Epiphone Joe Bonamassa Les Paul Standard

For his signature Les Paul Standard Signature model in Pelham Blue, Joe Bonamassa personally chose Gibson’s famed BurstBucker™ pickups. BurstBuckers™ replicate the sound of Gibson’s original “Patent Applied For” pickups – the ultra rare hand-wound pickups that gave the original ’59 Les Paul Standard its legendary sound and made it a favorite of blues fans like Eric Clapton, Duane Allman, and Jimmy Page.

BurstBuckers™ have unpolished magnets and non-potted coils like the originals. The myriad of variations in the output and tone of original “Patent Applied For” pickups came from inconsistencies in winding the bobbins, a result of the lack of automatic shutoffs on Gibson’s winding machines in the late 1950s. Seth Lover, who invented the humbucker, recalled that original “Patent Applied For” pickups were wound “until they were full.” When two coils in a pickup have a different number of turns, that variation puts a little “edge” or “bite” on the classic humbucker sound. Gibson BurstBuckers™ bring that elusive and sought after tone back to life. The neck pickup on the Joe Bonamassa Pelham Blue Les Paul Standard is a Burstbucker-2 and is wound in the range of Gibson’s ’57 Classic. The bridge pickup is a Burstbucker-3 and is slightly over-wound with a hotter output for leads.