New pickups or a new guitar?

https://lemmy.world/post/1209182

New pickups or a new guitar? - Lemmy.world

I’ve got a 1970s Hohner Les Paul and the humbuckers are starting to die. I was looking at Seymour Duncan’s but for that cost does it make sense to just get a new guitar?

What do you mean by > ‘the humbuckers are starting to die?’ They’re just magnets with copper wire wrapped around them, they don’t really wear out. What’s the problem you’re trying to solve? If it’s quiet/scratchy/noisy you probably just have a bad potentiometer or a cold solder joint. If you don’t like how to guitar feels then yeah something different may be in order. If you like the guitar but something about the sound isn’t perfect then maybe different pickups will help, but your amp will have a much larger impact on your tone than different humbuckers.
That’s a great question! So the issue I’m having is that the sound coming out of the guitar via the amp sounds off and by off I mean off key, out of tune. So I tune the guitar and play (not thru amp) it sounds right. Plug it into the amp and play, it sounds off. Plug in one of my other guitars to the amp and it sounds fine. All I can think of is something ain’t right with the pickups.
That’s really strange. The other electronics in your guitar might be better suspects.
Pots in particular. They are literally a moving part and suffer from wear, dust, and oxidation. Worth bypassing or replacing with known good ones when troubleshooting in general.