basics

Hot humbuckers were all the rage through the 1970s, but by the 1980s the mystique and interest around the original, lower-output P.A.F. was building.

In 1981, Gibson took note of the customer demand and enlisted engineer Tim Shaw to recreate the P.A.F. based on its original specs for their upcoming Heritage reissue series. His design essentially reversed most of the changes made to the P.A.F. over the previous two decades, going back to the shorter, non-“T” bobbins and larger Alnico 5 magnets.

The only compromise was with the wiring—Gibson opted to stick with polyurethane wires instead of enamel for budget purposes, despite Shaw’s objections. Nevertheless, the Tim Shaw humbucker was the one of the most faithful and accurate interpretations of the original P.A.F. at the time.

Gibson used the Shaw pickups in its reissue models throughout the 1980s and eventually in its Custom Shop models in the 1990s. Shaw’s work inspired other builders to design their version of the P.A.F. sound around this time, including Seymour Duncan himself. In fact, Guns n’ Roses guitarist Slash was an early fan of Seymour’s Alnico Pro II pickups, which can be heard on the band’s legendary debut Appetite for Destruction in 1987. Other notable players that rocked reissue Gibsons during this time include Eddie Van Halen, Mark Knopfler, Johnny Marr, Neal Schon, and Kirk Hammett.

Modern P.A.F.s

Today, you’ll find a cottage industry of major and boutique pedal companies dedicated to recreating P.A.F. and T Top pickups. True to the incredibly wide array of tones and specs of P.A.F. pickups over the decades, there are also a ton of different modern P.A.F.s to choose from––Gibson alone makes several pickups that are all slightly different but still derive from the original P.A.F., including Custom Buckers, Burstbuckers, ‘57 Classics and more.

Seymour Duncan also makes a total of nine different P.A.F.-inspired models, from the road-worn Antiquity pickups to the vintage-modern hybrid Saturday Night Specials.

In the 1980s, Seymour struck up a partnership with Seth Lover himself, which led to the pair designing the Seth Lover humbucker. A devotedly faithful recreation of the original P.A.F., these humbuckers are even wound with one of the original Gibson coil winding machines at the Seymour Duncan factory. Duncan and Lover remained friends until Lover’s passing in 1997.

While plenty of hotter and more powerful humbuckers emerged in the many decades since Seth Lover’s patent, the P.A.F.’s warm, expressive sound maintained a steady and devoted following over the years. In fact, uncompressed sound is a growing trend in some guitar circles at the moment, which is why you hear P.A.F.s more and more in ambient, shoegaze, church, post-punk and many other genres.

You’re just as likely to see modern rockers like Dave Grohl or Derek Trucks use P.A.F.-loaded guitars as indie stars like Justin Vernon or Jeff Tweedy, while collectors like Joe Bonamassa continue to sing the praises of vintage Gibsons and P.A.F.s. At the end of the day, that’s the beauty of the P.A.F.: a sound that continues to inspire players, no matter the genre or decade.

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