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I have a client who loves the low Z pickups in his Les Paul Recording and L-5 solidbody for their definition, clarity, and range of tones. He wants to put some low Z pickups in a couple of his archtop electrics, but hates EMG's. I suggested Lace Sensors - they are not low Z, but have the tone profile and performance he craves without batteries.

Anyone have an idea?

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"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince

Here are some ridiculous ideas:
Find some original Gibson pickups (good luck). Maybe Les Paul's estate has some (hah hah) Call some extreme guitar guys like Gruhns. Put an ad in the vintage guitar magazine.
Find a broken original Gibson guitar, buy it and take the pickups.
Buy an original Gibson, take the pickups, put in regular pickups and sell it at a huge loss.
Talk to someone like Seymour Duncan and see if he is up to the challenge of making copies of the Gibson pickup.
Try to gently talk him into playing some guitars with Lace Sensors. See if he agrees with you.
Sorry for the low quality of these ideas.....

He has a Strat with Lace Sensors. Problem is, he hates the shape and feel of the Strat.

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"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince

Have you tried calling Dimarzio or SD to see if they can spin something up? They both will make custom pickups to custom specs. Not sure of the $$$$ though.

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Brian

You never know what you are capable of until you actually try.

https://www.howardguitarsdelaware.com/

Did I mention he's cheap?

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"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince

I really like Lace Alumitones.

And Cycfi offers very high quality passive and active versions of their Low Z designs.

Never heard of this brand - a glance at their website looks very promising!
Thanks - I'll be sure to let my client know about them.
I see their inspiration was the Les Paul Recording....

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"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince

Its a lot easier and possibly cheap: take an arbitrary single coil - a reasonably sounding cheapy is sufficient, remove the winding and rewind it with 500 turns of 0.2 mm wire.

It will have its treble resonance roughly in the 30 kHz range.

As the number of windings is of the order of 10% of a High-Z pickup, its output will be reduced by roughly 20dB. Sufficient to drive the microphone input of a mixing console but still large enough to drive a normal guitar amp. Played through a PA such a pickup will have a nice "acoustic" tone.
Well, actually the treble resonance needs to be damped by a parallel resistor of around 2.5 kOhms, which might be a volume pot.

Other, more traditional electric guitar sounds may be obtained in the usual way (i.e. similar to the Les Paul Recording) by adding parallel capacitors and also damping resistors. Good values are typically in the range of 100-750 nF. Similarly to C-Switches in Hi-Z setups, larger parallel capacitances may also require stronger damping.

A while ago i tried the concept in this guitar - note the additional hexaphonic pickup which, btw. is also just six individual LoZ pickups on a rail, one per string. The other pickup has been a cheap chinese tele neck pickup with a bar magnet underneath rewound as described above. If i did it again, i would use a pickup skeleton with 6 alnico rods.



Originally in traditional tuning, the guitar is now set up with strings .011-.080 and tuned in fifths: EADGCF, i.e. like a cello with additional treble and bass string.

Velly intelesting....

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"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince

I was making low Z bass humbuckers about 10 years ago. I used a preamp to boost the level up, but you can use a transformer, like with the LP Recording guitar.

The pickups in the LP are stacked humbuckers. They are wound with 24 gauge wire. However, on the LP Signature guitars, Bill Lawrence designed those pickups, and he used standard 42 gauge wire, which is what I was doing.

So you can take a standard Gibson type humbucker and wind about 1,000 turns on wire on each coil. Then use a mic transformer.

As an aside, EMG pickups are not really low Z. They are standard high impedance pickups with preamps built in. They wire each coil into the input of a differential op amp, so they aren't wired in series or parallel.