Fitting a stacked P90 pickup on a Goldtop Les Paul

 This is a beautiful LP goldtop copy from China. It's a Harley Benton L450gt electric guitar and it was bought via Thomann.com for less than 130Euros! It has a set-in neck joint and a medium-tenon neck. The original P90 pickup of the guitar were pretty cheap and the guitar was producing lots of hum. I had to shield the electronics cavities of the guitar to reduce the noise. A part of the high frequency noise went away but the 50Hz hum was still loud enough.
 Therefore, I decided to replace both pickups with lower noise ones. The new pickups were hot ceramic ones with double magnets, measuring about 8 kOhms of DC resistance. I bought these as I like the extra output and punch they offer but it was also a matter of Signal to Noise ratio (SNR). Even if the noise output level stays the same, the added signal output increases the SNR figure. Fortunately, the noise level was lower.
 Nevertheless, I could not really use this guitar for high gain hard rock playing without enabling the noise gate of my amps. Then, I spotted this "stacked" double-coil P90 pickup (more like a P100 actually) that fits this guitar and offers hum-free operation and plenty of output without sounding like a regular humbucker. The tone is actually really close to the original P90s but there is no 50Hz hum whatsoever!
 Moreover, this modification is totally stealth as it does not affect the looks of this beautiful goldtop guitar! I even placed the original p90 cover of the new pickup.

 I installed this stacked pickup at the bridge position which I use most. It sounds like a hot single-coil P90 pickup with a bit less brightness. Loosing a bit of high-end brightness is normal for any dual-coil pickup, stacked or not. Its bottom coil does not act like a dummy coil but it produces a part of the sound signal while filtering out the 50-60Hz noise and some treble.
 The stacked pickup comes with a 5-wire cable which means you can actually split it and get true single-coil sounds using just the upper pickup coil. The result is awesome.
 The only problem one may encounter is spotting the wire color code (you can always email the eBay seller) and placing the pickup inside a pickup cavity that's too shallow. This is a double coil pickup and it has about double the height of a regular P90 pickup. So be careful and measure everything before you place an order!

Here's the stacked P90 pickup:

A regular P90 pickup:

Cheers, Thanos