I wouldn’t usually follow up one pickup feature with another, but the article I wrote detailing changes to the pickups in our Telecaster 75th Anniversary edition got me thinking. I’ve been privileged to play a few ’50s Telecasters, and even a Broadcaster, but it occurred to me that I’ve never had the opportunity to directly compare each type of Blackguard-era pickup.

Just to recap, T-style bridge pickups were wound with 43 AWG magnet wire before Fender changed to thicker 42 AWG wire in 1951. The next big change occurred in 1955, when Alnico V magnetic slugs replaced the weaker Alnico III. By my reckoning, that equates to three distinct versions in the early 1950s alone.

I’m just a newcomer to the pickup-making hobby, but I thought it might be educational to make one of each. My idea was to order flatwork, slugs, and baseplates from the same supplier, along with two gauges of magnet wire from a single manufacturer.

So long as I could wind all the coils consistently, with the same number of turns, and wax-pot them for an identical period of time, it should be possible to form some clear conclusions on how each change influences the overall tone.

Picking Up Parts

Pickup parts are widely available, but for this project I ordered kits from UK retailer Axesrus because it’s a one-stop place for everything you need. However, the plain enamel magnet wire actually came from Allparts UK because it’s slightly cheaper there. When ordering, keep your wits about you because it’s easy to end up with slugs and flatwork holes that don’t match.

Complicating things further, some suppliers provide measurements in millimetres while others use inches, while both decimal and fractions feature. The narrower diameter, post-1955 slugs were 0.1875-inch, which equates to 3/16-inch and 4.75mm. Axesrus doesn’t sell the early style 0.195-inch (4.953mm) slugs, but it sells 5mm slugs and that’s close enough.

Most guitar-parts suppliers stock cloth-covered hook-up wires, and you can choose which colors you prefer. Yellow and black would be traditional for vintage style T-type pickups, but if you can’t find yellow then it’s possible to stain white cloth. You’ll also need some old-fashioned white parcel-string, which can generally be found in hardware stores or post offices.

Slug Fest

I started by pressing the non-bevelled ends into the flats using my arbour press. This makes the job easy, but you could tap them in using a rubber mallet. Axesrus’s kits come with tiny eyelets for soldering and they are inserted from the underside of the bottom flat.

As long as you’ve ordered the correct flatwork for your chosen slug diameter, there should be a tight friction fit. Even so, I like to wick some water-thin superglue around the holes from the inside and then wipe off any excess if I need to.

With all the bobbins assembled, Fender would mask off the eyelets, dip the bobbins in lacquer, and let them drip dry. They probably did this to lower the chances of corroded magnet wire shorting out against the slugs, and you can wrap tape around the slugs before winding if you don’t want to bother with lacquer. I did both to play it safe and also because the lacquer gives the flatwork a distinctive vintage sheen.

Winding Up

I’m not going to go into great detail about setting up machines and winding coils because there are many online video tutorials that can show you exactly how it’s done. You can even find one with Fender’s legendary Abigail Ybarra – watch her wire-guiding hand closely.

With 42 AWG wire I find that 10,000 turns equates to a coil resistance reading of around 7.5k. That’s pretty strong for a mid-‘50s T-type bridge pickup, and the same number of turns resulted in a 9.5k coil with 43 AWG wire. Be sure to re-check your resistance reading after soldering the leadout wires and try to avoid getting hot solder resin on the coil.

Strings Attached

Fender wrapped string around T-type bridge pickup coils, which protected them and allowed molten potting wax to soak through to the wire. The company’s winders used black-tinted wax, which turned the white string black and held it in place.

To apply the string, I unravelled about 10mm at the end to flatten it out and then positioned it up the side of the coil at one end, running from top to bottom.

Pinching the flattened end against the coil, I began wrapping the string around the coil in layers going from the bottom flat to the top. Once I had applied as many turns as possible, I cut the string and tucked the end between the final turn and the underside of the top flat.

Pot Luck

I use a beauty salon-style wax heater to melt potting wax at about 60 degrees Celsius. You could also get by with a glass bowl and a bain-marie type of arrangement instead, (but don’t use your partner’s favorite kitchenware. You’ll have to trust me on this…)

More learned pickup makers than me may have special wax formulations, but I use paraffin wax mixed with lamp-black powder and some boot polish to turn it black. The amount of time pickups should spend in the wax is open to debate.

Some advocate leaving them for 10 to 15 minutes, or until air bubbles stop coming up to the surface. This pretty much guarantees that a pickup won’t squeal microphonically, but lighter potting retains some microphony for airy high harmonics and vintage chime.

Having examined numerous vintage Fender pickup coils, I’ve noticed that the potting wax only penetrated the outer layers and there’s often no wax on the inside of the coil. They were semi-potted at most, and for vintage tonal characteristics I find that three to five minutes works well. If a pickup is too microphonic, you can always re-pot it, but you can never un-pot it.

Tone Tests

With four coils wound, bound and waxed, it was finally time for testing. Rather than evaluate my own work, I invited my mate Ed Oleszko over to lend an ear and he kindly brought his 1955 tweed Super.

Using my Dearnaley Taff Delta loaded with a genuine 1954 lap steel pickup for reference, Ed tested the pickups in a US-made Fender Anniversary Esquire, and both guitars were fitted with brass saddles.

Ed says of the Alnico III with 43 AWG: “This pickup doesn’t sound overwound in a dull and midrange heavy sort of way. I’d describe the output as gutsy, rather than hot. It has mellow treble, hi-fi clarity, and excellent balance that is very forgiving and easy to play, but it’s not a quintessentially Tele-like tone. It sounds older and mellower, with loads of bass heft, although the lows do sound a bit soft, and it’s more woody than twangy.

“It has a beautiful midrange, lots of harmonics, and, with no hint of shrillness, it’s the one that works best in the Esquire’s back setting. Once your ears adjust, it makes some regular Tele pickups seem a bit shrill and uncultured in comparison. It has a lovely oboe-esque voicing, and as a Gibson player I feel very comfortable with the plummy midrange and the effortless way it sustains and blooms.”

Over to the Alnico III with 42 AWG, and Ed says: “This one has a huge sound, with a lot of low-end thump and a wide soundstage. It really sustains, but not quite as well as the 43 AWG version, and it doesn’t generate as much of that Patent Applied For-like upper-harmonic bloom. This is very much a Blackguard Telecaster sound with an aggressively confident midrange that never gets brash, and it’s the one that sounds closest to the ’54 lap steel pickup.

“It’s twangier than the 43 AWG version and the low strings have a springy bounce. The resonance peak seems higher, so it has a clucky quack, rather than the plummy voicing that makes the 43 AWG softer and woodier. It’s not as clear sounding as the 43 AWG, maybe because the midrange is congested with harmonics, but there’s a clickier front-end attack to notes, and when overdriven, the overall vibe recalls Springsteen’s Darkness On The Edge Of Town.”

Finally, to the Alnico V and Ed says: “42 AWG with Alnico V slugs appears to generate an upper midrange peak and a bass lift with a slight dip in between. This pickup is clearer and more balanced overall, and it’s like a ‘loudness button’ has been applied across the whole frequency range. Nothing jumps out, and it sounds more modern because it doesn’t have as much of the 42 AWG’s quacky and honky vocal midrange. That said, it’s not as characterful as the others.

“It does provide the best note separation and it has the tightest bass. With the volume right up it sounds punky, and when you turn it down it does that jangly faux-acoustic thing. There’s a lot of sustain, which makes playing easier because it doesn’t require as much physicality as some vintage pickups.

“It’s perhaps the most versatile of the three and I think it would work well in a lot of musical genres. The problem is that now that I’ve heard how different they all sound, I want three Telecasters, rather than just one, because they’re sufficiently different to justify it!”

Wrapping Up

As I mentioned at the beginning, I’m just getting into pickup making and repairing, and these were only the second, third, and fourth T-type pickups I’ve made so far.

If you fancy trying it for yourself, you can set up with a winding machine, a magnetizing rig and any other bits and pieces for less than £200, and the wire and parts for a T-type bridge pickup should total less than £20.

Have a go!

• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

If there was such a job as ‘tone archaeologist’, Stuart Robson of Sunbear Pickups would qualify. His forensic examinations of vintage pickups have led him down many an interesting path in the design and development of his own pickups.

His latest prototype, however, tells a particularly interesting story. While Gibson’s fabled Patent Applied For humbuckers of the late ’50s are endlessly discussed and copied, less light is shed on the earliest examples of the breed – the 1957 examples that, as Stuart explains, were built just a little differently from the ones that followed and had a sound all of their own – quirks that he has sought to faithfully emulate in his latest vintage-inspired humbucker. What’s the story?

“Well, they’re called the KZ 57 SB PAFs and they’re designed to mimic the winding pattern and coil structure of the coils produced by the very first machine that was used by Gibson in the ’50s. This machine was used to wind the majority of the of the 50s P-90s but also some of the earliest Patent Applied For pickups,” Stuart explains.

“The winding machine [used for 1957 Patent Applied For humbuckers] was made by Geo-Stevens – in fact, it was the earliest winding machine produced by that maker. Geo-Stevens carried on making winders that were quite similar looking for many years after.

“But the original one is a little bit janky – it’s early and it’s quite rattly and it’s got a specific lobeless cam set up on it. And, basically, that means the way that it lays wire backwards and forwards on the bobbin is quite specific in terms of the turns per layer and will fill the bobbin more for the same number of turns of wire that the later Leesona machine would do. So that just gives a specific character to the pickup.”

So what did that all mean for the sound of the earliest Patent Applied For humbuckers?

“They tend to be slightly airier,” Stuart argues. “They have more detail in the low-end, not necessarily more tightness but more transients, more harmonic content in the low-end than the coils off of the Leesonas tend to. And they just tend to be a little bit sweeter. So they’re more like a humbucking P-90 in character than the later Patent Applied For pickups tend to be,” he explains.

It’s A Wind-Up

While the output of Patent Applied For humbuckers wandered about between 1957 and 1962 when they transitioned into being ‘Patent Number’ humbuckers, Stuart adds that the first ones wound on the Geo-Stevens machines were restricted to a maximum ceiling in output more than later examples.

“People try to make generalisations, like, ‘Oh, I think the ones from ’59 are a bit hotter. But, honestly, you get ones in ’59 that are anything from the lowest to the highest outputs [that are considered typical]. What [the use of] that very early Geo-Stevens machine did mean, though, was that you really couldn’t get a hot Patent Applied For off of it.

“If you think about the spec of 10,000 turns on a P-90 being split to around 5,000 turns per coil on a Patent Applied For pickup, you would not get more than that onto the bobbin from the KZ 115 Geo-Stevens winder because the coils were effectively fluffier, looser and more naturally scattered by the way that the machine delivered the wire to the to the bobbin [compared with coils made on later Leesona winders] – so you you wouldn’t get one that was over 8.2k, generally speaking.

“And that’s part of their character as well – the fact that the coil is, frankly, a lot less tidy than the later coils are. So you won’t get a hot Patent Applied For humbucker out of it, but you will get up to the idealised 8k-ish range.”

It’s certainly an interesting little nook of Gibson pickup history – but what inspired Stuart to want to make his own take on the early ’57 style of Patent Applied For?

“I find them really interesting to make because it’s a very specific coil type that no-one really talks about,” he reflects.

“There’s lots of direction towards the Leesona-style coils [among modern makers of vintage-style humbuckers]. But people generally don’t talk about the actual coil build because to know about that, you either need to have the original machines – good luck! – or you need to be taking apart the original coils and lucky enough to be doing repair work on the originals.”

Fortunately, his own work in pickup design and repair has granted him the necessary insights, but he cautions against taking ‘handmade’ to mean better when it comes to vintage-correct Patent Applied For-style pickups.

“‘Scatter-wound’ is obviously a thing that people talk about in pickups – too much,” Stuart observes. “But all Patent Applied For humbuckers were machine-wound. So, the idea of a hand-wound Patent Applied For, which you see in the market all the time… if we’re being brutally honest, it’s not a thing. Because you can’t hand-wind a Patent Applied For with the kind of consistency that makes it sound like [a vintage original].”

Three to get ready

Sunbear Pickups KZ 57 SB PAFs

Hot off the winder at Sunbear Pickups is the subject of this article – a faithful recreation of 1957-spec Patent Applied For pickups. The prototype set of KZ 57 SB PAFs we examined here has an Alnico V bridge giving an output of 8.1k and an Alnico II neck pickup with a DC resistance of 7.3k, making this a touch-sensitive and classic set to savour.

Bare Knuckle Mule humbuckers

A well-liked take on the classic Patent Applied For sound by the thriving Cornish maker, the Mule is wound using “butyrate bobbins, maple spacers, nickel-plated slugs and Fillister no.5 pole screws... and Sand cast Alnico IV magnets”.

Output is similarly classic at 8.4k for the bridge and 7.3k for the neck. Output is similarly classic at 8.4k for the bridge and 7.3k for the neck. An old favourite for many players of maple-top single-cuts.

Dimarzio PAF 57

Wound on Alnico II magnets, DiMarzio says its PAF 57 pickups “paint an auditory masterpiece – creamy tones, flawless hum cancellation and a crystalline top-end”.

Available in a range of finishes (black, relic white or cream butyrate bobbins, or nickel covers), this major maker rarely disappoints, offering another window on early Patent Applied For tone to consider.

• Find out more at Sunbear Pickups.
• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

Renowned bluesman, guitar expert and all-round gear guru Joe Bonamassa has taken Guitar World down a deep-dive into the differences between P-90s and humbuckers – discussing what makes the former sing and how best to set them up.

P-90s were big players for the best part of a decade before humbuckers came along and became the most common choice, especially in Gibsons. But what’s the difference between the two?

On the sliding scale of pickup tones, P-90s are said to be dead center. Generally speaking, while single-coils have snap and bite, humbuckers offer more warmth and size. P-90s sit right between them.

But how does that translate in application? Well, in a new Guitar World video, Bonamassa delivers the answer.

He’s armed himself with two Gibson Les Pauls that are as close in makeup as possible, save for their pickups. There’s a ‘58 Goldtop Standard with PAF-style humbuckers, and a ‘56 with P-90s.

“The difference with P-90s is they're a little bit more sparkly when you roll the volume down,” he explains. “They’re more like single-coils, but they’re pretty woolly when you roll the volume up.” It covers all bases.

Speaking with Gibson last year, Joe Bonamassa claimed that “most people who are real dyed-in-the-wool Gibson people will say behind closed doors when the internet isn’t watching that their favorite pickup is a P-90.”

“They're cleaner,” he believes. “There's a sparkle on top that a humbucking pickup doesn't get.”

And that’s why his Copper Iridescent Epiphone model is, like Warren Haynes' new signature, loaded with them over usual humbuckers.

But the pickup height makes a big difference, too. There are two schools of thought when it comes to pickup heights: keep them close to the strings for maximum output, or move them further away and push the amp.

Bonamassa falls in the former category when it comes to humbuckers, but P-90s require a change of tact.

“[With P-90s], I try to get the front pickup as low as I possibly can, and the back pickup as high as possible,” he states. “It creates more of a balance. Sometimes you've gotta use popsicle sticks and put it on some low-budget, de facto scaffolding to get it to work.”

P-90s are having a bit of a moment. Haynes had them fitted into his recent signature Gibson after discovering the benefits they offer. Former Ozzy Osbourne shredder, Jake E. Lee, has also been talking about the lesser-loved pickups.

“Humbuckers are great, but, to me, the P-90s were always the best of both worlds,” he tells Guitar World. “They have that articulation, attack, and aggressiveness that single coils have, but they’re also kind of smooth and beefy-sounding, like humbuckers.

The only reason he didn't play them during his Ozzy days was “because they didn’t make humbucking P-90s, so you’d have to deal with all that noise that comes with them, and at the volume I played at, it just was untenable.”

Haynes has also explained why he’s defected from ‘buckers, as P-90s find themselves in vogue once more.

Fender’s recent 75th Anniversary Telecaster launch bonanza spanned five new models across five product ranges – so you’d be forgiven for glossing over the spec. Anniversary guitars are typically new finishes, commemorative neck plates, shiny headstock decals… You know the drill. But one of these models plays host to one of the most significant developments for Fender Telecasters in decades.

The 75th Anniversary American Ultra II Telecaster has stealthily introduced Fender’s first-ever in-house rail humbucker, the Fastlane – ie, a single coil-sized humbucker that doesn’t change the look of the instrument.

“We’ve been experimenting with our own single-spaced humbucker design for quite some time,” says Allen Abbassi, Director of Product for Fender Electric Guitars.

“Over the last year and a half, we’ve been intensifying our efforts and finally hit upon a recipe that we loved. Serendipitously, this coincided with the development of our 75th Anniversary Telecaster collection and we thought it was the perfect opportunity.”

Named after their distinctive magnetic bars, high-output rail (or blade) pickups have been around for decades, and aim to deliver a more consistent string-to-string response compared with individual pole pieces.

Classics such as the DiMarzio Chopper and Seymour Duncan Hot Rails – as featured in Fender’s own Soul Power Stratocaster for Tom Morello – are ubiquitous in the modding scene. But as Abbassi tells it, Fender didn’t look to other manufacturers when it voiced its own design.

“We wanted to design a single-spaced humbucker that sounded great both clean and dirty, had fantastic note-to-note string clarity and was punchy enough to sound and feel like a great humbucker. We think we hit it out of the park.”

On the Ultra II Telecaster, the Fastlane is paired with a noiseless single coil and S-1 switching: a push button on the Volume control runs both pickups in series, while hitting the switch in the Tone control flips the Fastlane from series to parallel for “a bit of single coil flavor with more top-end and tighter lows” that still bucks the hum.

Life in the Fastlane

But if rail pickups have been around for an age, why does any of this matter? Because of what it means for the shape of Telecasters to come – and not just $2k+ anniversary models.

“This is just the beginning,” says Abbassi. “There will be lots more new Fastlane pickup designs in the future.”

Telecasters are the great equalizers. They find their way into every genre, and a humbucker in the bridge, paired with a single in the neck, all while keeping the classic aesthetic… Well, that would be a mighty versatile stock guitar – and perhaps the closest thing we get to a reissue of the Jonny Greenwood-favored HS model, the Telecaster Plus.

An off-the-shelf Fastlane configuration that spans multiple price points could push heavier crowds yet further towards the Telecaster – and be welcome news for Strat fans who don’t like a full-fat humbucker crowding up their scratchplate.

None of this is reinventing the wheel. But for a company steadfastly rooted in tradition, it’s a notable shift, particularly as Fender Japan innovator Edward ‘Bud’ Cole has taken the reins at the top of the company on a global level.

The Fastlane’s release also coincides with another significant Fender development – its own take on the B-Bender, debuted via John Osborne’s signature Telecaster. And there are more innovations coming down the pike very soon, says Abbassi.

“Nothing is off the table for future development as we are constantly looking for ways to innovate, create better tone and enhance playability – just like Leo – from bridges, to pickups, to electronics and more. We’ve got a bunch of new innovations cooking and several of them will launch this year…”

• For more information on the 75th Anniversary American Ultra II Telecaster, head to Fender.com.

A guitarist has created a wild 64-polyphonic pickup system for his master's thesis in electrical engineering, and if it were up to us, we’d give him top marks.

Traditionally, as is likely not news to anyone reading this, electric guitars have been built with one, two, or three pickups, with the Les Paul Junior, Telecaster, and Stratocaster (as well as Peter Frampton's triple-humbuckered Phenix and the occasional Black Beauty Les Paul) all being examples of that tradition.

But David Wieland of Dark Art Guitars is living up to his business's name with this eye-opening new approach to guitar pickup designs in a bid to ace his studies at ETH Zürich.

The PolyMap, a polyphonic guitar pickup system, “can record 64 individual pickups simultaneously,” and unlike the eight-coil D.U.M.Bucker, it isn’t a silly gimmick, and it doesn’t require protective headgear to play it.

“The basic idea was to build a guitar that doesn't record the finished mixed output signal, but instead a lot of information about each one of the strings,” he says. “This is a very fancy way of saying that instead of two or three pickups, we have a few dozen that are only picking up one string each.”

Wieland landed on the number 64 by dedicating eight individual pickups to each string on his Dark Arts Alchemist headless guitar, with the eight-string featuring a 26.5” scale length. The extended range aids low-end clarity, without making the neck uncomfortably wide.

It also has a swamp ash body with a maple burl top, for those curious, and a “giant hole” was made to house this ungodly amount of pickups. The pickup capsules themselves are from Cycfi Research and are mounted onto a control board. This takes the individual analog signals, buffers them, and sends them to 64 analog-to-digital converters.

“Because we want to record all 64 pickups simultaneously without mixing them, the only real choice was to digitize the inside of the guitar,” he expands. “This means that we essentially built a 64-channel audio interface integrated into the guitar that then sends out one single digital signal.

“Inside the computer, we can take those 64 audio channels and get them into a DAW, and in order to do anything useful with them, we wrote a VST plugin that allows you to mix all of these signals together, apply various effects, and then get a stereo output that you can listen to on just regular headphones.”

This approach means the raw data from the guitar is recorded, rather than a pre-mixed output, so that in post-production, full autonomy is granted over which pickups are heard and which have effects applied.

So Wieland could, in theory, opt for a middle pickup-position-like setup where all pickups are active, but only add a chorus pedal to the bridge pickups and leave the neck positions raw, or bestow them with a different effect. Furthermore, there are pan and phasing options, as well as all kinds of otherwise-impossible-to-get pickup combinations.

It also means that, if he wanted to change a part to be played exclusively on a specific part of the pickup system, there’s no need to re-record. “This makes it a really powerful recording tool,” Wieland adds. No kidding.

Granted, the custom-made plugin is a little overwhelming at first glance, but it has a raft of editing features, including all pickups featuring volume and pan options, as well as output options to contend with these pickups having a much flatter and wide frequency response compared to traditional designs.

This is another novel tweak to the guitar’s tried-and-tested formula, and it will be interesting to see how the guitar community responds to it. Indeed, feel free to let us know in the poll above...

There are some teething issues Wieland is still looking to fix, but as a feat of engineering, one can only stand and marvel at them. Either way, we want a go...

For information, head to Dark Arts Guitars.

Metallica is helping EMG celebrate its 50th anniversary by dropping new special edition finish options for each of their signature pickup sets.

The thrash metal giants have been powered by the firm's high-output passive and active pickups since basically day one. Their relationship predates their 1983 debut album, Kill ‘Em All, with Kirk Hammett first loading three of its single-coils into his purple Fernandes.

Hetfield was quick to follow suit, and EMG founder Rob Turner has recently said that making Hetfield's signature pickups was his most challenging and exhausting build.

And so here, Hetfield's signature JH ‘Het’ humbuckers get a special Sandblasted finish, while Hammett's KH-BB set gets a purple Spectrum colorway, and bass player Robert Trujillo's RT ‘Rip Tide’ pickups get a gilded redressing.

The limited edition sets – which, under the hood, are the same pickups that have been fuelling Metallica’s riffwork over the past few decades – are available during 2026 only.

Hetfield's set, which went through a tireless prototyping process, is unique in its use of ceramic poles, which are taller and thinner than usual. Hammett's Bone Breakers, by comparison, utilize Alnico 5 magnets, while Trujillo's take on the EMG J bass pickups are now “truly metal” thanks to their fresh new look.

“The thing I love about EMGs is that they're so consistent,” Hetfield says. “I can put EMGs in every guitar, and it's gonna sound exactly like I need it to.”

In other Metallica news, the band has just announced a residency at the Las Vegas Sphere, and their existing gig rig means they won’t need to go to the lengths John Mayer did to work around the venue’s sound restrictions.

3rd Power has introduced the MagFRAG pickup system – a potentially game-changing new evolution that gives players unprecedented control over their gain staging.

The tube amp specialist, which has previously built amps for the likes of Joe Satriani, unveiled the latest edition of its proprietary system at NAMM last month. First launched back in 2017, the updated MagFRAG humbuckers and single-coils look to push the boundaries of modern pickup engineering and design.

It is true we are living in a golden age of guitar pickups. Over the past 10 years there has been a huge leap forward in pickup tech, which all started when Fishman launched its flagship Fluence Modern humbuckers back in 2014.

At the time, Guitar World hailed the Fluence system as “the first truly new electric guitar pickup system design in more than 80 years”. MagFRAG – an accessible passive pickup design – is aiming to be equally influential in the passive pickup sphere.

In essence, MagFRAG pickups use a multi-magnet platform design to give players intentional control over how and where gain is created. That means they utilize a string-specific magnet voicing – for example, alnico II, V and beyond – to improve “clarity, balance and dynamic response”, unlike conventional pickups, which use a single magnet bar at their core.

As 3rd Power puts it, MagFRAG isn’t about “chasing vintage replication”. It’s about pushing the boundary. It’s a new approach to the “modern tone ecosystem”, homing in on a player’s touch while preserving musical feel “across a wide range of gain structures”.

MagFRAG was originally designed as a high-resolution interface between a guitar and amp, but later became a pickup system that has since been rolled out through two distinct families: PraXIS and Drive.

The PraXIS Series is about transparency and dynamics. PraXIS Reveal, made from a low-mass coil architecture, prioritizes touch sensitivity and clarity over output, meaning gain can be shaped at the pedalboard or amp stages. It also means every nuance of the player’s hands and instrument remains intact.

Elsewhere, PraXIS Reference offers a more full-range voice said to be more suitable for “modern electric guitar”, while Reference+ offers increased output and ‘push’.

There’s also the MagFRAG Drive Series, made up of Drive and Drive Studio pickups. The first is voiced to engage the front end of an amp with responsive saturation and bumped mids without excessive compression, while the latter offers an unpotted configuration for more controlled microphonics, enhanced “harmonic bloom” and “studio-grade responsiveness”.

A pickup system that lets you intentionally and deliberately choose where your gain staging comes from sounds like a neat idea, and the multi-magnet design seemingly offers a fresh take on conventional passive pickup design.

In the provided diagrams, for example, there are three distinct types of magnet used in one pickup, which will no doubt have an interesting effect on overall tone and behaviour.

These are a new development and a significant departure from conventional passive pickup design.

“MagFRAG is about intent,” said Dylana Nova Scott, Founder and Chief Designer of 3rd Power Amplification. “Where you choose to shape gain should be a musical decision. The MagFRAG Pickup System gives players clear, purpose-built tools to decide whether that happens at the guitar, the pedalboard, or the amplifier.”

Like any new development, though, it will be interesting to see just how revolutionary the MagFRAGs can be when it rolls out. For example, how effective the MagFRAGs are at differentiating gain stages in practice – ie, whether the gain comes from a pedalboard or amplifier – remains to be seen.

No doubt we’ll see plenty of demo videos in the near future, though, so keep your eyes peeled on 3rd Power for future updates.

Fresh from launching his long-awaited signature PRS, DragonForce speed wizard Herman Li has returned with all-new Fishman Fluence pickups – and the Omniforce humbucker set is said to capture the full scope of Li’s musical evolution.

Ostensibly, these are the same pickups that feature in his eye-catching signature guitar, which comprises two humbuckers with a single-coil nestling between them. That configuration delivered 13 different tone voicings to Li’s fingertips, but the aftermarket release has, in a surprising move, done away with the single-coil pickup.

Consequently, the full suite remains exclusive to the PRS Chleo, with the Fluence Herman Li Omniforce twin ‘buckers instead offering three voices per pickup for a slightly more streamlined – but still generous – offering.

Li’s predilection for an aggressive, cutting neck pickup tone has been catered to, and the new Omniforce is said to be “sharp enough to unleash explosive pinch harmonics on demand.” Here, Voice 1 is about smooth, articulate lead tones with crisp warmth. Voice 2 is a passive-style with tighter frequency and more organic feel, and Voice 3 is a lively single-coil, inspired by vintage guitars from Li's collection.

The mission statement for the bridge ‘bucker was to be three things: powerful, precise, and capable of cutting through mixes with ease. So, expect a high-output humbucker character with three voices charting open-sounding passive-style tones, focused mid-range with “razor-sharp” articulation, and another helping of vintage-voiced single-coil magic.

The pickups are active, boasting 200 hours of playtime before they need recharging.

“Herman is fearless when it comes to innovation,” says Fishman Fluence Brand Manager, Ken Susi. “The Omniforce Signature Series reflects his entire tonal journey while showcasing what’s possible when cutting-edge Fluence technology meets world-class artistry.”

The sets are available in Black Plastic and Black Nickel finishes, meaning the Gold finish of the Chleo is another PRS exclusive. Individual pickups are not currently available.

The Fishman Fluence Herman Li Omniforce Signature Series pickups are available now.

Elsewhere, the SE version of Li’s signature PRS raised eyebrows over its price, and the guitarist recently reflected on how a video game turned DragonForce into a household name.

NAMM 2026: Seymour Duncan is taking a leaf out of Fishman’s book with its brand-new MortalCoil humbuckers, which pack three distinctive voices for catch-all tonality.

Sounding like a Tekken character, the MortalCoil Multiple-Voiced Active Humbuckers are loaded with three precision-engineered voices, inspired in part by its heritage pickups.

There’s the fast, controlled attack of its modern metal-minded MC1s in voice one, authentic JB tones in voice two – the pickup it made with Jeff Beck, but one that's taken on a life of its own since – and a clear, articulate single coil to round out the lot.

Beneath the hood, there’s some wiring wizardry going on, too. They’re precision-wound high-density copper coils with optimized resistance, which, in simple terms, means that they offer a faster response and stronger pick attack “than competing designs” – and it's a perk that it says will benefit users of all tunings.

Moreover, the humbuckers also boast new preamps, imbuing them with a more dynamic feel, even when the distortion is dialed back to its minimum. Their efficient circuitry, meanwhile, helps prolong battery life. Pair it with Ernie Ball’s rechargeable 9Vs – what a revelation! – and you could be on to a real winner.

In recent years, Fishman Fluence pickups, bolstered by their multi-voice system, have been appearing in guitars of all shapes and sizes, with widespread backing, including endorsements from Polyphia’s Tim Henson and Scott LePage, as well as Mick Thomson, and a continued presence in Strandberg guitars.

It seems, then, that Seymour Duncan, a company with a rich heritage, is looking to bite back with this three-in-one active pickup. By packing the “surgical precision” of the MC1, the genre-crossing JB, and a single coil sound made with modern rigs in mind – which is especially useful for guitars without a pre-wired split coil – the MortalCoil could prove a worthy adversary.

“Experience what happens when 50 years of pickup expertise meets modern active technology,” says Seymour Duncan. “MortalCoil installs easily as a drop-in upgrade for many existing active setups and includes all required pots and wiring.”

Some eagle-eyed folk have noticed that the MortalCoils play a big role in ESP's latest lineup, including the TH-1000 Evertune. Now they're available as aftermarket parts, ready to add more heat and versatility to six- and seven-string guitars.

The Seymour Duncan MortalCoil Multi-Voiced Active Pickups are available for $169.00 per pickup, or $279.00 for a set.

See Seymour Duncan for more.

It’s been a busy few months for the pickup brand, having released Slash’s Back to the Beginning pickups, which were custom-wound for his SG, earlier this month.

NAMM 2026: When Slash opted to wield a Gibson SG at Ozzy Osbourne's farewell show, he turned to pickup guru Maricela “MJ” Juarez for a purpose-built set of Seymour Duncan humbuckers that would be up for the job. Now, they’re available worldwide as the Slash 3.0 Signature Humbuckers.

As the name attests, the Seymour Duncan Slash 3.0 pickup set, comprising two Alnico V pups, is the third iteration of signature pickups for the top-hatted guitar hero. It's the first time, however, that he's stepped away from Alnico 2 magnets

This generation, built specifically for Slash’s SG, follows its older siblings in packing a little more heat than PAF-style pickups without being particularly high-gain, instead prioritizing clarity over power.

That being said, the 3.0s adds greater “punch and aggression” to his signature recipe, with rough-cast Alnico V magnets and a vintage-inspired construction coalescing for “players seeking extra cut without compromise.”

Those tweaks, ultimately, lead to an enhanced output with a tighter low-end. And though they were originally installed in his SG, they’ve become far more widespread across Slash’s electric guitar collection.

“The SG that I had at the Ozzy gig [Back to the Beginning] needed a louder pickup, but I still wanted that true-to-life guitar sound that I like in my guitars. That's where the idea for the 3.0 came from,” explains Slash.

“There's a little more oomph to it, but you still have the cleanliness and honesty of the guitar. It's raunchier than the 2.0; it gives me the extra boost I need in certain guitars.”

The Seymour Duncan Slash 3.0 pickup set is hand-built in Santa Barbara, California. The set starts at $258, with individual pickups priced at $129. There are a handful of color options, including Black, Nickel, Gold, and Zebra.

Visit Seymour Duncan for the full lowdown.

In related news, Seymour Duncan recently made its celebrated JB ‘buckers available for Telecasters and recreated Tommy Bolin’s legendary Les Paul pickups, with the help of Joe Bonamassa.

EMG pickups founder Rob Turner has said that working with James Hetfield forced the firm to completely reinvent its methodology as the Metallica guitarist pushed its craft to the limit.

The thrash icons are one of the most notable bands to have adopted EMGs, and helped define their status as heavy metal pickups.

“Kirk [Hammett] was the first one to call up, but I had no idea who he was,” Turner says during a talk with Thomann at Guitar Summit 2025. “I don't think he knew who he was, actually. He was in a band and they were trying to get a record deal, and he had this purple Stratocaster with two single-coils and a humbucker in it.”

That first encounter between EMG and Metallica predated their debut album, Kill ‘Em All, which shows how integral the EMG’s high-output active pickups have been to their world-conquering sound across their entire discography.

“I think James [Hetfield] got a little jealous of what was going on,” Turner adds with a smile.

Before long, the guitarists worked with EMG on their own pickups, and some years later Hetfield’s exacting ways put Turner through the ringer.

“Hetfield was the toughest [to voice a pickup for],” he says. “We built 19 different models. He more or less changed what we were doing. Normally, we use a very narrow core in the pickup, and he wanted to have pole pieces.”

This created a domino effect of challenges, which forced Turner to rethink his approach.

“So then we're going to start with a larger core and a larger coil. That means [having] a larger aperture, which means there's going to be too much low-end,” Turner explains. “So then it's like, ‘Okay, we’ve got to change the dimensions of the coil. They need to be taller and thinner. We need to be able to space them accordingly.’

“The hardest one was the neck pickup,” he adds, “because it uses ceramic poles. Typically, nobody does that. They're too strong. So, we had to magnetize them to a certain extent.

“Then we showed him a tray of sample finishes, and he picked the hardest one to do, which is this black, shiny, stealth-like, and it's the hardest thing to prevent from getting scratches in production.”

Hetfield's official signature 'Het Set' ultimately reshaped what were, at their core, EMG and EMG81 humbuckers. In the firm’s promotion material for the set, Hetfield is quoted as wanting “something unique and historic.” He certainly got that.

In related news, Dave Mustaine has revealed that Megadeth will close out their last-ever album with a cover of Ride the Lightning, a song he co-wrote with Hetfield before he left Metallica.

What is it?

If there ever were a Lennon and McCartney in guitar pickup design, it would have to be the formidable duo of Bare Knuckle’s chief designer and founder, Tim Mills, and Adam 'Nolly' Getgood — whose extensive résumé, including work with Periphery, Animals as Leaders, and Devin Townsend, along with his role as a music software entrepreneur for GetGood Drums, is nothing short of impressive.

Both of these blokes’ collaborative efforts have already yielded the acclaimed Polymath and PolyPaf humbuckers, cementing their reputation for voicing exceptional pickups.

Not ones to rest on their laurels, Mills’ and Getgood’s work recently caught the attention of prog metal guitarist Mike Stringer of Spiritbox during a tour stop. From there, Stringer became deeply involved with this power couple to craft a signature pickup that can precisely enhance the low-end density of a 7-string guitar that’s being pummeled with gain, while also clearly detailing ambient and clean tones when both pickups are combined.

The result of this three-way collaboration is the rousing Halcyon humbucker, available in both bridge and neck models, which sounds even more monumental when you hear it in Stringer’s preferred drop F# tuning. If your musical proclivities span between metalcore chugging and taut cleans that slap and pop like Stringer’s, then the Halcyon humbucker could be the forceful sonic voice you've been seeking.

Specs

• Price: Starting at £195.60 per pickup (approx $247), or £376.80 for a set (approx $476)
• Type: Twin blade pole-design humbuckers
• Origin: U.K.
• DC Resistance: 17.9 kΩ (Bridge); 7.9 kΩ (Neck)
• Magnet: Ceramic (Bridge); isotropic Alnico V (Neck)
• Features: 4-conductor or braided 2-conductor wiring; short or short-triangular mounting legs; available in the full range of Bare Knuckle’s humbucker colors, custom finishes, blade colors, and covers.
• Potting: Yes
• Contact: Bare Knuckle Pickups

Usability and sounds

While it seems tempting to install the Halcyons in a set-neck, single-cut guitar, Bare Knuckle suggested that I try the Halcyons in a modern superstrat that’s more in line with how Stringer plays. Lucky for me, my Charvel Dinky DK24 is the perfect guitar to outfit these humbuckers because of the guitar’s five-way switching and coil tap switch that allows for multiple coil-splitting configurations to hear the Halcyon’s wide range of tones on tap.

Also, knowing that Stringer is a stalwart of the 7-string and I am not, I opted to hear how the Halcyons fare with a 6-string guitar, which I believe most players will want to know about.

I’ve never been a fan of rail pickups, and as good as some have sounded, I just never liked the way they looked. Nowadays, with the advent of more performance-driven shapes and sleeker contours on guitars, I’ve softened my position. Right now, the dual-bladed Halcyons look absolutely killer in my Charvel.

Speaking of “killer,” my guitar tech who installed the Halcyons informed me, “I’m just gonna warn you — these are the LOUDEST pickups I’ve ever heard in a guitar. Make sure you put the dogs and kids in another room before plugging it in.” Noted.

Just like the Ragnarok humbucker, the Halcyon is among the highest-output passive pickups Bare Knuckle produces. One look at the pickup resistances on the Halcyons shows the bridge measures at a gargantuan 17.9k ohms, but the neck reveals a more moderate 7.9k ohms.

Checking Bare Knuckle’s online chart, the EQ block graph displays a decreased bass with bumped-up mids and treble on equal footing. For this reason, PAF pickup partisans may want to look elsewhere since the powerful output of the Halcyon bridge is unapologetically voiced for modern aggression but also calibrated for balance.

Having a twin‑blade pole design (versus individual pole pieces) allows both pickups to maintain even string balance across various gauges and tunings — making these pickups particularly effective for drop tunings and in use on multi‑ or extended-scale instruments.

The Halcyon bridge is stacked with a trio of custom ceramic magnets to deliver a biting midrange, muscular output, and razor-sharp attack without being flabby in the lows. The neck pickup’s leaner wind around an Alnico V magnet provides ample headroom for a refined hybrid of cleaner and ambient textures. Surprisingly, despite that intentional contrast between the Halcyon’s individual builds, there is no discernible output drop as you switch between the neck and bridge, or engaging coil-tapping, which allows you to summon an array of dynamic tonal colors without sacrificing balance.

Finally, the Halcyon is available in several cosmetic options to match your axe. You can get it in traditional black, but Bare Knuckle also offers a variety of covers and radiators, blade colors, and certain custom finishes. This pickup typically comes with 4-conductor wiring, which allows for versatile coil-splitting options, but is also available in braided 2-conductor wiring.

Heeding my tech’s advice, I started on a clean channel of my Blackstar St. James head to catch the initial breath of these Halcyons. And yes, he’s right; the bridge pickup has a massive output unlike anything I’ve ever heard. You can hear a colossal wall of rounded lows and weighted mids, but thankfully, no excessive “boom” on its bottom end.

You can gather from this clean state that it’s the kind of humbucker primed for utmost saturation. After dropping my strings down to F♯ and pumping full-throttle gain from my EVH 5150 III head, it’s apparent that the Halcyon doesn’t possess a feral nature; instead, it captures pure brutality through controlled aggression. By chugging away on the wound strings, you can sense how well the Halcyon bridge handles low‑end with clarity and manages to preserve chordal articulation under the strain of increased gain from modelers and pedals, or in this case, a high-gain amp driven to its limits.

Sticking with the bridge pickup, I found it was great for injecting elements of Stringer's style. As I unleashed a barrage of rhythmic pick scrapes and thickly layered, low-end riffage, the Halcyon responded with surgical precision and presence. Moreover, I could hear how cleanly my rapid two-handed tapping solos sliced through the untamed red solo channel of my 5150. The pickup’s fast attack and measured aggressiveness are so convincing that it almost made me sound like a dyed-in-the-wool Hesher who’s been playing industrial metal for years.

Switching over to the neck, what’s immediately clear is which pickup is the Alpha and which is the Beta — and that’s not throwing shade at the neck. The Halcyon neck wastes no time pulling punches; it still hits hard, but it’s all about firmly detailing its crystalline voice that doesn’t clash with the bridge.

Any combination of splitting the coils allowed me to articulate taut, clean notes that sound like slap-bass on the low strings, or to introduce delicate volume swells drowned in ambient reverberation, to which I accentuated arpeggiated lines using a dotted-eighth note delay setting. What’s cool is that no matter the pickup configuration or coil-tapping I used between the neck and bridge, both consistently proved the Halcyons fuse precision with authority, allowing each riff and note to land with weight and vitality.

Verdict

Verdict: ★★★★½

Bare Knuckle consistently brings something unique to the table, and here, the Halcyon is a powerful humbucker imbued with an aggressive nature that doesn’t sacrifice clarity. The Halcyons are uncompromising, high-performance pickups specifically designed for modern, drop-tuned, progressive, and industrial metal genres.

Guitar World verdict: For players focused on tight distortion, multiple coil-splitting options, extended range, and maintaining clarity at high gain, these pickups are a highly compelling choice. However you utilize them, Bare Knuckle’s Halcyon humbuckers provide a pugnacious foundation of intensity that demands your attention.

Hands-on videos

Bare Knuckle Pickups

Aristides Guitars

• How Spiritbox’s Mike Stringer went from reluctant hometown hero to metal’s new seven-string phenomenon

Seymour Duncan has retooled its famed JB humbucker for Telecasters, and it could be a game-changer for Telecaster players.

The pickup was first crafted in the 1970s in collaboration with Jeff Beck, hence its name. It was the firm's first-ever humbucker design and helped make the sound of his masterpiece record, Blow by Blow, so distinctive.

Since then, it's been introduced to a huge array of genres, with players adoring its high-output tones and ability to push tube amps harder for greater sustain and harmonics.

Of course, it’s proven a hit with metal guitar players, as evidenced by its inclusion in the new Jackson Soloist SL2DX, but it’s also won over blues players, too, for those wanting a little more spice and sizzle.

Now, Tele players can get in on the action with this new reimagining that, crucially, packs the heat and tonal charm of the famed pup into a single-coil-sized design. That’s the real kicker here. There’s no need to get drills and saws out to carve out a bigger hole in your beloved axe.

“With any replacement pickup, you’re constrained by the shape of the pickup that you’re trying to replace,” Seymour Duncan’s VP of engineering and new products, Kevin Beller, explains. “If you’re trying to replace a Tele [pickup], you can’t really deviate from a Tele shape very far. Basically, what we’re doing is we’re trying to fit two coils into the space where one big single coil used to occupy.”

It’s concocted with a ceramic magnet for “powerful and dynamic tones” and is vacuum wax-potted for squeal-free performance. Anyone who’s ever run a traditional Tele hot will know how susceptible to hum they can be.

Wired with four-conductor lead wire, the pickup enables series, parallel, and split coil wiring options for those not wanting to leave their single coil twang behind them.

Naturally, the JB Jr. for Tele is designed specifically for Telecaster bridge routs. Its “beloved punch, harmonic sparkle, and searing highs” will fit most standard Telecaster bridge single-coil routs – Fender or otherwise – but it’s always best to check the measurements before ordering.

“For decades, the Seymour Duncan JB humbucker has been the go-to pickup for guitarists across countless genres,” says Seymour Duncan. “The JB Jr. for Tele brings high output, tonal versatility, and signature harmonic richness to your Tele bridge, all in a single-coil-sized humbucker design.”

The Seymour Duncan JB Jr. for Tele bridge pickup is priced at $129 and is available to order now.

Visit Seymour Duncan for a closer look.

Seymour Duncan has been busy of late, dropping what it claims to be the ultimate Jazzmaster pickup and collaborating with Joe Bonamassa on two pickup sets that recreate the sounds of two unique axes in his collection: his obscure “Greenburst” Strat, and Tommy Bolin's legendary Les Paul.

Seymour Duncan and Joe Bonamassa have recreated the humbuckers from the blues maestro’s Bolin ’Burst – a famed 1960 Les Paul Standard that carries close ties to the late Tommy Bolin.

A few years ago, Bonamassa acquired the guitar under some extraordinary circumstances, going as far as to call it the strangest guitar deal he ever did. Now, he’s linked up with the US pickup manufacturer once again to analyze the Les Paul's two humbuckers in exacting detail, resulting in the signature "Bolin Burst" set.

Bolin himself made his name in Zephyr, the James Gang, and Billy Cobham – ultimately inspiring Steve Stevens to use toy ray guns in one of his most iconic guitar solos – before replacing Ritchie Blackmore in Deep Purple in 1975. He was driven to his intense audition by none other than David Bowie.

In the group, he helped reshape their sound on Come Taste the Band, before releasing his second album, Private Eyes, in 1976. He died at the age of 25 following a drug overdose in December that year.

The Bolin ’Burst actually belonged to Bolin's friend David Brown, who purchased it for $125 in 1966. It later became Bolin's main six-string after his Goldtop was swiped from a Zephyr gig, and Brown kindly lent him the Les Paul Standard as a replacement.

The pickups were never swapped out, and they – along with Bolin's touch – helped give the electric guitar its singular tone.

To harness that sound, the Bolin Burst pickups feature Alnico 2 magnets to “deliver authentic vintage tonality with dynamic bridge and warm neck pickup characteristics”, and they have been aged by the Seymour Duncan Custom Shop to match the time-worn vibe of the originals.

A portion of the proceeds from sales will support Bolin’s legacy “through dedicated endowment and memorial funds.”

Seymour Duncan says “the bridge pickup provides a dynamic and barky sound,” while the neck is all about “warmth and clarity” through an overdriven amp.

“It really is a special set,” Bonamassa says of his latest signature pickups. Production is limited to 500 sets. Each bottom plate is signed by Bonamassa and Seymour W. Duncan, and the pickups arrive in numbered packaging to the tune of $375 per set.

Visit Seymour Duncan for more.

The release comes as part of Seymour Duncan’s Joe Bonamassa collection, which includes pickups inspired by a 1950 Broadcaster, the most dynamic guitar he's ever played, and one of his personal favorites, an ES-335.

Back in the late 1990s, Gibson joined forces with Black Sabbath rifflord Tony Iommi to create the brand's first ever signature pickup. Now – less than two months after Sabbath took their final onstage bow with the late Ozzy Osbourne – that pickup, the Tony Iommi Signature Humbucker, is back.

Featuring a distinct configuration of powerful ceramic and Alnico 2 magnets, and unique winding, the fully wax-potted and epoxied Iommi humbucker is designed to help guitarists emulate the mighty, distorted rumble of the metal godfather's tone, without descending into overcooked, blown-out mush.

The humbucker's 4-conductor wiring, meanwhile, allows for series, parallel, and split coil operation.

The Iommi 'bucker had become an increasingly rare sight in recent years, in turn fetching ever-bigger money on the secondhand market.

“I’m really excited that Gibson’s bringing back my signature humbucker, they were getting pretty hard to find!” Iommi himself said in a statement. “This pickup came about after a lot of time spent in Nashville, just experimenting with different setups to get that perfect tone and sustain from my favorite guitars.

“We had to make sure it worked with my light gauge strings and low tunings, but still pack a punch, and the result has got some serious output. They're on my signature guitars too, and I couldn’t be more pleased with how they turned out.”

“I’d personally installed these on one of my Gibson guitars 15 years ago, and I was blown away with the distinct Tony Iommi and Black Sabbath sound I was able to get out of them,” added Gibson President and CEO Cesar Gueikian.

“They have such a great, clean look with the unique pickup cover, and we are excited to bring the Rifflord’s signature humbucker back as we continue to pay tribute to Tony.”

The re-release of the Sabbath man's signature pickup continues his fruitful relationship with Gibson, which has also – in recent years – produced a signature SG Special, which for our money stands as one of the best Gibson SGs you can buy today.

The Gibson Tony Iommi Signature Humbucker is available now for $229.

For more info, visit Gibson.

In the seventies, Larry DiMarzio and Seymour Duncan broadened the tonal horizons for the electric guitar community by developing their own pickups to be retrofitted onto instruments made by other companies.

To this day, they are still very much masters of their trade, with innovations to suit just about any kind of player, from low-output passives for purists to enhanced firepower for higher-gain thrill-seekers – and everything in between.

Over the last two decades, however, a company from England has risen from being a relative unknown to becoming arguably the world’s largest independent electric guitar pickup manufacturer, thanks to some highly customizable and award-winning bespoke creations that guarantee tonal excellence.

We are, of course, talking about Bare Knuckle Pickups – the business founded by session guitarist Tim Mills in 2003 with an emphasis on everything being hand-wound to order, giving customers complete control on how their pickups should look and sound.

As well as producing best-selling circuits like The Mule and The Nailbomb, the specialists also have collaborated with guitarists like Steve Stevens and Misha Mansoor to create signature sets that are tailor made to get the job done. It all happened very organically, Mills says when asked about his journey from hopeful newcomer to becoming the brains behind an internationally respected phenomenon.”

What made you want to get into building pickups?

“I came to it as a player because I don’t have a science background. In the Nineties, I was playing for Elkie Brooks, a blues star with a career spanning 65 years. Later on, some friends asked me to help out in their Ozzy Osbourne tribute band. I knew it would be fun, but I had to emulate lots of different tones.

“I started messing around with pickups just to see what worked. I got frustrated by the fact that nobody was describing what these things did. I felt like every pickup was marketed to say it was good at everything. The information was very generalized.

“I ended up pulling a pickup apart just to see what the hell was going on inside. I reverse-engineered one with a winding machine I’d cobbled together and then started experimenting with different permutations of magnets and wire.”

How did that end up becoming your full-time job?

“I put a website together with some designs, figuring it would be a nice way to earn [money] alongside teaching music and martial arts. I was looking for a name and realized there was a synergy between guitars and combat; it’s all hands-based. The penny dropped when I remembered that bare knuckle, the original form of fighting, was something we excelled at in this part of the world.

“It all felt quintessentially British. I wanted to prove we could make good stuff here. In my first year, I had two people with me; now there’s over 20 in the workshop plus all the IT, service and accounts teams. But it’s all done the same way. We use the same machines I put together back in the day. I think I’m now on the sixth motor for that winder.”

You must have done a lot of research to know exactly what you’re working with.

“I became obsessed with tone. I had a mentor who gave me original Fifties pickups. I wanted to learn about why they could sound three-dimensional, ultra dynamic and touch-sensitive. I went down the wormhole of plastics, metals and carbon content, looking at the strand count in the wire and all that stuff.

“I also wanted us to be making our own parts. I ran into an engineer at a guitar show and asked if he could make a base plate exactly like an old Gibson. We analyzed everything to the finest degree and didn’t cut any corners, even down to the direction of the grain on the nickel silver.

“The same went for the tooling and magnets, with X-ray spectra graphs analyzing aluminum, nickel and cobalt. When it comes to retrofit pickups, people tend to want something hotter, but I studied low- and medium-output designs as well.”

It’s interesting how you make pickups that vary in terms of output, though everything is passive.

“EMG have really got their game together when it comes to active stuff. I can’t see anyone chasing them down that path. Their pickups do exactly what they say. Sure, other companies have come along with their own permutations of actives, but EMG still hold their own in that world. I felt there was more scope to develop by staying passive.

“Active pickups have an in-built preamp that sculpts the tone. It’s based around creating a lot of compression. That’s the great thing about them; you can put an active pickup on any guitar and it will sound consistently great. But in the Ozzy tribute, I needed something that could do Tony Iommi’s rock sound as well as Zakk Wylde’s metal sound. And I could only do that using passives.”

Customers have full aesthetic control when ordering from you. How crucial is that to the business?

“I wanted to expand on what a pickup could look like, so we concentrated a lot on aesthetics. There are a lot of custom finishing, from colors to etching and so on. We were the first to come up with the camo or tiger finish pickup.

“These are all part of guitar language now, but they came first through us. We’d mess around with things like acid etch, blow torches, burnt chrome – which technically you can’t do, because chrome doesn’t burn. But if you do it with nickel, all these glorious colors come out.

So what’s next for Bare Knuckle?

“We’re doing something with Claudio Sanchez from Coheed and Cambria. And we’re working on a signature for Tracii Guns. We started talking online; it all happened organically. That’s way better than me chasing somebody. If you give an artist something for free, it’s totally unsolicited and will probably end up on the shelf.

“I remember one day getting an order from someone called Steve Stevens and didn’t question it. A bit later, he emailed again asking if I’d like to come to a show. We met backstage and he got me to watch from his backline.

“We then started talking about a signature, which started a chain of events; I’ve since worked with Misha Mansoor, Chris Robertson, Adam Getgood and, most recently, Mike Stringer [Spiritbox]. This latest one has been really successful; it’s the pickup equivalent of a bulldozer.”

Who would be your dream client?

“I’d love to make something for Jimmy Page. He actually sent his “Number One” 1959 Les Paul to my workshop because of a pickup issue just before the 2007 Led Zeppelin reunion. It was fantastic to analyze such a brilliant guitar. The back of the neck had this odd carve where it got thin from frets three to nine.

“Interestingly, the neck pickup was just shy of 9k. Normally that would be muddy and hot, but because the magnet had discharged so much and the coil windings were heavily asymmetrical, it was behaving more like a single-coil. That’s why it had this woody, almost SRV sound.

“The bridge was a symmetrically wound 8.2k Seymour Duncan installed around the late Seventies. It was nicely balanced with a good growl. Most of the tone came from how much timber had taken off the neck, almost to Ibanez levels of thinness. I was amazed the truss rod hadn’t popped out. Honestly, working on Jimmy Page’s guitar was bucket list stuff for me.”

• Best pickups for metal 2025: our guide to upgrading for high gain heaven
• Best humbucker pickups 2025: buck up your guitar with mellow lows and punchy mids
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

DiMarzio has set out on a quest to make electric guitar players fall in love with Telecaster neck pickups by releasing a new set that looks to remedy a glaring issue that plagues most traditional units.

Hearing the cries of Tele players who hate the guitar’s traditional pickups owing to the perceived muddy and dull tones that lack clarity, DiMarzio has launched the Muscle T set, which “adds more of the glassy sparkle that Tele neck pickups always lacked” in a bid to save the day.

Hand-wound and tested at its New York facility, the Muscle T neck is joined by an accompanying bridge pickup. Utilizing a traditional magnet stagger, it takes inspiration from the firm’s favorite '60s Tele pickups but kicks “the output up a notch”.

The set also packs more sustain and has a warmer top end “to eliminate harshness.” Vintage-inspired but bestowed with a modern touch, the Muscle T offers “balanced lows, mid-range snarl and a clear top,” but doesn’t lose the positive aspects of those '60s pups.

That includes “dynamic response” in abundance, and it’s been “carefully calibrated with more volume and presence to keep up with the needs of modern players.” Finally, there’s the promise of a greater string-to-string balance.

The DiMarzio Muscle T pickups cost $89 apiece. The bridge is available in a traditional dress only – black with chrome pole pieces – while the neck comes in Chrome, Black, and Gold covers, and an unplated version.

It’s been joined by another new release, the Super PAF Ceramic, which puts a high-octane spin on the OG DiMarzio PAF ceramic humbucker design.

“The Super Distortion started a sound revolution,” DiMarzio says, with no room for humility. “Replacement pickups simply didn’t exist before the invention of the Super Distortion; it was the first pickup specifically designed to kick a tube amp into total overdrive and is still the standard by which all other high-output pickups are measured.”

Ace Frehley, Al Di Meola, and Phil Collen were early adopters of the pickups as hard rock roared to the top of the charts on both sides of the Atlantic, proving to be the secret weapon of countless players.

With increased power equating to “a wall of sound,” its invention redefined what pickups could do, and it's unlikely the likes of other tonal pros, including Seymour Duncan and Bareknuckle, could have existed without it.

The DiMarzio Super PAF Ceramic bridge pickup is available now for $106, and there’s a wealth of customization options, from vintage stylings to technicolour madness.

Head to DiMarzio for more.

As a young man in New York City, Larry DiMarzio was a guitar repairman with a big vision.

“What I was after was really making a better rock ’n’ roll pickup,” DiMarzio tells Guitarist. While that may sound simple in theory, it wasn’t in reality. From DiMarzio’s perspective – which was gleaned through years of repairing used guitars, which he found to be of increasingly poor quality – major brands that he grew up loving had lost the “process for building the pyramids”.

Essentially, by DiMarzio’s estimation, the halcyon years of the 1950s and early ’60s, which produced some of the most prized Les Pauls, Stratocasters and Telecasters ever produced, were a distant memory. In their place were quality control and tonal issues. The concerns with the build quality were one thing, and not necessarily DiMarzio’s priority. But the tonal needs were another matter entirely.

First came DiMarzio’s FS-1 pickup, which essentially replaced the stock Fender Strat bridge pickup. Early adopters were David Gilmour, which was fantastic, of course, but this was only the beginning.

Players such as Earl Slick, Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, Ace Frehley, Al DiMeola and Joe Perry hipped themselves to DiMarzio, who, in addition to the FS-1, had developed the iconic Super Distortion humbucker, changing the face and sound of rock ’n’ roll in the 1970s.

Slick specifically was one of DiMarzio’s earliest supporters as DiMarzio modded his guitars. “If you listen to early Aerosmith records, you can tell between Joe and Brad Whitford’s stuff,” Slick says. “The sound was coming out of Joe’s pickups. They added punch. They weren’t just louder, they were sonically different, with more midrange.”

Larry DiMarzio chuckles when he looks back on the inherent differences between his product and what was available at the time, saying: “It’s the difference between supermarket-baked bread and a good bakery. That’s not what guitar players need. They need a good, honest product built from the ground up.”

To that end, DiMarzio’s product reshaped hard-rock guitar in the 1970s and kept on doing so into the ’80s and ’90s. His pickups can be found in guitars of all shapes and sizes, making their way under the hands of everyone from Randy Rhoads and Paul Gilbert, to Kurt Cobain, Dimebag Darrell, Nita Strauss and Matteo Mancuso.

Now in his mid-70s, Larry DiMarzio no longer needs to work. And he certainly doesn’t need to invent any more iconic pickups – but that’s not stopping him. It’s not his style to sit back, and it’s definitely not his style to sell out, regardless of how many legacy brands are scooped up by major players around him.

Moreover, he’s certainly not about to start believing his own hype, no matter how many iconic players champion his creations. “I’ve never asked those questions directly,” he says. “My attitude was that I’m crew. I’m happy to do the job, you know? I’m the guy who walks in and fixes the problem.”

What led you to become a guitar repairman in New York City in the early ’70s?

“Maybe we should start with fantasy versus reality. I grew up having teachers who had interesting guitars. One of my earliest teachers – and I must have been 15 – had an original mid-’50s Strat with the V-shaped neck and stock Strat pickups.

“That guitar was very special; it was better than anything I could afford and was available to me. Having said that, some of the early guitars that I owned were broken or falling apart, so I wound up fixing those guitars.”

Once you got rolling, what were your observations of guitars in the ’60s and ’70s?

“In my mind, there were always the famous… it was really a matter of there was something different between the guitars that my teacher had, and the new guitars that were being produced through that period of time. Does that make sense?

“So the reason that I refer to ‘fantasy’ is that you have an idea in your mind, which may not be true and very often isn’t. Coming at it from the point of view that there were things that stood out because you didn’t own them, you had a fantasy about them.”

How did that fantasy merge with your reality?

“I started working at the Guitar Lab around ’71 or ’72. I was going to work at a professional guitar shop around the corner of 48th Street [in New York City] and I suddenly had access to tons of guitars that were coming through the shop for repair. Or I’d go down to Manny’s, pick up a Stratocaster and say, ‘This is like a dead tuna,’ you know?”

And pickups were the way you compensated for that?

“Yeah, pickups seemed to be the way to compensate for the shortcomings of new guitars. When I first started working on pickups, the first pickup that got built was a Strat pickup just because I had Strats at the time.”

That was the FS-1, right? What went into putting that together?

“I had this fabulous old Telecaster. It was very acoustic and it rang beautifully. But it wasn’t the sound that I was hearing on Eric Clapton records. Being in the city with a lot of professional players, you quickly learn that – like the pros did – you could figure out hardware that worked in certain ways.”

David Gilmour was an early adopter of the FS-1 pickups in his Strats. That must have been a big boost for you.

“I had no direct relationship with David; that was something that he just bought. But again, the idea was, how can I get this overdriven sound that I’m hearing from Clapton, Beck and Page, without destroying the environment in terms of small clubs and places that are serving drinks?”

How did the FS-1 do that as an alternative to Fender’s typically shrill bridge pickups?

“The first solution that I came up with was, of course, to increase the output of the Stratocaster pickup. But I also EQ’d it in a different way.

“If you’re playing in clubs, there are common problems, so what rapidly happened was – and as you said, which was spot on, I was a guitar repairman – people came in and wanted them, which eventually led to me opening my own shop.”

On the Super Distortion side of things, how important was it for you to have young players like Joe Perry, Ace Frehley and Paul Stanley equip their guitars with DiMarzio pickups as an alternative to using early fuzz pedals?

“Everybody is different. All your clients have requirements and needs, and sometimes you get friendly. A lot of what we did was in an effort to try to show people that there were obvious differences. Gibson had lost the recipe, not only for guitar building but for pickup making based on their original designs. What I was after was really making a rock ’n’ roll pickup.”

With such young stars as Earl Slick and Al Di Meola also using your pickups, was it apparent that you were making a dent in the market?

“I didn’t look at it like I was suddenly making an impact, you know? I try not to believe my own publicity [laughs]. During that period of time, we were trying to make everything better, right? But it became obvious to me that a lot of people liked what I was doing, and that was really nice.”

Is it true that Ace Frehley and the guys in KISS started using your pickups because you grew up with Gene Simmons?

“Ace found out about me because of Gene. I went to school with Gene and I went to college with Gene. And, oddly enough, I was invited to be the guitar player in Wicked Lester, the pre-KISS band. But I wanted to be in a Top 40 band, so I was like, ‘I gotta work,’ you know? I wanted to be working.”

In many ways, DiMarzio reshaped the sound of rock guitar in the ’70s, and that kept up in the ’80s, with players like Randy Rhoads and Paul Gilbert championing your pickups.

“As the guitar playing changed, you know, the pickups were very good and applicable for what was going on. It had a lot to do with the fact that everybody started building multiple gain stage amplifiers.”

How did Randy end up using DiMarzio pickups?

“I was called up by Karl Sandoval [who built Randy Rhoads’s Polka Dot V], and I didn’t know Karl at the time. But Karl has always been a fan of the pickups; he liked the way they sound. He’s a guitar player and he recommended them. A lot of people were recommending the product because they liked it and used the product themselves.”

You also contributed to the evolution of shred guitars by redesigning the Strat bridge in the ’80s – how did you do that?

“Yes, around that time I redesigned the Fender bridge. Fender decided to start casting Stratocaster bridges and I remember thinking, ‘Wow… that’s how you screw up a really good product.’ So I redesigned the Stratocaster bridge, and guess what? The first thing I did was reduce the string spacing.

“I went from 2 ¼-inch to 2 ¹/8-inch. So I literally made the change that Eddie [Van Halen was known for and] was thinking about. He twisted the pickup to try to get the string balance right because, of course, the polepieces don’t line up properly with a 2 ¼-inch bridge.”

How is what DiMarzio did different, aside from not twisting the pickup?

“The solution is to change the outside string alignment, which also makes the strings go up the neck better. It’s more of a straight line from the bridge to the tuning pegs and, of course, through the nut. So the entire bridge works better.

“And we put tracks on the original DiMarzio bridges so that bridge saddles didn’t slide around, so when you use the tremolo, the guitar would come back into tune. Needless to say, Floyd Rose’s solution worked way better, but it also changed the sound of the guitar, which I didn’t like.”

In recent years, you worked with Steve Vai’s Ibanez PIA guitar, which features a beautifully engraved set of DiMarzio UtoPIA pickups.

“Everyone can get their own thing – and way. I’m not locked into any particular thing. When we worked on the Steve Vai project, for example, the most recent PIA project, we knew that we could get the sound that Steve wanted, but I also wanted to do something very different cosmetically to the pickup.

“We wanted to integrate the cosmetics of the pickup to the overall look of the guitar, you know? And since I do a lot of photos, I can think of a way to begin that and add to the overall look of what we’re doing.”

In an age where there’s no shortage of replacement pickups on the market, what continues to set DiMarzio apart from the pack?

“We’re always making little improvements. I continue to introduce things that I think will make a better product. And again, the goal is to never skimp: the goal is to build something where the guitar players can rely on it.”

Have you gotten to the point where you can reflect on the legacy of DiMarzio?

“Good question. You have to be very careful with who owns a brand, and I would rather just continue doing what I’m doing. I don’t have to work, but I have a commitment to the company and my clients. The legacy of building high-quality guitars is an American art form.

“You’re always dealing with skimping, penny-pinching and manipulation, and that destroys the integrity of the product. People want to play a product that is designed with integrity and intent.”

Is steering away from those sorts of things what you’re most proud of?

“It’s tough. I would probably say [it’s] the fact that I haven’t sold out, you know? I’ve always just tried to stick with what I did well. I get up every morning and I just try to figure out what I’m doing today.”

• Find out more at DiMarzio
• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

Many moons ago I remember asking Paul Reed Smith why he didn’t use pickups made by the likes of Seymour Duncan. My thinking was that while Paul had studied and learned the guitar-making craft of the greats, hadn’t Seymour Duncan done the same, focusing on the pickups they used?

The question came out all wrong. “Don’t you like my pickups, David?” No, that wasn’t what I meant.

Today, though, we all have easy access to the parts needed to make a pickup: the bobbins, the magnets, the wire and even mainstream luthier suppliers such as StewMac will sell you a pretty good pickup winding machine. You certainly don’t have to start like Seymour Duncan did with a record player’s turntable.

Follow some basic and well-documented rules and you, too, can be a pickup maker. Now, if this sounds like a bit of a slur towards the diligent people that make superb pickups, it’s not meant to be. It’s just that things are changing.

Case In Point

Ruokangas has been making guitars since 1995 in Harviala in the south of Finland. If you’ve ever been lucky enough to get your hands on one, you’ll know they represent extremely high craft and quality.

From a base range of models you can typically spec up your custom dream and, to be honest, even if you have no intention of doing that I’d highly recommended a visit to Juha Ruokangas’ website, which is crammed full of hard-earned tips, advice and a lot more.

But recently I received notification that Ruokangas was now in the pickup-making game. Soon, Juha Ruokangas and I were back in contact and he said he’d love to send over a set.

Now, the two humbucker pickup set – VÄINÖ (bridge) and AINO (neck) (pic 2) – come in a pretty wide range of options, from uncovered with bobbins in black, cream or white with a choice of nickel, gold or black poles (offered on all styles), through to standard nickel or gold-covered pickups (with or without the engraved Ruokangas ‘R’). The third option is partial covers, or frames, that can be nickel, gold or black-plated, like the poles.

These then come with a choice of 12 faceplates: from Arctic Birch to Brown Tortoise (pics 3 & 4). Not entirely sure what guitar I’d audition the pickups on, I ordered up the nickel open frame with a satin black face and nickel-plated poles.

I had plenty of other things on the work schedule, so I put Juha Ruokangas and his very Finnish-named pickups to the back of my mind until they arrived a little while later in a small, unassuming cardboard box.

As you can see, each is hand-signed on the back [see below], while the actual pickups appear very well made. They both come with four-conductor hook-up wire, the red and white wires are joined for standard humbucking function, black is hot, and green and the uncovered stranded wire go to ground.

The brief bit of reading I’d done about these new pickups pitched them as not another Patent Applied For clone set but certainly within that classic style. Checking the DCRs, both are under 8kohms and have a slight coil offset, too. That doesn’t tell us what they’re going to sound like, but it does give an idea of what to expect and, in my case, the sort of guitar to listen to them on.

I’d stopped using an old PRS CE 24 a while back because it wasn’t quite fitting the gig, which was a shame as it’s a lovely player, and with a now 20-year-old Clive Brown goldtop relic refinish, it’s really quite the looker – almost as vintage as its owner.

Testing, Testing…

With a standard PRS master volume and master tone circuit and a three-way toggle pickup selector switch circuit, the new pickups were a simple install.

And after a play-testing over a few days, with a lot of comparisons, what I can say is that Ruokangas is very much in the pickup business. If your tastes lie on the more classic, lower-output side of the tone tracks, you really have to hear these.

What’s different from a plethora of similar designs? Well, the wheel hasn’t been reinvented, but this is a very balanced set with three distinct voices. The bridge is most important to me and the word ‘organic’ springs to mind; it’s a really good classic rock pickup that’s very musical, open and responsive, with a near-perfect high-end that’s neither oversharp nor brittle yet has beautiful clarity.

Now, the PRS is a 24-fret guitar, so you’d expect the neck to sound a little brighter than on a 22-fretter and, again, there’s that openness and clarity here that can certainly blues-wail and yet sounds really sweet. The mixed pickup selection will be influenced by the pickup placement, but here it’s a standout: funk, bounce, almost Strat-y.

But something else is going on here. These pickups sound lively and airy like unpotted pickups, but they’re not conventionally potted and I’m not missing anything over other non-potted pickups that I’ve accessed for comparison. How so? Well, let’s find out…

A Different Path

Juha Ruokangas is extremely passionate and proud of the guitars he and his small team have hand-built over these past 30 years. But why get into the pickup business after all this time?

“When I was a young guitar maker – I started my business in 1995 – it was clear to me I could do anything that I wanted, but I couldn’t do everything because I just didn’t have the time” Juha tells us. “At that point, making pickups wasn’t an option. Also, back then the only way I could have started to make pickups was winding them myself by hand – I’d have to figure it out the hard way.

“In order to be able to master this I’d need to wind hundreds, thousands. And even if I did figure it out, how could I tell someone else who I might employ how I wanted them to be wound? If I’m going to take all the time to learn this, then pickup making, not guitar making, is going to be my career.

“But around four or five years ago I started flirting with the idea again,” he continues. “Now, we make guitars totally by hand; we don’t have any CNC or other technology of any sort. But I’d started seeing these companies – there’s one in the UK, for example – that make super-efficient pickup winding machines that are fully automated and you can do the wire tension, you can simulate the scatter-wind… all these processes. But, importantly, you can record these things and programme them down to the finest details: you can refine recipes for pickups.”

“I started to realise we’d entered an age where it would be possible to enter the craft of pickup making from a totally different perspective. That’s when, let’s say, the coffee table talk started at our ’shop. Me, my wife [and business partner, Emma Elftorp] and the rest of the guys started discussing it: ‘What if we got one of these machines? We could start a pickup-making hobby.’ Not to take it too seriously but to start understanding how pickups can be made in the modern world.

“They’re not cheap machines, but they are accessible to a small business. So we got a machine a couple of years ago and started playing with it. I invited a Finnish luthier who had been hand-winding pickups all his life to come and spend a couple of days with us.”

After plenty of trial and error over the course of eight months or so, typically making a new set most mornings and then listening to and comparing them with other pickups as the day went on, Juha and the team were happy with the pickups – except for one thing…

“Then we hit the real dead-end, which was the potting,” Juha reveals. “We almost gave up. I knew I didn’t want unpotted pickups, but I didn’t want potted pickups, either! [laughs] When I designed my [single-cut] Unicorn model in 2008/’09, the first humbuckers Harry Häussel [one of the many respected pickup makers Juha has used over the years] made for that guitar were unpotted because I wanted that nuance and element to the sound. But immediately I ran into the problems.

“With my own band, a three‑piece, we play in a rehearsal studio and I’d crank up my Marshall JCM800 and I couldn’t deal with the microphonics. So we had that conversation – yes, we can pot them. Again, it was either/or.

“You see, all the early versions of the pickups over those eight months were unpotted, but when we thought we’d created what we really liked, after potting them they became, well, just like ordinary, regular humbuckers.”

“That’s when I talked to my friend Lassi Ukkonen who helped us with our Valvebucker circuit years ago – he’s a retired electronics engineer who has worked all his life with guitar and hi-fi audio. I unloaded my frustrations on him.

“Well, he started talking about coils, inductance, capacitance, Q factor… and all these things in mathematical terms and I’m like, ‘Whoa!’ I said, ‘Look, I want to keep the cake and eat the cake!’

“But it was Lassi who brought up the idea of trying to do it in a controlled manner: choose part or parts of the coil during the process of winding – either at the beginning, the middle or the end, somewhere – to solidify a certain amount of the coil. I’m not going to be totally open about it obviously, but he had the theory and believed there was a chance to lose the microphonics but still keep that ‘air’ in the sound.”

On the evidence we’ve heard, the resulting Flux-Coil Stabilisation really does seem to keep the life of the sound but cure the microphonics. Maybe guitar makers turning to pickup making isn’t such a bad thing?

Mod spec

• Product: Ruokangas VÄINÖ bridge humbucker
  Price: From €190 
• Tech spec: Ruokangas Flux-Coil Stabilisation, slightly asymmetrically wound coils, 4-conductor wiring
• Magnet: Alnico IV
• DCR: 7.95kohms
• Options: Uncovered, covered or open‑frame with 12 different faceplates, polepiece and cover/frame plating
• Product: Ruokangas AINO neck humbucker
• Price: From €190 
• Tech spec: As VÄINÖ (above)
• Magnet: Alnico II
• DCR: 6.9kohms
• Skill level: Easy to fit if you can solder; coil junction leads are pre-soldered so all you need to do is solder the hot and ground wires
• Contact: Ruokangas Guitars

• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

The surname “DiMarzio” is now inextricably linked to the DiMarzio brand, one of the world's leading electric guitar pickup firms. Larry DiMarzio, the man behind it all, started his career as a guitar repairman in New York in the early 1970s, before his keen ears and business acumen noticed that there was a gap in the market: pickups that delivered even greater tone.

“I started working at the Guitar Lab around ’71 or ’72,” he tells Guitarist. “I was going to work at a professional guitar shop around the corner of 48th Street [in New York City] and I suddenly had access to tons of guitars that were coming through the shop for repair. Or I’d go down to Manny’s, pick up a Stratocaster, and say, ‘This is like a dead tuna,’ you know?”

As DiMarzio asserts, “Pickups seemed to be the way to compensate for the shortcomings of new guitars. When I first started working on pickups, the first pickup that got built was a Strat pickup just because I had Strats at the time.”

Lo and behold, DiMarzio created the now-iconic FS-1 pickup, a replacement for the stock Fender Strat bridge pickup – and some pretty well-known guitarists flocked to it, including early adopter David Gilmour. Later, Earl Slick, Ace Frehley, Al Di Meola, Paul Stanley, and Gene Simmons all became associated with the fledgling DiMarzio brand.

“I had this fabulous old Telecaster. It was very acoustic and it rang beautifully. But it wasn’t the sound that I was hearing on Eric Clapton records,” DiMarzio replies when asked how the idea for the FS-1 pickup came about. “Being in the city with a lot of professional players, you quickly learn that – like the pros did – you could figure out hardware that worked in certain ways.

“The first solution that I came up with was, of course, to increase the output of the Stratocaster pickup. But I also EQ’d it in a different way. If you’re playing in clubs, there are common problems, so what rapidly happened was – and as you said, which was spot on, I was a guitar repairman – people came in and wanted them, which eventually led to me opening my own shop.”

Another of DiMarzio's inventions was the Super Distortion humbucker pickup, designed to perfectly fit into the standard Gibson humbucker mounting – creating a more-than-worthy opponent for run-of-the-mill ’buckers.

For more Larry DiMarzio, plus new interviews with Bob Mould and Scott Gorham, pick up issue 525 of Guitarist at Magazines Direct.

Seymour Duncan has collaborated with blues rock guitar maverick Philip Sayce for a signature set of Stratocaster pickups, promising a faithful recreation of his signature Strat sounds.

Called the Philip Sayce "Mother" Stratocaster Pickup Set, the trio of single-coils are inspired by an electric guitar that has been by Sayce’s side throughout his career. The guitar in quetion is actually a 1963 Fender Strat, but when its original pickups shorted out after years of use and corrosion, the 1958 pups he replaced them with gave the guitar a whole new voice.

Sayce feels like a solid choice for Seymour Duncan's latest vintage Strat tone exploration: his innovative, pentatonic-based style sees him make light work of daredevil over-bends and trem-picking with his fingers, with his ice-cold lead playing inspired greatly by Stevie Ray Vaughan and Albert Collins.

The guitar has been used by Sayce during his stints with Jeff Healey, Melissa Etheridge, and Uncle Kracker, and has been a driving force during his solo career. The death of the original pickups ended up being a blessing in disguise for the guitarist.

The ’58 pickups that took their spot are slightly underwound, resulting in, as Seymour Duncan says, a “clear, full-bodied sound that has been the hallmark of Philip’s guitar tone ever since”.

The team at the Seymour Duncan Custom Shop has since put the set under its tone-exploring microscope to recreate them at an affordable price.

So, expect the same “singing, punchy Strat sound” of Sayce’s right-hand six-string, with “bell-like cleans” that can “easily morph into sizzle” with a little overdrive or fuzz.

The set is built with Alnico 5 magnets with delicate care taken with the winding process “to match the feel and responsiveness of Philip’s original guitar”.

Each of the first 500 sets sold are specially aged to match the heavy relic of Sayce’s originals. A certificate of authenticity, signed by Sayce and Seymour W. Duncan, is also included and arrives in limited-edition packaging. All sets are pad-printed with Philip’s signature on the flatwork.

Speaking to Guitar World about his tone choices, Sayce admitted to being very picky, and he's showing no signs of relenting in his exacting ways here – meaning all three single-coils will offer something to savor.

“I'm very, very picky; I want all three [pickups] to be just right,” he said. “I don't want to cringe if I go to any of them. I want them to all be so that I could land on any of them and feel real good about it. Or feel inspired by the sound.”

The Seymour Duncan Philip Sayce "Mother" Stratocaster Pickup Set is priced at $375.

Visit Seymour Duncan for more.

What is it?

There are quite a few non-permanent pickup designs out there, although the vast majority tend to be for acoustic guitars. The Submarine Subsix pickup is something altogether different though, being easily attachable to an electric guitar, and giving you the ability to send each of your guitar strings through a different signal chain.

It’s a hexaphonic pickup, like the famous Roland GK pickup system but instead of sending the signal to a dedicated unit, it allows you to choose what to do with your signal processing. Using 12 Neodyminium N42 magnets, the Subsix isolates the sound of each string on your guitar and effect them separately, opening some wild possibilities in terms of how you record or perform.

It can be attached to acoustic or electric guitar, and its flexible design with removable backplate allows for a wide variety of configurations, so in theory it should fit on pretty much any type of guitar. It comes with two 1/8-inch to 3 1/4-inch adapters for splitting the signal, and you get a myriad of attachment items including temporary suction pads, sticky foam rubber pads, and a pair of powerful magnets.

Specs

• Price: £319
• Origin: UK
• Type: Hexaphonic pickup
• Mounting type: Temporary via suction pads, rubber pads, or magnets
• Pole piece/spacing: 45.5mm to 51.5mm
• Magnet type: Neodyminium N42
• DCR: 2.4kΩ per channel
• Contact: Submarine Pickups

Build quality

Build quality rating: ★★★★☆

The Subsix came to me nicely packaged in an all-black box, with a separate bag for the cabling. The pickup itself feels hefty but not overtly heavy, and the front is pure chrome with a black metal backplate. There are no visible polepieces, with all the magnet action happening beneath that shiny chrome surface, with the only two protrusions spoiling the sea of chrome being the adjustment screws that allow you to change the pickup height.

On the one side of the pickup are two 1/8-inch jack inputs that take care of the signal splitting, and the black back panel is removable to allow you to fit it on guitars where there isn’t much clearance between the scratch plate and strings. Overall it looks pretty cool, and feels very well made. My only qualm is that as well as sticking out a mile, the chrome also instantly started attracting dust and fingerprints. Some players might prefer a more subtle option when it comes to colorway.

Usability

Usability rating: ★★★½

To see how it would fit on a variety of guitars I tested installing it without using any of the included sticky pads or magnets to see how well it fits. On my Telecaster, Strat, and Ibanez RG it fitted with minimal fuss. I needed to remove the backplate to get the clearance for the strings, but this is easily done by unscrewing the tiny hex screws.

Fitting it on my Gretsch semi-hollow and LP-copy was a different beast however, thanks to the raised pickguard on those guitar designs. It is possible to install using a variety of the included rubber pads, but admittedly this is a bit of a faff, and I found it much easier to just use the already flat surface of my Stratocaster.

As my heavily modded Stratocaster needed a string change anyway, I set to work attaching the pickup to my guitar. Getting the manual out for the first time, I was a little surprised at how basic the instructions are. There’s little in the way of information on orientation, how far it should be from the strings, or how far it should be from the other pickups here. I did eventually find that this information is available on the website, but weirdly it’s not included in the manual.

Once the pickup is installed you’ll need to do some serious cable management to take care of the unwieldy contraption that is two cables splitting out into six. The cables need to run from the pickup towards the headstock of the guitar, and are then wrapped around the neck through the cutaways on your guitar before being cable-tied together to keep them in place.

I ended up using some of my own velcro cable ties to keep everything neat, as you get a lot of cable length which will be very useful to those hoping to use the Subsix live. I also found I could wrap it around my guitar when it was not in use without having to undo the velcro ties to remove the cable completely. It’s not the neatest solution, and it means you can’t play the guitar normally this way, but it worked for my needs.

At the other end plugging into the Audient iD48 audio interface I’m also reviewing at the moment I was faced with more confusion, as the color-coded cables didn’t line up as I expected them to. You’d think that what’s presented to you in the manual would correspond to the strings in order but instead, my low E and D were the wrong way round, as were my G and high E strings. It was a quick fix to get them cascading in order from input 1 to 6, but I found myself again wishing the manual had been a bit clearer on this.

Sounds

Sounds rating: ★★★★½

To begin my testing I opened up Pro Tools, assigned each input to the individual string, and kept all the tracks panned to the central position while I strummed a few open chords. It sounded very piezo-esque with that ‘plinky’ sort of tonality from where I’d placed it in between my bridge humbucker and middle single coil, but with all six tracks monitoring it sounded very thin, and certainly not a tone you’d want to use on a recording.

My next step was to get my gain staging right, as different strings were being picked up at different levels. This resulted in much toing and froing with the input gain knobs on my interface in order to get the strings sounding even. In the end, I added some SSL G bus compression in Pro Tools in order to get a more even sound.

Next, I opened up Helix Native and copied six iterations of the US Double Nrm amp model (based on the Fender Twin Reverb) to each track. This gave a much fuller and less thin tone, sounding much more like a regular clean guitar. There’s a nice phasing to certain combinations of strings with all the tracks engaged which gives it a very choral quality when you play open chords.

With the levels set right and each string ringing out evenly, I set to panning each individual string. I kept both my E strings in the center, taking the A, D, G, and B strings at varying intervals to the left and right. Strumming open chords with the tracks in this configuration gives that plain clean guitar a much more interesting sound, it’s very 3D and again there’s a pleasing phasing effect with certain combinations of notes or strings.

The next experiment was to start adding individual effects to each string. I used chorus, phase, delay, and reverb in varying amounts on each string and here things started to get seriously weird. With a fast delay time and long feedback amount on my B string, a short tape delay on my G, and a healthy dose of spring reverb on my high E the Subsix delivered a sound quite unlike anything I’ve ever heard.

It’s like multiple guitars playing together at the same time, but everything is ultra-tight, essentially giving you the sound of a bunch of takes in one go. With modulation effects on my lower strings to complement the reverbs and delays on the higher ones, when picking arpeggios it made for a scintillating sound that’s one of the most genuinely unique guitar tones I’ve ever heard.

With my clean sounds covered, I removed the modulation effects and added a different modeled overdrive or distortion pedal to each track. This included the King of Tone, Boss DS-1, Tube Screamer, Pro Co Rat, Boss HM-2, and Big Muff - a who’s who of gain pedals. With open chords it sounded absolutely phenomenal, really giving the feel of multiple guitars playing at the same time.

Trying some soloing with these settings engaged was less successful. You really need to put in work here to balance things tonally, and overall it feels quite unnatural when you change to a different string and get a completely different sound. With some more tweaking, I could definitely see some interesting possibilities here though, you’d just need a lot of work to get it to a usable position.

Verdict

Overall I was really impressed with the way the Subsix tracked each individual note. It feels very seamless when playing and I never felt like I was playing through anything other than a regular pickup on my guitar. The ability to pan and effect each string individually makes for some truly original tones, and the depth on offer here is more than I could cover in just this review.

Whether the large differences in gain between strings were down to my installation of the pickup is unclear, so I would love to see an updated manual that’s far more in-depth to truly get the best out of it. I’m also aware it’s quite a niche product, only really suited to those who want to do some properly deep experiments with electric guitar tones and don’t mind sitting down for endless hours changing settings and trying different combinations of effects.

Guitar World verdict: The Submarine Pickups Subsix has its flaws, but for creative studio types it’s an incredible tool. If you love recording guitars and want to get a sound that’s unlike anything else you’ve heard, it’s completely worth the time and effort needed to get it set up and sounding right. It’ll give you sounds you won’t find anywhere else, that’s for sure.

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Seymour Duncan has announced the launch of its new Jazzmaster Silencer guitar pickups. These, says Duncan, offer “classic tone with absolutely no hum.”

While “designed to preserve the unmistakable Jazzmaster charm while eliminating unwanted noise” is a promise we've heard (and been disappointed by) before, it's hard to deny the quality tones in Seymour Duncan's demo. Berkeley, California-based producer Bobbing lays down some of the juiciest Jazzmaster noises we've heard in some time.

The Jazzmaster Silencers follow in the wake of Seymour Duncan's highly regarded Silencer P90 pickups, which use a similar technology.

The Jazzmaster Silencer is available in Vintage and Hot versions.

The Vintage Silencers “deliver the bright, punchy cleans and warm, mellow growls that define the Jazzmaster sound,” claims Duncan, “perfect for surf-inspired riffs, shimmering indie textures, and pedal-driven soundscapes.”

The Hot Silencers, meanwhile, “provide all the Jazzmaster character you love, but with higher output and enhanced power. Ideal for gritty rock, shoegaze, or experimental tones.”

Duncan argue that noiseless designs are especially important because of how frequently Jazzmaster users employ fuzz pedals and other high-gain sounds.

“When you're stacking overdrives and fuzzes, which do pair very well with the Jazzmaster sound, you get that noise amplified throughout your signal chain. When it comes out of your amp, it can be quite harsh or interfere with the sound.”

While many hum-cancelling single-coil pickups exist, all with their own strengths, most fall short of the goal of replicating vintage tone without noise. Seymour Duncan explains why typical stacked pickups fall short:

“With stacked humbuckers, you remove noise, but you also have issues of phase cancelation, which reduces low end and reduces the overall output of the pickup. To make up for that, stacked humbuckers are traditionally overwound, which then reduces the high end response of the pickup.”

Seymour Duncan says Silencer pickups eliminate the dreaded 60-cycle-hum “thanks to a patent-pending triple coil design.”

“The benefit of this triple coil design is that all three coils are actually in phase with each other. That means no phase cancelation and no reduction in high or low end. The outer coils eliminate hum, while the center coil delivers true Jazzmaster tone.”

Seymour Duncan launched the Silencer range with the Jared James Nichols signature P90.

Almost 70 years since it was usurped by the humbucker, the P-90 pickup seems to be staging a comeback. The surge in P-90 interest among fans of guitar pickups has been buoyed by the Warren Haynes signature Les Paul. In a new interview with Guitar Player, Haynes explains why he made the switch from humbuckers.

"When I switch back and forth from my first signature model guitar, which has humbuckers, and I then plug in the new guitar with the P-90s, it instantly is the tonal change I’m looking for without turning knobs," raves Haynes.

It's not that Warren is unhappy with the humbucker tones he is known for. "As much as we’re all happy with the sound that we work on through the years and get dialed in, I think most guitar players are also looking for other sounds to be equally inspirational," he clarifies.

He says the P-90 pickups in his signature guitar offer "different sounds that inspire me to play differently."

"It kind of started [with] me wanting to find some tones that were different from my normal go-to sounds," he explains. "When I started experimenting more with the P90s, I was like, 'Oh, this adds to my tonal range!'"

Diving deeper, Haynes adds: "You definitely get options that aren’t there with humbuckers. Most of the sounds I enjoy come from the guitar anyway. I’m not depending on pedals for the majority of the sounds that I use.

"I like to change the volume knob on the guitar to get a lot of different sounds that way, and P90s are definitely great for that."

Haynes is one of many rock and blues players who are looking to P-90s for an alternative to thick humbucker tones. Joe Bonamassa, Phil X, and Jared James Nichols are also P-90 champions.

Phil X's forthcoming signature Gibson SG will feature the hot single coil pickups, and he has long used his Arcane PX-90 signature pickups on tour.

Joe Bonamassa has made his love of the pickups well known, and can often be found waxing lyrical about the differences between P-90s and PAFs.

Jared James Nichols launched his signature Seymour Duncan Silencer P-90 back in 2023, with its triple coil hum-cancelling design.

After seven decades of humbucker dominance, perhaps the P-90's time has come.

Joe Bonamassa certainly makes a case for why you should try them. If you're not sure, check out our deep dive on P-90s vs humbuckers, or our history of the dog-ear P-90.

Lollar Pickups is celebrating 30 years of tone sculpting in style with its brand-new Super-Caster pickups, offering a unique approach to the traditional Stratocaster pickup design.

The gold foil-covered single-coil pickups share the same footprint as standard Strat pups, but offer “an entirely unique design” headlined by larger, longer magnets.

The coils are more old-school in their design, too, and that vintage-modern blend results in the set delivering “a punchy, present sound with more body and a bit more output than most Strats”.

The middle position especially has come under a great deal of attention. The Super-Casters look to offer “classic chime” aplenty, with a signature “glassy Strat ‘quack’” in the in-between positions. As such, traditionalists and those looking for something a little more left-field can be equally satisfied.

Then there’s the outrageously good-looking design: the pickups are housed in an open-top metal ring with a brass mesh insert that pertains a certain retro chic while still standing out from the Strat pickup crowd.

“The Super-Caster pickup set offers more dynamic range and output with extended harmonics and robust bottom end,” says Lollar.

However, its DC resistance figures – 5.8K, 5.4K, and 6.2K in the neck, middle, and bridge positions, respectively – are a little misleading, Lollar says.

Sure, they're said to clean up nicely, and are pleasingly reactive to a player's pick attack, but they're “loud and proud”, too. Consequently, “harmonics sustain and linger past what conventional single coil pickups offer”.

With these pickups deviating from the typical Strat recipe, it begs the question of which player they are best suited for.

“What we've done is added a lot of versatility into the Strat footprint,” says production Manager Kevin Moe. “So it's gonna work really well for anyone who wants a different characteristic out of their Strat. It's got a larger sound, it's got a big attack and the big magnets respond really well to bending.

“It's gonna hit really hard with rock, funk, and blues, but I think they could work really well for ambient players that use a lot of effects and want to maintain clarity and even jazz players.”

The pickups debuted at NAMM 2025, where some big-name players took them for a spin. Among them was Mateus Asato – a reliable informant when it comes to exceptional tone – who said they sound “phenomenal”.

Lollar's all-new Super-Caster pickups are available now from $135 per pickup, and $270 for a set. If gold isn't your bag, there are also nickel and chrome options.

Head to Lollar to take a closer look.

The release comes after Lollar dropped hum-canceling Jazz bass pickups and a similarly stealthy P-90 recipe last year.

Tom “TV” Jones has racked up an impressive list of accomplishments in the guitar world. He built the TV Jones company around his innovative technology, revived and modernized the classic Filter’Tron electric guitar pickup, and was instrumental in the Gretsch brand’s revival.

Working with acclaimed artists included Brian Setzer and Billy Gibbons, Jones has reshaped rockabilly, country, rock music and more. But the TV Jones story isn’t only about pickup design – it’s about a dedication and obsessive mission to craft a unique guitar sound.

Jones spent his formative years pulling electric guitars apart to learn about their inner workings. By the 1980s, he was playing in bands, and, like all tone chasers, he was unhappy with his pickups.

“In the late ’80s I was taking guitars apart, playing since I was 14. I decided to make a guitar and still have it.

“In the late ’80s, I decided to make a guitar – and I still have it,” Jones says. “Then in the early ’90s I worked in the guitar repair department at The World of Strings, a violin shop in Long Beach, CA, where I learned how to refine my craft.”

He launched the TV Jones company in 1993. “I started out as a guitar maker, then moved to pickups,” he recalls. “I started designing and manufacturing pickups that capture the tonal essence of vintage models that appeal to modern guitarists.”

He found inspiration in the Filter’Tron pickups found in vintage Gretsch guitars – a design known for clarity, warmth and bite. “It blooms with saturation as you dig in,” he explains.

“Brian Setzer’s guitar tech, Rich Modica, would bring his guitars into The World of Strings for work. I did fret jobs, reshaped necks, lacquer refinishes, and built custom guitars for Brian. He’s been my main client going on 32 years. His vintage ’59 Gretsch 6120 inspired me to learn how to build pickups.”

The big break came when Setzer, who wanted to augment his sound with increased reliability for recording and touring, adopted Jones’ version of the Filter’Tron. The pickup builder was catapulted into the guitar world’s consciousness, and earned him the trust of Fred Gretsch.

The result was Jones’ pickups being installed in the Gretsch Setzer Hot Rod guitar models, and a partnership with Gretsch that’s still going strong.

“We wanted to make it possible for musicians to try them in any type of guitar, so we devised all kinds of mounting options,” Jones says. “They were mentioned on the Gretsch Pages discussion forum, and production exploded after that.”

The timing was perfect – Gretsch was going through a revival due to a renewed interest in vintage-style guitars popularized by Setzer, Elliott Easton, Steven Stills and Bo Diddley. With TV Jones pickups aboard the Vintage Select Edition series among others, instruments delivered the vintage tones of past models with modern appeal.

In 1999, Fred Gretsch hired Jones as a consultant and go-between with artists to help design their signature guitars. The term “That great Gretsch sound” soon became synonymous with the tone of TV Jones pickups. In 2001, Jones relocated to a facility in downtown Poulsbo, Washington, where the company remains.

Then another big name appeared on the scene.

“I got a call from a gentleman who sounded like he was from Texas,” Jones says. “I asked, ‘Is this who I think it is?’ He said, ‘Yes!’ It was Billy Gibbons.”

The ZZ Top leader was interested in a pickup that sounded like a humbucker, but fit in a Filter’Tron housing for the Gretsch Billy-Bo guitar. By adding more magnet wire to the standard Power’Tron, the Power’Tron Plus was born.

TV Jones’ success was far from easy to achieve in a market saturated by heavyweights including Gibson, Fender, Seymour Duncan and DiMarzio.

The pickup builder relied on direct connections to musicians and word-of-mouth advertising to spread the word. His company triumphed out of respect in the guitar community, and players who tried TV Jones pickups became evangelists.

One of the trademarks in Jones’ approach is his commitment to personalization. While most manufacturers were offering standardized pickups, he focused on the necessity of tailoring tone to individual players, offering customers one-to-one advice.

From the vintage twang and growl of the TV Classic to the golden-age PAF vibe of the Power’Tron, the TV Jones range expanded over time – but the company has never lost its boutique ethos. Its tooling is all self-manufactured, and every pickup is crafted with the same care and precision of Jones’ early experiments.

Yet despite the accolades, Jones remains an underdog in the truest sense: a tone craftsman whose work reverberates louder than the name. His achievements are a reminder that persistence and passion will triumph.

While mass production can overtake artistry, Jones’ dedication to authenticity and quality sets him apart. He didn’t just build a brand – he forged a legacy built on the constant pursuit of tone. When players experience the magic of a TV Jones pickup it proves that, sometimes, underdogs can redefine the game.

And the reimagining of the Filter’Tron was the catalyst. “It gives you more dynamic control,” Jones says.

“I heard that when I played Setzer’s personal guitars. The magnets and pole screws are larger in the Filter’Tron; the bobbins are closer together and have less magnet wire. That translates to clarity and more dynamics.”

“I thought, ‘I have to recreate this!’”

• Head to TV Jones for more information.

What is it?

Last year when I reviewed Bare Knuckle’s fantastic Peacemaker humbuckers, I had also mentioned – in the same review – that its signature Adam “Nolly” Getgood Polymath humbuckers are extraordinary.

Fast-forward a year, and I still stand behind that statement. If you haven’t heard a guitar outfitted with Bare Knuckle Polymaths, you are woefully missing out on one of the most focused and refined humbucker designs in recent memory. The Polymaths were so unforgettable that I’ve been haunted by my missed opportunity for not installing a set in one of my own guitars.

When I heard that the dynamic duo of Adam “Nolly” Getgood and Tim Mills – Bare Knuckle’s chief designer and founder – have collaborated once again under the “Poly” prefix for Getgood’s newest signature humbucking creation, the PolyPaf, I jumped at the chance to review this freshly updated take on the renowned (and often misunderstood) P.A.F. pickup.

Usability and sounds

The PolyPaf humbucker’s main ingredient is an unoriented Alnico V rough cast magnet. If you’re stuck on the word “unoriented,” you’re not alone. I don’t have the space to explain the differences between an “unoriented” Alnico V magnet and, say, an efficient “oriented” one; just know that BK’s “unoriented” choice offers a bit of randomness in the pickup’s magnetic properties, yielding tonal by-products of warmth, midrange focus and soft compression.

PolyPafs also utilize high-carbon steel slugs tailored to optimize the wound strings sonically and a custom wind offset of 42AWG plain enamel wire for superior tone. Pickup resistances on the PolyPafs measure 8.3 kilo-ohms for the bridge and 7.6 kilo-ohms for the neck, and if you need a visual, Bare Knuckle’s online EQ chart displays an upward staircase bump of bass, mid and treble, respectively.

For the PolyPaf, the goal for Getgood and Mills was to reimagine a P.A.F.-style humbucker with concentrated consistency and renewed vitality, combining all the classic tonal hallmarks players romanticize over.

After installing these humbuckers in my favored Gibson Les Paul Classic, I can reveal this is no clichéd P.A.F.-repro pickup because the PolyPaf is a completely reinvigorated paradigm of 21st-century P.A.F. tone.

The PolyPaf is available as a 6-, 7- and 8-string pickup with four- or two-conductor wiring, short or long mounting legs and 50mm or 53mm pole spacing. In addition, you can select from a staggering selection of open-coil bobbin colors, pole screw finishes, custom covers, radiators and TVs options, including making your own “custom cover” etching.

Most guitar lore is fraught with mystery and misinformation, and the mythical P.A.F. is no stranger to both. Historically, vintage P.A.F. pickups are well documented for their inconsistencies regarding the type and length of Alnico magnets used (among other material build variations) and the number of coil windings that can result in tonal bliss or miss.

It might be audacious to say, but it’s almost as if the PolyPaf was reverse-engineered from a digital snapshot “model” of an idealized, pre-produced bridge and neck P.A.F., and brought to life as detailed humbuckers with all the organic complexity, string-to-string separation and touch-sensitive nuance the vintage pickups were known for.

The bridge’s warmly sculpted tone is so clear and “in your face” that it’s easy to perceive its mid-output as a “hotter” humbucker because it can bare its teeth and show muscle when pumped through a high-gain tube amp (in this case, my EVH 5150 III), all while maintaining an articulate voice.

Switching to the neck and bridge/neck combinations offers even more “wide-openness” – I could coax juicy cleans or chunky honk as I opened them up through a Fender Deluxe Reverb. Even using guitar amp sims and modelers like IK’s TONEX and Positive Grid’s Spark 2, the PolyPafs genuinely enhance your touch and the sounds of the modeled tone with pronounced detail.

Verdict

Bare Knuckle’s PolyPaf refreshes the iconic P.A.F. pickup in both a contemporary and classic manner.

It’s a modern-sounding P.A.F. that’s wrinkle-free but injects all the expressiveness and detailed response of a prime vintage example, making it as timeless as a made-to-measure black suit and tie.

Guitar World verdict: The PolyPafs’ fully dimensional, mid-output humbucking tones are the very kind of dynamic P.A.F.-style humbuckers many players have waited for.

Specs

Street price: From £163 (approx. $202); from £314 (approx. $390) for sets
Type: Humbucker pickup
Magnet: Alnico V
Wire: Custom wind offset of 42AWG plain enamel
DCR: 8.3 kΩ (bridge), 7.6 kΩ (neck)
Contact: Bare Knuckle Pickups

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Bare Knuckle Pickups

• How Adam “Nolly” Getgood and Bare Knuckle reinvented the P.A.F. for a new era

Spiritbox guitarist Mike Stringer and Bare Knuckle Pickups have collaborated on the all-new Halcyon signature humbuckers, which have been designed specifically for low-tuned seven-string guitars.

The design was born out of “an intense R&D session” that included Stringer, BKP tone guru Tim Mills, and Adam ‘Nolly’ Getgood – who recently released his own set of signature pickups, the Polypafs.

The mission statement was to “embrace not only Mike’s massive driven tone but also his unique approach to using bridge and neck pickups together for his clean tones”, all while ensuring the set was well-suited to the seven-string player’s preferred drop F# tuning.

That tuning sees the strings go as low as a standard eight-string guitar, meaning there are some very low frequencies to cater to. However, BKP says beta testing went so well that, by the end of the trial, “all of Mike’s live guitars featured the new Halcyon pickups”.

In short, the Halcyons build upon a twin blade pole design for “an even string-to-string balance”, regardless of the string gauges and tuning preferences of each player. Moreover, they are also well-suited for multi-scale players and can be tweaked to fit wonky-fretted guitars.

A trio of custom-size ceramic magnets sit in the bridge ’bucker, helping control the bottom end. It works alongside a hot wind for “an incredibly dialed-in mid-range and high-end attack”.

The neck pickup, though, has cooled off the wind a little, with an isotropic Alnico V magnet sitting at its core. This helps increase dynamic headroom and, combined with the bridge pickup, delivers Stringer’s punchy yet ambient clean tones.

A great deal of effort has also been invested in the split-coil sounds of each pickup, too, for when players want a slice of single-coil action.

“The Halcyons are everything I’ve been looking for in a set of pickups,” Stringer beams. “Working with Tim and Nolly, we’ve been able to come up with something very special; an extremely high output pickup that almost reacts like an active.

“I’ve been through many different passive, and active, sets over and beyond the last decade, and I can confidently say these are perfect for my needs. From crushingly heavy tones to glassy cleans, I get everything out of them without compromise.

“Playing primarily in low tunings, I’m always aiming to get the most clear and consistent tone, so I can sit in the mix where I need to,” he continues. “The Halcyons do a lot of the heavy lifting, making it so I can run low gain on my amp, and get the regular amount of push and clarity that lower output pickups don’t usually provide.”

“The bridge is an outrageous riff machine with unreal output, aggressive attack, and masses of taut low end that give single note riffing satisfying thickness, while not overwhelming the clarity of the ultra-low chugs Mike is known for,” BKP adds.

“The neck lives in another sonic dimension with a woody and bright, but not spiky voice, refined to combine with the bridge for Mike's signature, almost slap bass-like, clean parts.”

“During the R&D session with Mike we knew these were the pickups for him when he fell about laughing with glee as he tried them,” Nolly remembers. “Trying them myself I could see why.

“The sheer power of the sound they produce is so addictive, and hearing your playing come back at you with such attitude and drive regardless of how low you tune is an experience you really need to have to understand!”

All Bare Knuckle Halycon pickups are hand-wound at the firm’s workshop in Cornwall, England. As ever with BKP, they come in a host of different color and finish options.

They are available in six- and seven-string formats, starting at £195.60 per pickup (approx $247), or £376.80 for a set (approx $476).

Head to Bare Knuckle Pickups for more.

The launch of the pickup set follows the arrival of Stringer’s new Aristides signature guitar, which brings a killer offset design to the modern-minded brand’s catalog, following a growing trend of modern metal riffers loving offset silhouettes.

Joe Bonamassa has launched his latest signature pickup set with Seymour Duncan, this time based on the tonal delights of the obscure 1964 Greenburst Stratocaster he acquired in 2023.

The Joe Bonamassa “Greenburst” Stratocaster Pickup Set has been described as a faithful capture of one of the besuited bluesman’s most cherished instruments. The single-coils feature “precisely staggered Alnico 5 magnets and an authentic design that recreates the magic of this special '64 Strat”.

The pickups are handcrafted in the Seymour Duncan Custom Shop, and they include gray bottom flatwork and a pad-printed signature from JoBo for a more exclusive touch.

Bonamassa’s rare Strat pre-dates the firm’s much-mired CBS-owned era, with the gray flatwork pickups of the Greenburst’s time adored for a “notably punchy sound and higher output” that sets them apart from their later counterparts.

Watching JoBo’s playthrough, the twang and bite of the pickups cannot be disputed. It's also impressive how close the tone is when he swaps the guitar out for another Greenburst pickup-loaded Strat. It's very close indeed.

“It's for power Stratocaster playing,” Bonamassa says of the newly created set. “It's not subtle! It's the power and projection of the gray bottom characteristics that really balance out the front, middle, and treble positions.”

Made with period-correct wiring and the aforementioned staggered magnets, no corners have been cut to replicate the tone of the Greenburst, a guitar he called an “instant star” when he first laid eyes on it.

The guitarist has a knack for ultra-rare gear finds, even if it means taking exhaustive measures, like a 15-year search for Lowell George’s Dumble Overdrive Special amp. For a man whose home-turned-gear-museum has been the subject of two Reverb documentaries, though, the fact the Greenburst stands as one of his finest finds is quite the achievement.

Bonamassa bought the Strat in question from revered vintage guitar emporium Norman's Rare Guitars in early 2023. Its green finish – clearly not a stock colorway – had initially piqued his interest, and it's believed that the guitar's repaint was done in the 1970s at the latest.

The Joe Bonamassa “Greenburst” Stratocaster Pickup Set costs $375. The first 500 sets sold will have an aged finish. They will also include limited-edition packaging and a certificate of authenticity signed by Bonamassa and Seymour Duncan.

Head to the Seymour Duncan Custom Shop for more details.

Until 1957, the P-90 was Gibson’s premium pickup, fitted to artist-endorsed jazz boxes and ‘student model’ solidbodies alike.

Even those who couldn’t afford carved tops, fancy inlays or binding weren’t expected to compromise on their tone. And when it came to Juniors, from the earliest single-cut 1954 models to the last of the SG Juniors, one thing remained constant: the pickup was always a P-90 under a plastic cover with pointed ends that inspired the nickname ‘dog ear’. This style of P-90 carried over from Gibson’s archtops.

With nothing to screw into besides the top, the baseplates needed an extension at each end that was bent into an ‘L’ shape. This allowed the magnets and bobbin to sit inside the body, well out of the way of the strings.

For the Junior, Gibson routed a rectangular cavity into the body, and the pickup was effectively sandwiched between the body and cover with a fixing screw at each end. Some suggest this direct coupling is a key component of P-90 tone.

Soap Operatics

The Les Paul Goldtop was Gibson’s first solidbody and there was insufficient clearance for a dog-ear P-90 in the neck position. The design was altered for P-90s to drop into a rectangular cavity, a new cover was created, and the two fixing screws passed through the bobbins.

The cream cover resembled a bar of soap – hence the ‘soap bar’ nickname – and for the pickups to fit the cavity Gibson needed a baseplate without the mounting extensions. This entailed a modification.

Gibson simply snipped the ends off ‘dog-ear’ baseplates and ground off any rough bits. We examined sets of P-90s from 1952, ’53 and ’55 and this was apparent on all three. Given the simplicity of the solution, it’s surprising how few P-90 replicas feature vintage‑correct baseplates.

Gibson seemed to use whatever magnets its supplier sent, but most P-90s had Alnico III magnets until around 1957, when Gibson began transitioning to Alnico V. This explains why the P-90s fitted to late single-cut, double-cut and SG Juniors tend to sound brighter, hotter and more aggressive. Or so we thought…

This writer was recently working on a 1952 Goldtop and noticed that both P-90s seemed slightly closer to the strings than usual. The guitar’s tone was fuller and barkier than most ’50s Goldtops, and it was decided that lowering the pickup heights might benefit the tone.

It turned out there were no shims; instead, rough-looking oversized magnets with crudely snapped ends. The immediate conclusion was that the magnets had been swapped, but we soon discovered otherwise.

Some sources mention it, but it’s not widely known that during ’52 and ’53 some P-90s had oversized magnets. Bars were cut halfway through and snapped to get two bars that were nominally 2 ½ inches long and ½-inch wide. The crucial difference, however, was that they were ³/¹6-inch thick, rather than ¹/8-inch. That’s why the pickup appeared to be set higher than usual.

The gauss meter readings were 400 to 500, which is pretty much what we’d expect from Alnico III – which should be called ‘Alni III’ because there’s no cobalt in the alloy. In addition to increasing the magnetic potential, the thicker magnets contain more iron and that bumps up inductance.

Mario Milan and James Finnerty mention these magnets in their book The Gibson “P.A.F.” Humbucking Pickup and even suggest that the thickness sometimes reached ¼-inch. They also recount that some found their way into PAF humbuckers.

If Gibson was still using up stock of thicker magnets as late as 1957, it’s likely that some Juniors and Specials would have been equipped with thick-magnet P-90s, too. If you happen to own an early Junior and have found it hotter and fatter than most, take a look at the magnets next time you’re changing strings and you might discover the reason.

Vintage Checklist

If you want your Junior, Special or Goldtop to sound convincingly old-school, the coils should be wound with plain enamel wire and they must be unpotted.

Ideally, the DC resistance will be somewhere between 7k and 8k, and the inductance should read between 6.5 and 7.2 Henrys. Alnico III and V magnets are the best starting point for pre- and post-1957 tones respectively, but all grades of Alnico are fair game.

It’s a cliche of product marketing to claim that a new piece of gear is ‘revolutionary’. But so much of the gear we use and love as players is really built upon sounds that we already love from classic recordings – and if you want to bring something new to the table, here the name of the game is to take what was inspirational about sounds from the past and carefully prune away their shortcomings and limitations while retaining the sonic soul of the original.

Tim Mills of Bare Knuckle Pickups is an expert in subtly (and not so subtly) tweaking the ingredients in established electric guitar pickup designs to produce something magical: classic at heart but new in spirit and application.

And that is exactly what, in partnership with producer and contemporary metal guitarist Adam ‘Nolly’ Getgood, Bare Knuckle has achieved with the new PolyPaf humbucker, which aims to yield up iconic sounds but which can also handle heavier gain and contemporary styles more confidently. We join Adam to find out more.

Tell us about the inception of the PolyPaf.

“I think the idea for it was in my mind right back from when we designed the Polymath, the pickup we launched a few years ago, which is intended to be a Goldilocks pickup in that it’s right in the sweet spot in terms of output and voicing where you can do anything with it.

“It can do an extraordinarily good job of what you’d want from a high-output pickup without giving you the negatives that might be associated with that. We achieved that really by Tim’s expertise in winding, along with my feedback. He came up with a slightly different way of offsetting the coils of a humbucker. So winding slightly different turns onto each of the coils, particularly on the bridge pickup.”

“It worked so well that it made me feel like I would love to hear that applied to a 42-gauge plain enamel wire – the traditional PAF-style vintage-spec wire – which will obviously give you that more open top-end and more dynamics, and that really amazing swirling complexity.

“It wasn’t just the wind. The other thing was that we settled on using this unoriented Alnico V magnet, something that Tim suggested, which is a really huge difference in terms of the sound and the feel when you compare it with the standard oriented Alnico V. You’ve got less output, but [it’s ] kind of a lot more mid-forward and a lot sweeter in the top-end and yet also more juicy in the low-end.

“The combination of those winding decisions and that magnet… I really wanted to hear what would happen if we did something in the PAF’s output range using the PAF wire. Because, as you’ll know – if you’re talking about originals – it was kind of luck of the draw how each PAF was going to come out. Like, had the coils just been randomly put together without any real selection process?

“The problem, when you’re talking about an original PAF, is there’s such a wide range of sounds that you can get from the pickups. But a lot of the PAF-style pickups on the market – either PAF replicas or PAF-inspired pickups – are more focused on the blues and jazz end of things and are really low output.

“They’re quite weak magnets and you get that very lovely [nuanced] vintage sound. But being someone who does like a fair amount of gain in my tone sometimes, I can find that those pickups sound a bit too scooped and harsh by the time you run them through some high gain.

“What I was really keen to hear was what happened if you used an unoriented Alnico V and the Polymath offset on a pickup that otherwise falls within original PAF spec. Because what Tim does in terms of the way the bobbins are made – the maple spacer that’s in there, even the use of unoriented Alnico Vs, which would have been what was around at the time of the PAFs – is all actually within the original spec of the original pickups Gibson were making.”

“In applying those things to the bridge pickup, straight away I felt like we created something really special because we ended up with a pickup that had the PAF touch-sensitivity, the openness, the dynamics, the complexity, but it had this really rich midrange and juicy feel. Which is something that I value so much in the Polymath, and it also seems to have struck a chord with players and reviewers.

“This is a pickup that could have come out of a Gibson from the late ’50s or early ’60s. I feel like if you did have a guitar from that era and these happened to be the pickups that were in it, everyone would be like, ‘Wow. That’s a pretty badass-sounding Les Paul,’ or whatever. So it’s just about finding the right combination of variables to take the original PAF spec and make it something that’s very appropriate, still, for vintage applications.”

What musical application would the PolyPaf have in your world, do you think?

“There are a few different applications for the PolyPaf. I’m going to focus mostly on the bridge pickup because I feel like PAF neck pickups are such a well-known sound, and while I feel like we’ve created a really amazing one here, I think it’s the chameleon nature of the bridge pickup that needs to be talked about the most.

“There are plenty of players around now, even in my progressive metal world, who are using less gain – fusion players, too. I’m thinking about guitarists like Plini, Olly Steele and a few others who are not driving super high-gain amps, but they’re playing aggressively, and having a more dynamic pickup with that kind of swirling complexity and open top-end can be a really beautiful thing in that kind of application.

“I’m thinking there are players who do anything from blues, rock through to Southern US rock metal – especially if they’re playing a guitar that has got lots of natural body to it, particularly of tune-o-matic loaded instruments. With those kinds of guitars that are providing quite a lot of body, you can stick a PAF in and it’s still going to sound absolutely huge because the guitar itself is providing so much body.”

“There are also players – and this is something that Tim at Bare Knuckle has championed for a long, long time – who are using really thick strings, or are playing baritone instruments and getting lots of string movement, very heavy string mass, and are generating loads more output that way. Dropping down to a lower-output pickup can really help keep that sound from getting overblown due to the clarity and brightness.

“I’m talking about all this in [the context of] contemporary rock and metal circles, but I really don’t want to get away from the fact that these are still a PAF set. You could use these to play absolutely any style. I have a Seth Baccus hollowbody that arrived earlier this year and Tim wound up some of the first prototypes of the PolyPaf to go into it. It’s an absolutely gorgeous guitar for any style – jazz, fusion, blues – just an incredible-sounding instrument. I really don’t want people to get the impression that this is only a PAF for metalheads.”

“One point I’ll make is that the PolyPafs are not actually super-hot. Maybe they’re a little bit hotter than those very blues- and jazz-focused PAFs, but it’s the combination of the offset [coil windings] and the magnet spec that are bringing the midrange forward in a way that allows it to work for players who are used to hotter pickups, without over-winding it and losing too much top-end.

“In fact, I think that’s kind of the party piece of both the Polymath and the PolyPaf pickups. It’s not that these are like the most overwound PAFs on the market – there are plenty of those around. These are well within the original tolerance you could find in a PAF.”

What guitars do you envisage having PolyPafs in, in your own collection?

“The guitars that I’ve put them in… there’s the Seth Baccus and I’ve got a couple of PRS guitars. I’ve got a Modern Eagle with a Stoptail, a Custom 22 Stoptail… those are amazing donor instruments for the PolyPafs. I think if you’ve got a Les Paul, or anything that you would typically use a PAF-style pickup for, it’s going to drop in really nicely.

“The guitar we created for the promo package for this was a wonderful Manson MA guitar that they built for me in a silver ’burst, again with a tune-o-matic bridge. It’s kind of like a Les Paul-cum-bolt-on-Tele [laughs]. That’s one of the biggest-sounding instruments I’ve got, acoustically. It’s got a big mahogany neck on it and the PolyPafs work brilliantly well.

“What I think it’s not ideal for – and this is always important to say because people can try to tell you that one pickup does absolutely everything under the sun, but it’s just simply not so… They’re not as suited to really bright guitars, unless you want a really brightened up tone.

“It could be brilliant for punk sounds, or if you want brash kerrang; there’s definitely a lot more kerrang to the PolyPaf than the Polymath. If that’s what you’re after, it could be good. But if you have a thinner-sounding instrument that doesn’t have a lot of natural sustain, you might be better served going to a higher-output pickup that’s going to fill out the low-end and give you the kind of compression that guitar would require.”

You mentioned working with Tim Mills. Tell us about your working relationship with him as co-developers of pickups.

“I owe so much to Tim. Tim was the first person in the music industry to take notice of what I was doing, which was very little at the time. I don’t even really know how he saw enough of what I was doing to see potential.

“But very early on, back in the early days when you called up Bare Knuckle Pickups and he would answer – I’m talking 15 years ago – he’d talk to you for an hour just about tone and pickups, and maybe after a few of those conversations you might buy a pickup. I was a broke uni student back then!

“But I don’t know if it was just my persistence in calling him, coupled with him hearing a little bit of my playing, but when Bare Knuckle wanted to revamp their website – which is the one prior to the one that’s up now – he asked if I’d like to come down and do the sound clips for all of the pickups. He placed a huge amount of trust in me.

“That was the beginning of a really lovely thing. That’s when I travelled down and I spent around 10 days with him – he would hand me guitar after guitar loaded with the next set of pickups, and I would record clips of all sorts with them that I’d come up with. That was an amazing experience.

“At that quite early stage in my career, I had this formative experience of hearing the entire range of Bare Knuckle pickups back to back, played through the same rig. Because of that, my ear latched onto what it is that pickups do and how they work with guitars.

“Then Tim involved me in creating some other promotional content talking about basic differences between pickups – the difference, sonically, between a covered and an uncovered humbucker, for example. We went on to have this really rich friendship, where he mentored me a lot and always stayed up to date with what I was doing.

“I would introduce artists to what he was doing and that led to certain things like the Misha Mansoor Juggernaut [pickup set] – Misha being the founding member and guitarist in Periphery, the band that I played in. And because of my understanding of both the pickups and the band, Tim and Misha asked if I could come along and be a part of that prototyping session.”

“I guess that formed the archetype of the process we’d subsequently go through with several artists, including Rabea [Massaad], and the next Misha pickup, and a couple that haven’t come out yet. We used this process of doing blind shootouts with the artists where I’m acting as a producer and Tim is the scientist who isn’t telling us what he’s changing with the pickups as we go, and using that as a process for refining the pickups.

“I feel really privileged to have had as much insight as I have into the creation of pickups. Somehow I’ve got this far without saying it, but Tim really is an incredible pickup winder – his ear for tone and his ability to do stuff without recording.

“And that’s always my benchmark; everything I do, I pretty much don’t believe it until I record it and hear the difference. With Tim, he can just pick up a guitar and plug it in and know. He really relies on the primal intuition that he has, which is so powerful.”

“When the idea of doing the Polymath came about, that was really to service the Manson Oryx guitar that I designed with Manson Guitars, which I wanted to have a unique pickup set.

“I didn’t think that I merited having a signature set for sale on the market; I thought we could just design an OEM pickup. But Tim pushed for it to be released and it went on to be really successful. That was something unexpectedly cool, and it seems to have resonated with so many people.

“So – here we are doing it again. It’s such a pleasure to work with Tim, this time a little bit more at a distance with the PolyPaf. Having worked together in close proximity so much, it’s less necessary for us to do the blind shootout thing. I can switch out magnets and other components and install the pickups myself and do my recordings.

“That way, we can each do tests and then have a conversation or get together in the studio – as we did recently with various amps and guitars – and test out the prototypes, so that we can get our heads in front of the same speakers. It’s been a really wonderful process to work with Tim. It’s an honour.”

• PolyPaf humbuckers are available now. See Bare Knuckle Pickups for more details.

Legendary pickup maker Abigail Ybarra is one of the most iconic individuals to ever be associated with electric guitar pickups, and is widely recognized as something of a “pickup god” for the work she carried out over her 50-plus-year career at Fender.

Indeed, after joining the Fender Custom Shop in 1956, Ybarra began hand-winding and hand-building pickups for the firm two years later.

Soon, her hand-crafted creations were being fashioned into some of Fender’s most popular guitars, and were played by the likes of Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Buddy Holly, Stevie Ray Vaughan and countless others. It wasn’t long before her pickups became highly sought-after by artists and collectors alike.

So, in other words, she’s a pretty big deal when it comes to the world of guitars and pickups – but Ybarra’s daughter had no idea her mother was such a high-profile name until she got mobbed by fans.

In a new interview with High Voltage Guitars, both Abigail and her daughter Aurora sit down to discuss Ybarra Sr.’s legacy, with Aurora recalling she only realized her mother was such a legend in the game after witnessing the fan hype that surrounded her during a Fender event.

“I never knew that my mother was a legend in the making,” Aurora says. “When I was a young kid, I knew the business. I was familiar with Fender, I was familiar with pickups and what it was that my mother did as a kid, but I did not realize that my mother was a thing until 2006.

“I went to a Fender event with her in Arizona. She had asked me just to help her there at the event,” she continues. “And when we got to work and they allowed the public to come into the exhibit, people were just losing their minds. It kind of scared me, because people were crowding her.

“I remember thinking, ‘Hey, back up, back up. Give her space.’ That's when I realized, ‘Oh, my goodness.’

“And a friend of mine who knows of my mom's reputation – and I didn't even know at the time – he said, ‘Your mom is Abigail Ybarra?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ He goes, ‘I thought your mom was just like an employee at Fender.’ I go, ‘She is.’

“He goes, ‘Yeah, but that's like saying my mom's a baker and then finding out that your mom is Betty Crocker!’ I was like… wait a minute, I work with this guy at UPS, which has nothing to do with the business that my mother's in. I just thought that was crazy.”

Abigail Ybarra retired in 2013 after a decorated 50-plus-year career. She came out of retirement earlier this year to help former Fender Master Builder Carloz Lopez create the Castedosa ABI – a guitar named after her – and more recently built the pickups that can be found in John Frusciante’s recently unveiled $20k signature Stratocaster.

It’s hardly a “Hold the front page!” moment, but latest releases in Gibson’s expansive aftermarket Pickup Shop collection include a pair of sets – the perennial ’57 Classic and the back-to-the-70s Dirty Fingers hot humbuckers – that come with what many thought were the brand’s ‘forgotten’ Quick Connect plugs.

The what? Well, with these connectors attached to the four-conductor pickup lead, they’re a push-fit into the relevant PCB-style Gibson control circuit that can give you some tricky additional sounds.

We last discussed these quick fixes about five years ago and, to be honest, we thought that Gibson – not least under its new management – had abandoned this simple and nifty idea, at least in terms of aftermarket retrofits.

However, chatting last year to Gibson USA’s Jason Davidson, who looks after the Pickup Shop, he explained: “We still manufacture the Quick Connect [QC] stuff for Gibson USA. Gibson was actually using the QC stuff back as far as the late ’70s on different models, but we started formalising it into Gibson USA production, on regular production models, around 2007.”

“It was around 2012 to 2013 that we did start to sell a few models aftermarket with the QC plugs, like ’57 Classics, the Angus Young model, the Dirty Fingers. We offered those with the QC system, but they didn’t actually sell very well and were discontinued shortly after.

“So, as I said, we still use Quick Connects at the factory, and since Jared Brandon – the Pickup Shop’s product manager and designer – and myself have come onboard with the Pickup Shop we’ve received a lot of requests for the Quick Connect pickups. We haven’t forgotten those customers because there are tens of thousands of guitars out there with the QC system.”

Today, it’s Gibson’s Modern instruments that use the Quick Connect/PCB system, unlike the hand-wired circuits of the Original models.

The key to the multi-switching system – which is employed on all the Modern Les Pauls (with the exception of the Modern Lite) – is that the relatively complex circuit is all mounted to a pre-wired circuit board. Each of the four pull-switches uses the same vintage taper pots that Gibson developed alongside CTS with (obviously) a switch attached to each.

Pull up the bridge pickup tone control and the bridge pickup is sent directly to the output, bypassing the volume and tone controls. Pull up the neck pickup tone (with the three-way toggle selecting both pickups) and we’re out of phase with the ability to alter the pickup volumes to lessen the potentially over-thin sound.

The pull switches on each volume control are a little more unusual. Gibson calls them “coil taps”, not to be confused with a single-coil pickup that is ‘tapped’ at a percentage of its winding to give a reduced output via a switch, as well as the full hotter output without the tap applied.

Yes, one coil of the humbucker is ‘tapped’, but perhaps ‘filtered’ would be a better description because it passes through a capacitor. These coil-taps are also used on the Gibson SG Moderns, although without the direct out and out-of-phase tone control switches.

“Instead of a true coil-split, it’s a coil tap,” says Gibson master luthier Jim DeCola, who originated much of the design. “People might think of a single-coil pickup that’s tapped at, say, 70 per cent, but in this case I’m using a tap between the two coils, basically filtering it out through a capacitor, which is a tuned capacitor, and the value of the capacitor determines the frequency response of the tap.

“So when you pull up the switch to tap it, it’s scooping out some frequencies to give it that fat single-coil sound without the volume drop [of a normal coil-split]. It’s hum-reducing; it’s not fully hum-cancelling, but it’s closer to a humbucker than a single coil – a lot quieter.”

Now, if you fancy hand-wiring that lot, good luck! And that’s the genesis of the system. “[In production,] it’s more affordable,” says Jim. “If we had to do that in a hard-wired situation a lot could potentially go wrong. Using the PCB, it’s more affordable and more repeatable. There’s better shielding, too, so it’s quieter,” he concludes.

Quicker Connect

Another aspect of the system is that the other components – the output jack, toggle switch and four-conductor pickups – all connect to the PCB with simple push-in connectors. It means swapping or replacing pickups, so long as they have those Quick Connect connectors, is a simple no-solder swap.

So if you have a post-2011 PCB-equipped Gibson, you can swap out the pickups? Yes and no.

It’s a yes if you fancy trying either of these new sets, but a little frustrating that, while the Pickup Shop makes other Quick Connect pickups, they’re only available with a guitar attached – for example, those used on the Les Paul Modern Studio (490R and 498T), the Les Paul Modern Figured and Les Paul Supreme (Burstbucker Pro And Burstbucker Pro +) and the Les Paul Classic with its zebra-coiled 60s Burstbuckers (previously the ’61 Zebras).

Now, not everyone is a fan of this modernist system. Many have replaced the PCB with a traditional wiring loom and stated it sounds better. I can’t comment as I haven’t done that, but in using a 2019 Les Paul Classic for gigs and recording – where its expanded sounds have proved more than useful – and as a reference for reviews, I’m a fan.

But it does mean that you’ll find some QC/PCB pickups and parts on eBay and the like. You’ll also find Quick Connect adaptors (not official Gibson parts); for the more adventurous, these means you can wire in any four-conductor pickup, and so long as you get your wiring colour codes right you can still have all the four push-switch sounds.

Some while back I swapped out the Les Paul Classic’s original ’61 Zebra Burstbuckers for an eBay-purchased Burstbucker 2 at the bridge and 1 at the neck. Jim DeCola arranged for a set of T-Types with Quick Connect plugs to be sent over from Gibson a while ago, too, so already the Les Paul Classic has had a couple of no-solder, fully reversible pickup swaps with zero problems.

Process & Sound

YouTube is your friend in terms of the procedure, but it’s a dead simple process, just like swapping pickups on any Les Paul, except you don’t need that soldering iron.

It’s not as easy as the GuitarX (previously Relish) system that’s available on certain Cream T, Newman and Gordon Smith guitars, and we understand a new Maybach model, but none of those guitars has the Gibson pull-switch circuit, though most do have a simple coil-split.

So, while listening to a new pickup takes a little longer, you can tailor what you want to hear in the same way. Those original ’61 Zebras have a pretty crisp PAF-like tonality; the Burstbucker 1 and 2 combo are, to our ears, a little sweeter sounding, and are unpotted, too. But to illustrate the personalisation that’s possible, we loaded in the new Dirty Fingers in the bridge position and the ’57 Classic at the neck.

With its three ceramic magnets and DCR of around 15kohms, the Dirty Fingers was obviously Gibson’s answer to the new kid on the block Larry DiMarzio’s Super Distortion and the like.

It’s a big change to our Les Paul Classic and yet you can’t help but smile as you run it into a gainy amp: there’s thickness, power and some biting clarity. The surprise is that coil-tap, which cleans things up a little but comes across as a rock-ready P-90.

The covered Alnico II ’57 Classic is very different – it’s one of Gibson’s best-selling pickups ever and is based on Seth Lover’s classic formula with balanced (as opposed to randomly wound) coils that replicate original PAFs.

There’s a rounded thickness to the voice that sings beautifully for soaring lead lines in that gained environment. We’d prefer a little more clarity for more classic jazzy blues, but as our Les Paul is now more ‘rock tool’, it all works rather well, not least with the out-of-phase switch whereby using slightly unbalanced volume settings gives some very useful gnarly midrange.

Character Building

Modding for dummies? Well, some of you more experienced guitar tinkerers might be having a chuckle, but this levels the playing field: anyone can revoice their instrument while retaining some pretty tricky wiring options from those four pull-switches.

You also might simply prefer the open-coil or pickup covers to change the look of your guitar. Whatever, the combo of expanded sounds and aesthetics is just a Gibson Modern and a screwdriver away. No soldering necessary!

Specs

Gibson Dirty Fingers Quick Connect

• PRICE: Treble and Rhythm $129/£119 each
• ORIGIN: USA
• TYPE: High-output uncovered humbucker
• MOUNTING TYPE: Standard humbucking
• POLE PIECE SPACING/STYLE: 49mm/dual screw coils
• MAGNET TYPE: 3x ceramic
• COIL WIRE/WIND: N/A
• POTTING: Yes
• DCR (kohms): 15 (Treble and Rhythm)
• OPTIONS: Available with standard 4-conductor hook-up cable with zebra coils. New SM version uses single Ceramic 8 magnet

Gibson ’57 Classic Quick Connect

• PRICE: Treble and Rhythm $169/£149 each
• ORIGIN: USA
• TYPE: Classic-output covered humbucker
• MOUNTING TYPE: Standard humbucking
• POLE PIECE SPACING/STYLE: 49mm/screw and slug coils
• MAGNET TYPE: 1x Alnico II 
• COIL WIRE/WIND: N/A
• POTTING: Yes
• DCR (k ohms): 7.8 (Treble and Rhythm)
• OPTIONS: Uncovered versions available including double classic white, plus underwound versions all with vintage 2-conductor cable
• CONTACT: Gibson

Bare Knuckle Nomads Set: What is it?

Pickups for Telecasters come in numerous sonic shades, and to that end Bare Knuckle already makes quite a few. In fact, adding this new set, the company has 11 different flavours, including the historic Blackguard sets; the Flat ’50s have been powering this writer’s Tele for the past few years.

“I wanted to create something more controlled and powerful that would cater to my heavier sounds just as much as the ambient and cleaner side of what I do,” states Rabea. Like his Triptych set for S-style guitars, the Nomads use a different magnet blend.

“In order to make them synergistic with the Triptych set, I decided on a similar approach,” says Bare Knuckle founder, Tim Mills.

“I opted for Alnico III magnets in the bridge coil and Alnico V in the neck. Alnico III has the lowest pull of any of the Alnicos used in guitar pickups and this, paired with a relatively hot wind of 43 AWG plain enamel wire, allows for the high-end to really breathe and for plenty of extension in the bottom-end.

“It puts all of the dynamic headroom at the player’s control, either by rolling back the volume or digging in more with the pick to push the signal harder.”

Both pickups are well crafted, and the bridge uses what looks like a traditional copper-plated steel baseplate. Tim tells us it’s actually “a much thicker 1950-style baseplate that would have been zinc-plated, but we decided copper-plating would be a nice touch to change things up.

“The thicker steel alters the inductance of the coil, delivering more solid high-end response with plenty of weight behind each note. More of every frequency – but most players particularly feel it in the high-end where it removes any hint of spikiness and really fattens up single-note lead work.”

The neck pickup plays with the recipe, too. “It features a taller coil than normal,” says Tim, “and slightly narrower-diameter magnetic poles – though our vintage-correct full drop Tele neck covers, which are made from pure nickel silver with our own tooling, still fit!

The taller coil allows me to use a hotter wind than I would usually go for while sticking with a 43AWG plain enamel wire, which maintains the balance with the bridge, and the narrower-diameter magnets keep the bottom-end under control with plenty of snap in the upper mids and highs.”

Bare Knuckle Nomads Set: Specs

Launch price: From £261.60 (£276.60 as reviewed) / approx $335
Type: Single-coil pickups for Telecaster and T-style electric guitars
Origin: UK
Mounting type: Standard
Polepiece spacing/style: 55mm/flush pole (bridge); covered (neck)
Hook-up wire: Vintage-style push-back cloth-covered single conductor
Magnet type: Alnico III (bridge), Alnico V (neck)
Coil Wire/Wind: 43 AWG plain enamel/scatter-wound
Potting: Yes DCR (kohms): 10.4 (bridge); 7.2 (neck)
Options: Nomads etch on neck pickup cover (as reviewed) adds £15. Plenty of cover options; RW/RW and four-way mod
Contact: Bare Knuckle Pickups

Bare Knuckle Nomads Set: Usability and sounds

One thing that impressed us about the Triptych set was the apparent balance between positions – and that’s evident here. These pickups are designed to play well for traditional Tele-like tones and also under much higher gains.

Starting clean and loud, the bridge isn’t ferociously bright, but it’s certainly a Tele with gnarly honk, very present depth and clear highs without that eyebrow-raising treble many of us will have experienced.

At the neck, it’s more Strat-y to our ears, with well-tuned clarity, depth and percussive bounce. For funk or jangle fans, the mix is deliciously widescreen, combining depth and sparkle; it’s extremely musical. It’s little surprise that these Nomads record really well.

Edging up the gain you begin to notice how well that bridge pickup especially responds to pick attack and dynamics, while the neck puts on a Texas bluesman’s hat. Running through a variety of dirt pedals, the Nomads lap them up.

Unlike on so many Teles we’ve wrestled with over the years, our right hand isn’t constantly riding the tone control to pull back the sharp highs, and we’re not wishing for more clarity at the neck. Balance is the keyword: a T-style voice for sure, full of rootsy character but without the sharp ’n’ dark bits.

Bare Knuckle Nomads Set: Verdict

If there were a MasterChef for pickup makers, Tim Mills would have won it countless times over the past 21 years.

On the one hand, these Nomads are just another set of pickups for a Telecaster, but those decades of listening – not least to players such as Rabea – have not only satisfied the artist but created a recipe that has all the taste of this classic plank with a very seasoned, musical flavour.

Is this just another take on a Broadcaster set? “Kind of,” concludes Tim, “but I’ve introduced enough changes to bring it forward to the 21st century and turn what was already a sledgehammer pickup into a dynamic battering ram.” Anyone with a troublesome Tele, whatever style you play in, needs to hear these.

Bare Knuckle Nomads Set: Hands-on videos

Rabea Massaad

Bare Knuckle

• Bare Knuckle Triptych set

Some guitarists prefer to take a minimalist approach to their gear, and find a single humbucker – or maybe even a sole single-coil – to be plenty. Likewise, many simply crave the classic neck and bridge ’bucker duo, while others prefer a triple stack of single-coils. But how about a pickup that has, erm, eight-coils?

Well, that’s exactly what luthier Ian Pender and Five Star Guitars have masterminded with the D.U.M.Bucker – an absurd, yet full functioning, octa-coil that you might actually be able to get your hands on.

“The world may not be ready for this,” Five Star Guitars admits as an unlucky test pilot can be seen donning multiple layers of ear-protection equipment in a promotional demo video.

He then plugs into a classy-looking Mesa Boogie amp head and cab – which honestly deserve better – and showcases to the world just how dumb the D.U.M.Bucker truly is.

The banshee-level of screaming feedback is instantaneous, likely causing all dogs within a five-mile radius to cry. But, surprisingly, it works.

While it may be hard to hear the pickup’s guinea pig bellowing over the top of an open power chord, he does indeed cry, “Totally usable, yeah!” to deem the experiment a success.

Astonishingly, it comprises eight Frankenstein'd single-coils – or is that four humbuckers? – that total a whopping 48 pole pieces. Furthermore, the pickup's apparent success and meme-level popularity has resulted in Pender actually making the D.U.M.Bucker available to a select few guitar players.

As per a series of comments, only five will be made, and to prove the electrical monstrosity is real, Pender has released a further A/B video with a puny Squier Strat pitted against the octa-pickup beast. The jump in girth is massive, and we’d love to see someone tame the beast and let it shine.

The D.U.Mbucker is “a once-in-a-generation mind-blowing, speaker-melting, and eviction notice of tone”, with Five Star saying, “You thought about it, we've built it”.

There is currently no word on when the pickup will be released, or its cost, but it looks like it could be coming soon (that is, if it hasn't already been snapped up in preorders), so warn your neighbors.

Head to Ian Pender's Instagram channel for more information regarding pre-orders, if you dare.

Chances are you’ll own – or certainly have owned – a good ol’ Fender Telecaster or two. To be fair to Mr Fender, Teles weren’t designed to be easy to modify: a simple pickup change means removing that bridge plate, and the compact control cavity is not exactly spacious if you plan to add another control or something like a boost, which might need a battery.

And while plenty of us are perfectly comfortable with the Tele’s standard ‘modern’ circuit, which is made up of master volume and tone controls, and the bridge, both, neck pickup selections from the three-way lever switch, it’s certainly not the only way to wire up and drive your Tele.

For example, I previously ended up installing the original 1950 to ’52-era circuit (Charles Guitars) into my Wilkinson T-style kit-build. This is very different from the ‘modern’ Tele circuit, which only began to be used by Fender from 1967. On the original circuit in position 3 on the lever switch, we get neck pickup but with a pre-set capacitor roll-off for a ‘jazz’ or bass-like sound.

To be honest, I haven’t used that much. Thankfully, the middle position voices the neck pickup without that treble-snagging capacitor, which has seen a lot more use. However, the ‘secret’ lies in position 1, which voices the bridge pickup but with what we know now as the tone control working as a pickup blend.

With that control fully clockwise, the bridge pickup is voiced, but by turning the blend control anti-clockwise the neck pickup is gradually introduced. For a die-hard Keef and roots rock fan like myself, this is where the money lies.

But that wiring means I don’t have the instant and bouncy dual-pickup mix of the modern circuit’s middle position – you’ve got to move the blend control fully anti-clockwise to get that. And, more importantly, I don’t have a tone control. Telecasters can be very bright on the bridge pickup and, well, gigging one without a tone control isn’t for everyone.

That Wilkinson T-style kit has also been host for various other experiments, mods and pickup installs. It currently has Bare Knuckle’s Flat ’50 pickup set and that Vega-Trem VT2 vibrato (which I don’t use as a wang bar, but I really enjoy the sound it brings). In fact, this kit-build is in daily use and has been used for quite a bit of recording, too. I’ve often thought about taking it on a gig, but with no tone control I’m a bit hesitant.

Which is where Bedwas-based Radioshop Pickup’s latest bit of kit comes in. The company’s new ‘Telecaster Wiring Mod’ offers both a standard tone control and a pickup blend via a stacked concentric pot in the tone control position. My prayers have been answered!

Where It Started

“I didn’t particularly want to mess with the simplicity of the Telecaster because that’s its beauty – but I have always kind of wanted a bit more from the controls,” says Radioshop’s Paul Best of the origins of the mod.

“One idea I had was from the 1962 Jazz Bass with its two stacked concentric pots – a volume and tone for each pickup – but I felt visually that might be overkill, plus it might be too much like a Les Paul, which I didn’t really want to replicate. Then I thought, ‘Could we do it with one concentric control and get control over the level of both pickups?’ I tried it on my own guitar and liked it, and thought other players might like it, too.

“But it was also inspired by the feeling some players have that their neck pickup is too dark,” he continues, “so by rolling in a bit of the bridge pickup without taking too much away from the neck pickup, you might have something that’s a bit more usable.

“My assumption was that I’d be on the neck and I’d just bring in a bit of bridge – or vice versa. Now, if you wind the blend control fully back you have the same dual-pickup mix in all three selector switch positions. But if you dial the control up to around the midway point you have three variations of the middle-position mixed-pickup sound. I hadn’t really foreseen that.”

“Plus, a lot of people complain they have volume differences between their two pickups, so this circuit will negate some of that issue. Also, if one of your pickups is reverse wound, reverse polarity [RWRP], then the minute you sneak some of the other pickup in – adding a little bridge to neck, for example – you’re getting some, not all, of the hum-cancelling.”

Presumably it would be a good setup for a Tele with a neck humbucker, too? “Definitely! I’d try that out, but I’m running out of guitars,” laughs Paul.

Installation

The great thing about a Tele is the top-mount control plate so you can access the wiring by just removing two screws – much easier than a Stratocaster. You can obviously unsolder the pickups, unscrew the knobs and use the control plate to mount the new circuit, or grab a new control plate and mount the new circuit to that. If you want to swap back, it’s less work and much quicker.

The team at Radioshop not only makes some fine pickups but clearly has its soldering chops down. The new loom looks old-school but very tidy, and ours uses a single audio taper CTS 250k volume pot (with an optional treble bleed circuit comprising a .001µF capacitor and a 150k resistor wired in parallel) with a 250k tone pot placed on top of the lower 500k blend pot.

“We had to convert the blend pot to be a no-load ourselves because these concentric pots aren’t available with that feature and, of course, it’s central to the mod,” says Paul.

So the no-load blend pot is out of circuit when it’s fully up, clockwise, but when you roll it back it introduces the other pickup. When you’re on the bridge position it introduces the neck, and vice versa, and obviously the blend feature only functions in positions 1 and 3 on the lever switch; position 2’s dual mix pickup stays unchanged.

Along with that optional treble bleed, you have a choice of either a .047µF Orange Drop tone capacitor or, as here, a K42Y-2 paper-in-oil type.

If you can solder, the install is easy enough. Unsolder the pickup leads and separate earths (plus the leads to the output jack that are already mounted to the Electrosocket-style output jack plate on our kit-build). Next, you’ve got to remove the old circuit from the control plate and remount the new one and resolder the pickups, output jack and earth wires back on the new five-way switch and relevant points.

The Radioshop kit also includes a domed and knurled volume knob and the stacked control knobs for that tone/blend. The pots are both solid shaft types, so the knobs screw on and you need to take care that the upper and lower portions of the tone/blend move independently. Start with the lower black knob then the upper tone knob, slightly lifting it a fraction before you tighten the screw.

Firing Up

Working on a Telecaster’s circuit is easy because all we’ve done is removed and replaced it – we haven’t had to slacken or remove any strings or the scratchplate, as you would on a Stratocaster. Everything works first time and, reassuringly, with the lower blend control fully up (clockwise) and effectively out of the circuit, we have the standard Telecaster circuit. All good.

You can hear what’s happening with the blend control just by lightly tapping the pickups with a small screwdriver. In the bridge position with the blend full up, if you tap the neck pickup you won’t hear anything through your amp. As you slowly move the blend anti-clockwise an increasing amount of the neck is added to the bridge.

Audibly, then, we slowly move from the no-blend direct pickup sound to a subtly more textured response as the other pickup is introduced. It certainly warms and thickens the solo bridge pickup – but not excessively – and adds a subtle attack to the neck.

Obviously, if you wind the blend fully off (anti-clockwise) you’ll have the same dual-pickup mix in all three positions on the selector, but keep it midway and you hear three subtly different and very usable mixes.

Of course, any two-pickup guitar with individual volume controls will create similar pickup blends or mixes, not least a Les Paul with its dual volumes and the toggle switch centred. And although here on our modded Tele we can only adjust the level of one pickup against the full output of the other, you get an idea of the blend potential.

But a significant difference with the Tele mod is that, because it isn’t part of the blend, the actual volume control remains a master volume that can raise or lower the output of whatever pickup blend you’ve dialled in.

As with any good Tele, there’s no shortage of treble response on the bridge and knocking back the tone easily sorts that. Also, previously pulling the volume control back rounded the highs a little, but as we have that treble bleed on the volume control, it barely does so here – something you might miss or indeed prefer. Either way, removing the treble bleed is a simple job.

Final Thoughts

Getting your guitar to perform how you want it to – rather than the way a manufacturer thinks you want it – is the key to all this mucking around in The Mod Squad.

While trillions of players are perfectly happy with the good ol’ Tele’s standard wiring, this Radioshop mod gives you control over the relative level of the two pickups – without adding a second volume control (it could be very handy to try if you have a Tele with a humbucker in neck position, for example), and nothing changes with the blend control out of circuit.

Plus, while those uneven mixes that the blend allows might be relatively subtle, they do add a slightly different and very usable character. Standard Telecaster plus a bit more? Nothing wrong with that.

Specs

• PRODUCT: Radioshop Telecaster Wiring Mod
• COST: £140 as reviewed with treble bleed and PIO cap. As the Radioshop Telecaster Tone System (£325), which includes a set of Pure ’50s or Pure ’60s T-style pickups, the price of the mod circuit effectively drops to £115
• CONTACT: Radioshop

Bare Knuckle has unveiled its second set of signature humbuckers for modern progressive metal maestro Adam "Nolly" Getgood.

The PolyPaf pickups follow the Polymath set from 2021, and are designed to unite classic PAF-inspired humbucking tones with modern sensibilities.

Former Periphery bass player, superstar producer (Architects, Northlane, Bury Tomorrow), and Manson Guitar Works endorsee Getgood has designed the ‘buckers to work in partnership with the Polymaths, meaning a blend of the two pickups could prove fruitful.

Centered on the dynamism, clarity, and three-dimensionality of authentic PAF-style pickups, the new PolyPafs are augmented with an accentuated mid-range for a set that intends to appeal to both new and old-school players alike.

That means those vintage flavors will work in modern applications, including in seven-string and eight-string riffing, thick string gauges, and tunings so low they can summon demons.

Their foundations can be found in Bare Knuckle’s The Mule and Stormy Monday humbuckers, and are likewise made with 100% vintage correct parts. This includes Alnico V magnets (8.3 kΩ DC resistance in the bridge, and 7.6 kΩ in the neck), and “a unique combination of high carbon steel slugs under the wound strings”.

As such, they are primed for everything from blues rock to brutal modern metal. Available in six-, seven-, and eight-string configurations, they are also said to be suitable for baritone and multi-scale guitars, and in solidbody and hollowbody builds.

The tonal emphasis puts treble and mids above bass, with Bare Knuckle intent on “taking the original PAF tone into present-day playing context”.

“I wanted the PolyPafs to be true players’ pickups,” says Getgood. “The bridge is ready to go anywhere your picking hand takes it. Plaintive cleans, and raunchy open chords to gnarly, aggressive riffing can be had at your slightest command.”

“PolyPafs are judicious in their output, perfectly balancing dynamic headroom with midrange drive so you can express every nuance and emotion,” adds Bare Knuckle. “The open voice, trim bass, and string separation bring everything you play into sharp focus even when using super low tunings and thick string gauges.”

It’s not the first time Bare Knuckle has reprised a signature artist relationship in 2024, with Rabea Massaad delivering the Noamd Telecaster pickups in February.

The Bare Knuckle Polypaf humbuckers are available from £195.50 (approx $254) for individual pickups, or £376.80 (approx $490) for a set.

Visit Bare Knuckle to discover more.

Blues maestro Joe Bonamassa has, once again, teamed up with Seymour Duncan on signature Broadcaster pickups that promise to add that extra vintage, 1950s-inspired flair to your Telecaster.

Joe Bonamassa's 1950 Broadcaster Set takes inspiration from the Tele predecessor, of which only 250 were built between the fall of 1950 and the spring of 1951.

Right after its introduction, a trademark war ensued with Gretsch, which owned the BroadKaster trademark. This led to it becoming known as the “Nocaster”, which eventually resulted in the model we now know as the Telecaster.

As you can imagine, these guitars are now extremely rare. However, as befits a bona fide vintage collector, Bonamassa is the owner of one of these scarce models.

“The Broadcaster will be turning 75 years old next year, and it's just an incredible invention of electric guitar,” Bonamassa tells Seymour Duncan.

“My original guitar has a nice bright front pickup, which is hard to find on early Telecasters because they tend to get a little bit muddy. They're either overwound, underwound, or generally just a little lower in volume. So it's hard to get a really nice, punchy bright front pickup.”

However, according to Bonamassa, Seymour Duncan managed to capture his Broadcaster's unique tone and present it to the masses.

In fact, this 2024 replica is arguably so close to the real thing, that Bonamassa himself demos the set on an affordable Squier Tele and compares these pickups to his original.

“These are the prototypes of the Broadcaster set,” he explains. “The front [neck] pickup is a nice, bright, punchy pickup, and the flat-pole [bridge pickup] has a nice bite and a crunch.”

More importantly, they're authentic to Leo Fender's original design, which is why the tone evokes the early days of blues, rock, and country.

The set is built in the Seymour Duncan Custom Shop and features Alnico 2 magnets in the neck, Alnico 4 magnets in the bridge, and cloth push-back cable.

What's more, the raw steel bottom plates will be signed by Bonamassa and Seymour W. Duncan, aged to match the original set from the Broadcaster that inspired this new release, and individually numbered.

If you don't manage to nab one of the 250, Bonamassa and the Seymour Duncan Custom Shop will offer these pickups as built-to-order models for $160 a piece or $310 a set.

For more information, visit Seymour Duncan.

Seymour Duncan has partnered with Billy Gibbons to launch not one, but two signature electric guitar pickups, which elevate two classic ZZ Top tones through an assortment of single-coils and humbuckers.

The Red Devil – a new iteration of the ZZ Top icon’s Stratocaster-compatible humbucker – has been geared towards Telecasters, while the Hades Gates humbucker set is engineered for Les Pauls.

Naturally, both will produce their own distinct tones, but each new set has been fine-tuned to deliver Gibbons’ fiery hot Texas tone with some added oomph that previous sets don’t offer.

The Hades Gates humbuckers, for example, promise to be an evolution of Gibbons’ Pearly Gates P.A.F pickups – the same ‘pups that can be found in his coveted 1959 Les Paul Standard – bringing to the table added output and a hotter wind.

Hand-built in Santa Barbara, California, the Hades Gates humbuckers feature Alnico II magnets and are said to offer a more “fiery take” on the mid-forward, punchy sound that Gibbons and his Les Paul is responsible for.

These are available in a range of finishes and covers, from black and zebra to the more retro raw nickel with gold mesh covers.

“It took Pearly Gates and gave it an extra ‘bop,’” says Gibbons of the Hades Gates. “They offer a little extra output. When on stage, I think the essence of cutting through relies upon what emanates from the source.

“That’s the heart of what makes it sound so good. It’s interesting how something so subtle can be so dramatic on the player’s end.”

Continuing the theme of offering “extra heat”, the Red Devil Tele is a standalone mini-humbucker, which has been made available as a drop-in replacement bridge pickup for Fender’s single-cut (and, by extension, any T-style electric).

Again, a hotter wind that drives amps and pedals harder for a punchier output is utilized for the single-coil-sized humbucker, which is only available in black.

Prices for both new pickups start from $129.

In other Seymour Duncan news, the renowned pickup firm recently branched into the electric guitar string market, releasing the Antiquity string range.

Head over to Seymour Duncan to find out more.

Fender has expanded its arsenal of bass pickups by launching a trio of Tim Shaw-voiced Cobalt Chrome pups compatible with its Precision Bass and Jazz Bass models.

As was the case with the Big F’s Cobalt Chrome electric guitar pickups from last year – which were designed for Telecasters and Jazzmasters – this collection sets its sights on solving all your 60-cycle hum woes, comprising a magnetic combination that may “help eliminate” those pesky unwanted noises.

Using a proprietary blend of a FeCrCo magnet, the pickups not only help reduce hum, but also promise to “bring a new voice and attitude to your instrument”. Namely, they hope to provide “added punch, hi-fi clarity and dynamic range” while retaining the models’ traditional tones.

That means the Cobalt Chrome P Bass set looks to harness the “sweet low-end thump” produced by original Precision instruments, while the Cobalt Chrome Jazz Bass set is tasked with maintaining the platform’s classic “transparency and midrange growl”.

The two standalone Precision and Jazz sets are joined by a third offering, which combines both the split-coil of the P Bass with the single-coil of the J Bass.

Shaw – Fender's resident tone guru – took a deep dive into the new collection in the launch video above, during which he recalls the meticulous efforts he went to in order to perfect the Chrome Cobalt bass pickups.

“I’ve been a P Bass player most of my life, so when I started doing a new bass pickup it was a little daunting,” he says. “This is a sound I am literally hardwired to hear and feel. It’s a sound that sits very well in the mix everywhere.

“The challenge was not to lose that, but also to bring something else to the party. I ended up with a voicing which still has that very solid attack, and it’s got a little extra something up top. It responds very well to your touch, it’s every even all the way up and across the neck.”

That ethos of honoring the source material but building upon its legacy spans across all sets that Shaw voiced. However, as Fender’s chief engineer recalls, piecing together these three sets wasn't easy.

“I am very happy with the way the set came out,” he adds. “It did not come easily, I will tell you that.

“I take this really seriously. Things have to be musical, they have to make musical sense, and they have to be something where guys like Leo [Fender] would have listened to them and said, 'Yeah, that's good.' I never forget that. I can't forget that.”

Despite the differing sizes, the construction of each pickup remains fairly consistent across the board. In each case, a Chrome Ring with Black Insert design – as well as Formvar-coated wire – is utilized.

The Cobalt Chrome bass pickups could have a pretty sizable impact for bassists. After all, the guitar equivalents were met with a warm reception from anyone pitted against 60-cycle hum troubles. That, and these new units sound really, really good.

Price-wise, the Jazz Bass and P Bass sets will be available for $299 and $249, respectively. The P/J Bass, meanwhile, will list for $349.

To find out more, head over to Fender.

Fender has teamed up with Jason Isbell to launch a standalone set of signature electric guitar pickups.

The Telecaster-compatible single-coils have been designed by renowned tone guru Tim Shaw, and were designed in a bid to deliver “a perfect blend of Tele twang and Strat sparkle”.

In other words, they are shaping up to be perhaps the most versatile Fender-branded Telecaster pickups currently available.

Specifically, the bridge pickup was inspired by the single-coil found in Isbell’s prized 1965 Candy Apple Red model, which does the heavy Tele lifting: it provides the “twang, sparkle and fire Jason is known for”, and delivers the more traditional fat, full Tele tones.

The neck, meanwhile, is a ‘Twisted Tele’, which – as the name implies – is a slightly tweaked take on a traditional Tele piece.

It has slightly taller bobbins that allow for more winds, which in turn is said to deliver a touch of Stratocaster character to go with those bridge sounds.

As Shaw himself explains, “I’ve long been a fan of Jason’s playing, so it was an honor to work with him on these custom pickups. We started with the bridge pickup, which is based on one from one of Jason’s favorite guitars, a gorgeous ’65 Candy Apple Red Tele.

“The resulting duplicate offers classic fat, full Tele tones. For the neck, we went with a Twisted Tele – my personal favorite Tele neck pickup – which offers Stratocaster-esque sounds; the best of both worlds!”

Isbell’s signature model is one of Fender’s most popular and well-regarded Telecasters, with its sleek sunburst finish, classy body binding and smart subtle relic’ing.

It stands to reason, then, that Isbell’s pickups will be just as warmly received, not just by fans of the Grammy-winning Americana virtuoso, but by all Tele players who are looking for a set of pickups that could elevate their tone further.

Other notable features that set Isbell’s signature set apart from the competition include Formvar-coated magnet wire to improve brightness on the neck pickup, a plain enamel wire on the bridge for punch and twang, and alnico five magnets.

There’s also some Light Road Worn aging to fit the Isbell vibe, with the set coming with installation hardware.

The Jason Isbell Telecaster pickup set is available now for $149.99.

Head over to Fender to find out more.

Through all the leaps and bounds of guitar technology since its introduction almost 80 years ago, the P-90 pickup has remained a favorite of guitarists from across the musical spectrum.

From the metal thunder of Tony Iommi to the rabble-rousing volleys of Billie Joe Armstrong and Mick Jones, P-90s have served as the conduits for some of rock guitar’s most iconic riffs. However, that iconic growl sometimes comes with a price.

“Many factors from stage lighting to inconsistent power at venues and rooms,” explains Guitar World’s Paul Riario, “lead to a host of noise-related problems for single-coil pickups, especially P-90s.” These pesky issues can even extend to home practice, due to interference from home appliances and the like.

Top pickup builder Lollar already had a number of its own takes on the P-90, but was looking to further nip noise-related problems in the bud, while still delivering that classic P-90 performance – and style. Enter the new DC-90.

The DC-90 features a DC reading of 11K in the bridge, and 12.3K in the bridge, and – while its somewhat close in character to Lollar’s '50s Wind P-90 – has a unique, dynamic voice, that, as you can hear in Paul’s demo, can add depth and character to ethereal cleans, and bite to gain-driven riffs and single-note runs.

Tested fully clean, Riario lauds the DC-90 as “full and warm-sounding in all positions.” With reverb, compression, and delay in the picture, the DC-90 is simply gorgeous, giving Riario’s sound all the definition needed to paint a clear picture with his playing.

With a Screamer-style overdrive and a brighter distortion, the DC-90 still sounds right at home.

“The Lollar DC-90 is a unique-looking pickup, with a hum-canceling design,” Riario says. “Much like Lollar’s other fantastic pickups, the DC-90 is expressive, musical, and now, quieter. If you love a P-90 with that mid-range-forward voice, snap, and gutsy grind, the DC-90 delivers the same tonal profile in spades.”

Only available in Soapbar format at the moment, the DC-90 is available now for $175.

For more info on the pickup, visit Lollar.

Many years ago, in one of the first issues of Guitarist magazine I ever read, there was a report from a vintage guitar show. Among the pics of Paisley Telecasters and ’Bursts was a shot of a black Les Paul Custom fitted with what, to my inexperienced eyes, appeared to be an unusual neck pickup. 

It had chunky rectangular polepieces and looked like a relic from an earlier era. This, I later discovered, was Gibson’s Alnico V pickup, also known as the ‘Staple’ pickup because of those evenly spaced rectangular polepieces. 

It was not all that surprising that I didn’t know what it was, however, because it had a short life in Gibson’s guitars. Introduced in 1954, it was designed to take the warm tone of the P-90 pickups fitted to most Gibson electrics at that point and add a little more clarity to the equation. 

Stuart Robson of Sunbear Pickups believes it was created to placate that eternal tinkerer Les Paul, who often fitted heavily modified electric guitar pickups of his own devising to his Les Pauls, sometimes home-wound on DeArmond pickup internals. 

This would hardly have reflected well on Gibson’s then-standard P-90, the stock pickup of nearly all Les Pauls from 1952 to 1957, so Stuart believes they devised the Alnico V pickup to get closer to the style of neck pickup Les really wanted. 

“Like so many things with the early Gibson stories, you never quite know what’s absolutely the truth or what’s what people have surmised over the years,” Stuart says with a chuckle. “But my personal take on this is that there are pictures of Les Paul in the early 50s playing what were probably the very first Les Paul Customs. And you can see that in the neck of those guitars, he had pulled out what was presumably a stock P-90 and put in [what looks like] a Dynasonic [also known as DeArmond Model 2000] pickup. 

“So, while I’ve never heard this directly from anyone at Gibson, my presumption has always been that Gibson probably turned around to Les and said, ‘Well, we really would rather not have a Gretsch pickup in the guitar that you’re playing on stage every night. Why don’t we make something which is basically the same thing?’ Because the truth is that the original Gibson Alnico V staple pickup – with the exception of the wire and the shape of the magnet – is, in terms of construction, almost a direct replication of the Dynasonic. 

“Nearly everything about it is the same, right down to the way that the magnets are raised and lowered,” Stuart continues. “So I think I think probably what Gibson were doing was trying to give Les a neck pickup with the Gibson name on it that would do the job that he was swapping in the [modified] Dynasonics to do – which, in all likelihood, given his playing style, was to make the neck pickup clear.”

Take Five

Whatever the truth of this might have been, the arrival of the PAF humbucker in 1957 saw the Alnico V pickup consigned to the graveyard of history. When we asked Gibson’s now vice president of product, Mat Koehler, about the reason for the complete phasing out of the Alnico V a couple of years back, he gave this answer:

“I now understand that they’re very difficult to build. It’s part of the reason why we’re redeveloping the staple pickup as we speak, to be more factory-friendly. The design itself was a little crude – we have Seth Lover’s original drawings and you can tell that this wasn’t his instinctual way to create a pickup. 

“This was Les Paul in his ear saying, ‘This is what you should do.’ I think that had a lot to do with it. But it does serve a purpose and it has a fantastic jazz tone, which is why you see it on archtop models, too. I think, really, the reason that it wasn’t more prevalent is just because of the difficulty to construct it.”

Gibson isn’t the only one to be taking a second look at the Alnico V pickup, however. A number of independent pickup makers have revived the design, in simplified form, because people are belatedly realising that the pickup’s clarity is its secret weapon, making it sound more like an immense Strat neck pickup than a vintage P-90. 

The effect is quite addictive, as I discovered when I tried a Patrick James Eggle Macon Special fitted with Mojo Pickups’ take on the Alnico V – the P90 Soapbar Staple. Paired with a Filter’Tron-style bridge humbucker it offered bounce and bloom that contrasted beautifully with the bridge pickup’s crisp grind. 

The experience stuck in my mind, so when the aforementioned Stuart Robson of Sunbear Pickups mentioned he was developing his own take on the Alnico V pickup, I pricked up my ears. I was looking for a way to customise my already-modded AVRI ’52 Telecaster and I suddenly thought what a nice addition a staple pickup at the neck might be. 

I’m not one of the traditional Tele neck pickup’s detractors; some players don’t rate them at all, but I’ve always liked the little silver tube that the Tele has sported at the neck since its inception. 

However, while not in the least unhappy with my Tele’s excellent set of Lollar Special T pickups, I think I must be a frustrated jazz player as I’m on the neck pickup more than anything else – and, as such, I wouldn’t mind if it had some serious fatness and clout beyond the design limitations of traditional Tele pickups. 

The Alnico V staple has always intrigued me. I’ve always thought it looked cool, too. In the neck position of a Tele, it could look both vintage and a bit different, I reflected. So I took the plunge and called Stuart at Sunbear and ordered a single, humbucker-sized SB-Staple V pickup with a plan to put it in the neck position of my Tele. 

Stuart offers some great styling options on his pickups, which I made full use of, opting for his ‘aged’ finish and a tortoiseshell cover on top of the pickup where the ‘staples’ protrude. 

The pickup is wound to 7k DC resistance, so it shouldn’t be a mismatch with the Lollar Special T bridge pickup that will remain in place, which is wound to 8k DC resistance. In fact, they should match up perfectly, with the neck tending to sound a bit louder anyway. 

As Stuart winds such pickups to order, I knew there’d be a little wait while he worked his magic. That gave me a bit of time to put out a request for help with routing the body and scratchplate to accept the Staple V, a call that was answered by the estimable Pete Lewis at Lewis Guitar Works. 

Pete makes impeccably turned-out electrics that have the DNA of classic designs, while adding unique and very cool twists of his own. On this occasion, he kindly said he was happy to make the required customisations to my much-modded reissue Tele once the pickup arrived. For now, I’ll just watch and wait for the postman to come, box in hand, up the drive. Stay tuned to hear how the project turns out…  

Seymour Duncan has announced the release of its noiseless P-90 humbucker set, the Phat Cat Silencer.

The pickup set marries the firm’s P-90 Silencer design with its Phat Cat humbuckers to deliver authentic P-90 tones without any extra hum.

While the concept of noiseless P-90s isn't groundbreaking, their delivery in a standard humbucker-sized housing is, meaning any humbucker-equipped guitar can be easily modded to fit them.

The pickup wizards say its latest invention is “perfect for those looking to explore the feel and response of a P-90 without routing out a guitar”.

P-90 pickups, which serve as a halfway house between the bite of single-coils and the gluttonous girth of humbuckers, have proven hugely popular across punk, rock, and metal.

Everyone from Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong to Loathe’s Erik Bickerstaffe have fallen in love with the hybrid-style pickups.

However, their versatility and tonal charm have often been marred by their tendency to become noisy when used in high-gain contexts. Seymour Duncan also notes that their more compact size “often limits them to purpose-built guitars”.

The Phat Cat Silencer, then, looks to rectify both those issues. They boast a noiseless nature “without the need of major guitar surgery,” which means guitarists can “enjoy thick and edgy P-90 tones” at their leisure.

Their standardized housing also opens the floodgates of possible guitars that can load them up.

Players can choose from Vintage and Hot Bridge pickup variations, which are designed to partner up with the Phat Cat Silencer Neck pickup, of which there is only one option.

All iterations are available in nickel and gold finishes. Prices start from $139.

Head to Seymour Duncan to learn more.

Heritage Guitars has unveiled the Custom Shop Core Collection H-157, a Les-Paul style electric guitar headlined by its new hand-wound, vintage-style humbuckers.

Crafted at the famed Heritage facility on 225 Parsons Street in Kalamazoo, MI, the model's new 225 Hot Classic humbuckers help take the template to new tonal heights, with the pickups supposedly excelling with distortion or heavier music.

Hand-wound and designed to “deliver more oomph and power while maintaining dynamics and touch sensitivity,” the all-new pickups are tailored to excel with heavier music styles. They’re also wax-potted to counter extraneous noises and feedback.

The guitar, available in a choice of Dark Cherry Sunburst and Ebony nitrocellulose finishes, features an ultra-light genuine mahogany body and – for the former finish –a selected curly maple top. 

The 25.75" scale build also features a mahogany ‘50s-style C-profile neck, and an ebony fretboard bound and equipped with 22 Jescar medium jumbo frets and block inlays.

Gold hardware features include a Tune-O-Matic-style bridge with an aluminum Stopbar tailpiece and Heritage Custom Shop tuners. 

Heritage has made some visual enhancements here, too. Multi-ply binding features on the body and headstock, which has also been given a gold kite inlay.

Heritage believes its H-157 takes “renowned solid-body craftsmanship to new heights,” and so it arrives with a rather high-end price tag of $4,499. 

The H-157 succeeds Heritage's Standard H-150 model, which Guitar World described as delivering the “thrills of a Kalamazoo-era Les Paul for a lot less bills”.

The original Kalamazoo factory was bought from Gibson by a breakaway group of luthiers, who would later become Heritage, following Gibson's relocation to Nashville. 

Earlier in 2024, Heritage released the H-575, a high-end hollowbody inspired by one of the most popular jazzboxes of all time.  

Head to Heritage for more information about the new H-157 model. 

DiMarzio has teamed up with Billy Sheehan to present a new shape and feel for Precision Bass pickup covers. With this reinvention, DiMarzio promises pickup covers that improve “both playability and performance”.

DiMarzio used Sheehan's vision for ramp-style surface shapes to minimize all the hard edges from the pickup casing. Furthermore, the pickups experts relocated the height adjustment screws so that they're now below the surface of the pickguard, thereby eliminating finger contact.

There are tonal benefits to the new patent, too. “A by-product of our newly patented design is a shape that allows the twin hum-canceling coils to be adjusted closer to the strings,” comments DiMarzio.

“A secondary benefit from this is an improvement in both dynamics and string-to-string balance.”

The new design is now available on DiMarzio's Relentless Middle, Relentless P, Relentless PJ Pair, Sixties P, and Sixties PJ Pair bass pickups.

See DiMarzio for more info.

In a 2023 interview with Guitarist, DiMarzio founder Larry DiMarzio asserted how getting practical input from artists has shaped, and continues to shape, the direction of DiMarzio pickups.

“You can come up with ideas that you think are good in your design area… and then you still have to take them into the marketplace,” he remarks. “I mean, a lot of the pickups were road-tested, not just by me but by my friends. I mean, imagine if you would, it’s 1973, KISS is formed and recording, but they’re not even out on the road yet.

“Right? Ace Frehley and I meet up and I give him some pickups because he heard about them. Well, those pickups were out on the road for like a year. Now, if there were problems, I was going to hear about it. So I like the idea of getting a product and road-testing it.”

Over the past year, country-inspired music has experienced a renaissance in the mainstream. From Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter to guitarists like Pedal Steel Noah, Matheus Canteri and MJ Lenderman racking up millions of views on social media, guitar-forward country music has solidified its position in the global mainstream music landscape.

To acknowledge this new country movement, Seymour Duncan has announced pickups “designed with the contemporary country guitarist in mind.”

The new Hot Chicken Strat and Hot Chicken Tele pickups' dual-coil design ensure an “old school” character to the tone, minus the 60-cycle hum. Seymour Duncan also promises that these new pickups have been tailored to meet high-gain demands while retaining clarity and tone definition.

As Seymour Duncan puts it, “These noiseless Stack pickups deliver searing hotness that will cut through any mix. Whether laying down scorching leads or simmering rhythm licks, these pickups ensure fiery country tone without the vintage hum.” Both pickups also promise to deliver a “natural compression” that's especially useful in the hybrid picking and country fusion worlds.

The pickups are designed to fit all Strats and Telecasters, as well as other electric guitars built in those two styles. The Hot Chicken Strat pickups, available in off-white, white, and black, consist of three single coil-sized pickups that can be bought individually or as a set. They come in a stacked coil design wound around A5 Chamfered rod magnets.

The Tele counterpart is made in a similar way and can also be bought as a set or as individuals.

“In the early 80s, we designed a stacked Strat pickup. Based on feedback of the Strat pickup, we're like, ‘Hey, that sounds like it would make an awesome Tele pickup,’” says Seymour Duncan. “We're not trying to make it sound like a Strat, but [use] these same characteristics that are working well for the modern country player.”

The Hot Chicken Strat set will set you back $357, with the Hot Chicken Tele set coming in at a slightly cheaper $238. For more information about these two new pickups, visit Seymour Duncan.

Fishman has just announced the release of the Fluence Mick Thomson Signature Series pickup set. Thomson is known for exploring new technologies and gear, and Fishman Fluence claims to “deliver the greatest version of Mick's signature tones” but also “encapsulates everything that he’s been searching for throughout his career”.

The new pickup set promises to deliver an array of humbucker sounds as well as single coil capability. The first voice in the bridge pickup is Thomson's signature tight, active bridge humbucker tone, while the second voice conveys a refined punchy passive humbucker sound. The third voice channels a “glassy, crystal-clear single coil tone.”

The neck pickup features the first voice, which Fishman describes as “thick and fluid”, plus a second voice that offers “sweet” vintage passive humbucker plus an extra low-mid punch. In addition to these two, the neck pickup also incorporates a third voice that delivers “vintage, but quiet, single coil neck tone”.

To achieve the voicings Thomson requested, Fishman leveraged a new custom hybrid magnet design. “My pickups were tuned in a studio and then tested on the road and then tuned a little bit more. The end result being both musical and face melting,” reveals Thomson. 

“Extra attention was given to the low mids to keep it big but tight. Voiced to cut through a mix but never be shrill. Just could not be happier with how they turned out.”

Last year, the Slipknot guitarist officially became a Fishman Fluence endorsee alongside his new role as an ESP artist, all of which led to speculation that a signature set was on its way.

Fishman Fluence pickups were a game-changer when they first came out in 2014 due to the use of tiny, precision-made coils that can be stacked to isolate hums and frequencies. They can also be “split” to create different voicings, making the pickups particularly attractive for potential endorsees. 

In an interview with Guitar World, Fishman’s VP of Marketing and Artist Relations Chris DeMaria said, “It goes back to creating solutions for players. We’ve been able to sit in our studio with the artist and, in real time, create voicings that perfectly match the idealized sound they’re looking for.”

Priced at $289.95, the pickups are available as a 6-string set and come in a Thomson-approved matte black nickel finish. For more information about the Fluence Mick Thomson Signature Series pickup set, head to Fishman. 

Seymour Duncan has unveiled the alt.metal Blackouts – a new version of its popular Blackouts humbucker series. They are inspired by “the merciless roar of alternative metal guitar tones” and specially designed for down-tuned riffs. 

Following Corey Beaulieu's signature Blackouts, the pickup firm has now issued a tweaked EQ to better handle the cranked low-end that comes with down-tuned guitars. 

As such, these new pickups are said to “enhance the low-end tightness, along with adding top-end bite without harshness”. 

The Blackouts’ standout characteristics – high-energy, high-output, and percussive palm mute powers – remain. This, despite the fresh tone sculpting that’s gone on beneath their stealthy black covers.  

In a Seymour Duncan demo, Ryan 'Fluff' Bruce says the alt.metal Blackouts are designed for drop C# tunings and lower. He also describes the pickups as “a little different” from their predecessors, confidently saying: “If you are into anything aggressive, you owe it to yourself to check these out.”

The set pairs a ceramic humbucker in the bridge with an Alnico V in the neck, with Fluff singling out the neck pickup for its “bell-like tones” that “don't get the muddiness of a lot of other neck pickups”. 

The pickup has also been crafted with clean tones in mind, while “transforming with aggressive mids and increased sustain under higher gain settings” for a Jekyll & Hyde versatility.

The alt.metal Blackouts pickups are available in passive mounts for six-string models. Passive and active soapbar mount versions are extended to seven-string guitars, further proving that the emphasis is on low-tuned modern metal above all else.

The alt.metal Blackouts humbuckers are available from $258.

Visit the Seymour Duncan website to find out more. 

Seymour Duncan has unveiled signature Blackout electric guitar pickups for Trivium guitarist, Corey Beaulieu. 

He joins the likes of Slipknot’s Mick Thomson (who recently switched to Fishman pickups) and Jeff Loomis to have personalized production models of one of the firm’s flagship metal humbucker sets. 

As per Seymour Duncan, Beaulieu has used Blackouts for nearly a decade, finding they help deliver his “onslaught of chugging riffs and intricate leads” and break through the “monumental wall of guitars” he produces alongside Matt Heafy. 

The Corey Beaulieu Damocles set features a specific voicing that sees the active pickups’ presence, balance, and clarity cranked. The result is said to be a full-sounding high gain tailor-made for Beaulieu’s progressive and down-tuned playing style. 

Reflecting both Trivium’s gear preferences and that of the wider playing market, the Damocles humbuckers are available for six- and seven-string guitars, as sets and singles. Active and passive mounts are also available to suit each player’s preferences.  

“I got introduced to the Blackouts at NAMM 2016,” says Beaulieu. “They definitely enhanced the aggression and tone of our guitar playing and I've been playing them ever since. 

“They have a certain EQ setup and I was using a six-band EQ, pushing and pulling different frequencies. I sent a picture of my EQ settings to Seymour Duncan, and they voiced those settings into the pickups. With just the noise gate and the amp, it sounds exactly how I want it to sound. 

“The EQ had to sound aggressive but also have a mid-range cut, that snarl that really hits you when palm muting. The high-end has a really nice cut which brings the notes out in a riff and the mid-boost helps my leads cut through the band. 

“Surprisingly for active pickups, they also work with a clean tone – that boosted mid-range lets that sparkle pop out.   

“I feel the pickups are more EQ-balanced; there's not anything that's overbearing the front end of your amp. They’re the all-in-one stop for what I'm looking for in my guitar playing.” 

Single pickups start at $145, with a six-string set priced at $290. 

Head to Seymour Duncan for more information.