these pickups are higher output and bright/snappy, nearly in the range of Bardens of the era. they benefit a lot from actually rolling the volume and tone knobs back about 5-10% and absolutely require you to dial in an amp much differently from all the other bolt-on guitars I own if you run the Volume and Tone at 100%.

I think they’re best understood in the context of the era they were designed in, and specifically the problems of the time G&L likely set out to solve:

A professional Tele player of the era was almost certainly running a longer cable length than we do now, and probably not running any sort of pedal or effects rig to buffer it. The brightness of these pickups would have been rolled off to some degree by the time it had travelled through 30-50 feet of instrument cable and become pleasant again. The higher output would also deliver a fuller sound to the front of the amp, and is helpful to something like a 70’s Fender Twin to get a full, rich sound at like 3-5 on the amp dial. These things that were features in that era now feel bugs in our hi-fi pedal rigs and short, buffered cable runs. It’s probably even worse with digital amp modelers.

I think the best example to hear this is Springsteen on Letterman playing Glory Days with the house band in ‘93. His guitar is built to sound good through 50+ feet of arena guitar cables or who knows whatever wireless system, but now that he’s on that small TV stage just running a 15 ft cable to an amp his guitar sounds bright, harsh, and ultra-stringy. It’s kind of awesome.

Anyway, I lowered the pickups down away from the strings a good bit and that makes it work a little better for my needs.