Bill Lawrence XL-500 Bridge Pickups

The Bill and Becky ones are the "Good ones" They have thick blades compared to the "Stew Mac" or whatever they call them I just can't remember.
 
I've used the Bill and Beckys.

Really trebly in my experience. Lots of pick attack and cut. Cool, but different. I sort of dug it in the PRS, but it was too thin in my superstrats IMO. They occupy a drawer now.
 
squealie":14o7ql1i said:
I've used the Bill and Beckys.

Really trebly in my experience. Lots of pick attack and cut. Cool, but different. I sort of dug it in the PRS, but it was too thin in my superstrats IMO. They occupy a drawer now.
Click to expand...

Consider selling them? Wink wink...
 
squealie":jkrcgfe3 said:
I've used the Bill and Beckys.

Really trebly in my experience. Lots of pick attack and cut. Cool, but different. I sort of dug it in the PRS, but it was too thin in my superstrats IMO. They occupy a drawer now.
Click to expand...

yeah this. I have both the Bill Lawrence ones and the Bill and Becky ones and I struggle to find anything to put them in because they are to trebly. I have some in a Jackson Rhoads that is Basswood with a really thick coating of paint that made the guitar really dull...they really help liven up the guitar but still sound thin.
 
There’s a lot of misinformation and contradictory info out there about the pickups. I bought a BL USA one on eBay out of a 1994 washburn and it’s a cool pickup, totally different from anything else I have. Very bright and cutting top end. A bit too scratchy and ‘single coil like’ with some amps, but I’m also using it in an alder strat with no tone knob.

Very hifi sounding which gives it kind of a scooped feel. Very tight bottom end. Very harmonically rich. I’m not really going for a Dime tone but my first thoughts were it reminds me a lot of Dime since harmonics are just so damn easy, and it sounds very tight.

I did some research online when I bought it and the original pickups are the Bill Lawrence USA ones. Bill (real name Willi Lorenz Stitch) fell out with his business partner and left. BL USA kept making the pickups and Bill went off and among other things, kept making the L500 pickups. I think he also made them in Germany at some point under a different brand name that I don’t remember.

The Bill & Becky ones I think use Alnico magnets now, so slightly different from the BL USA. I don’t know if the BL USA ones have changed at all over the years.

There are plenty of posts out there saying they sound the same, and plenty saying they sound totally different. Some prefer one and some prefer the other. All I can figure is that one or both companies must have had iffy quality control at some point, since I read of complaints of bad sounding or defective pickups from both. Luckily both are pretty cheap compared to most other aftermarket pickup manufacturers so it wouldn’t be that expensive to buy one of each.

Fair warning, they’re very thick pickups and might not fit in something like an Ibanez without deepening the pickup routes.

The dc resistance is pretty low (I think my L500XL measured like 12k or something) but it’s the highest output pickup I have.
 
I've had them in several guitars, and liked them in all of them. I had a PRS SE Åkesson model, which is a great player, but even the pretty trebly (Wilde) 500XL was sort of dull in it. Now I have one in a partsocaster with an Allparts body and a Warmoth baked maple neck, and it's thick and nice. I really like it. It's close enough to an EMG 81 to make riffs tight, and still sound good on single note stuff.

The neck pickup in the Strat is one of these. A pretty cool sounding sc-sized rail humbucker.

http://irongear.co.uk/irongear_pickups_038.htm
 
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