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| Ever since the invention of the pickup, players have been trying to get more out of them. If you’ve been looking for a hotter signal, but aren’t sure where to go next, we take a look at the evolution of the pickup for clues. |
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One of the most important choices in the never ending quest for great guitar tone lies in the pickups. But how does one decide which kind of pickups to use? For many guitarists, the answer lies in a pickup’s output – in other words, how well can it drive your amp? While early pickup designs were notoriously wimpy, today active pickups and high-powered magnets have given guitarists the ability to induce mind-boggling amounts of overdrive in their amp’s front-end. This month, we’ll take a short stroll down memory lane and see how this pickup arms race developed, and what it means for your tone.
A Short History
Long before there were amps and pickups, guitar makers experimented with various methods of amplification. During the big band era the guitar was primarily a rhythm instrument, with accompaniment its primary task. As musical styles evolved, guitarists were increasingly influenced by other musical genres, such as Spanish guitar and Gypsy jazz. While the old six-string was increasingly used to produce some very cool solos and chordal melodies, the problem of projection remained.
One solution was developed by the National Company and the Dopera Brothers, creators of the Dobro resonator guitar. They decided to put the speaker into the guitar itself, an aluminum cone under the hot-rod looking grille, attached directly to the bridge of the guitar. This unique move was intended to increase the volume of the instrument.
This solution wasn’t universal, however. As Les Paul’s popularity increased, he decided that he needed to be louder than current technology allowed. Allegedly, Les Paul even stuck the steel needle of his phonograph into his guitar to try to amplify the sound. As most players now know, his affiliation with Epiphone, and then the Gibson Guitar Company, provided him with the solution. Gibson had been producing single-coil P-90-type pickups since the early 1940s, and guitars fitted with these early pickups fit his needs.
"Around 1955, Seth Lover, and engineer for Gibson, design and patented a new type of guitar pickup featuring two coils of wire sitting atop a magnetically conductive structure with screws on one coil and steel slugs on the other coil."
George Beauchamp of Rickenbacker had patented a pickup as early as the 1930s for use in lap steel guitars. His unusual design featured a single-coil of wire surrounded by horseshoe-type magnets; the surrounding magnetic field cut down on interference from external sources.
Strangely enough, these “Magnet Driven” pickups did not have a high impedance rating on the coil but were incredibly powerful and loud.
By the 1940s, Leo Fender had been taking advantage of the single-coil pickup, a coil of wire with six actual magnets sticking through the bobbin. All of Fender’s early instruments, including lap steels and the new Broadcaster Spanish guitar used these pickups. They were not a high-output design and the impedance of the coils varied from the future humbucking types. These pickups had a distinct, bright sound that players were and still are very attracted to, but they didn’t reduce hum as effectively as the coming technology would.
Around 1955, Seth Lover, an engineer for Gibson, designed and patented a new type of guitar pickup featuring two coils of wire sitting atop a magnetically conductive structure with screws on one coil and steel slugs on the other coil. The actual magnet was positioned beneath this structure to distribute the magnetism to each coil. The opposing polarity of the coils produced a canceling out of external noise and hum. This was the first doublecoil, or humbucking pickup. In 1957 the humbucker was added to the Les Paul Standard and Custom models. The first batch of these units bore no markings, but by later that year, a “Patent Applied For” sticker was affixed to the bottom of the base plate.
Humbucking or double-coil pickups exhibit some very important identifying characteristics. First, they are generally louder and not as bright as single-coils. The dual coils produce more voltage from the guitar’s output jack into the front-end of the amp. Early on, this gave the instrument higher fidelity, as well as introduced the possibility of overdriving the amp’s input stage to produce distortion. The pickup itself does not actually create distortion – plugging even the highest output pickup into the crystal clean input of an old Fender Showman on two will prove this. The pickup drives the amp to make the distortion or overdrive.
The wire gauge and the number of turns of wire used in the construction of a pickup radically affects its sound. People believe that the higher the impedance of the pickup coils or the more wire wraps there are, the hotter the pickup will be. Unfortunately, this is not necessarily true – it is the combination of wire-to-magnet strength and the magnet material that determines a pickup’s output. The various types of Alnico magnets each have different tonal characteristics. Some types, such as Alnico 2, have less magnetic pull on the strings, which can be of great benefit in increasing sustain and achieving a smoother top-end. Ceramic magnets have a stronger magnetic field and are generally louder and brighter than metal magnets. In the late sixties, I bought my first Alembic Hot Rod Kit, which consisted of some copper foil for shielding, wood spacers and a large ceramic magnet. When installed with Gibson or Guild humbuckers, you were treated to a huge volume boost and increased overdrive from your amp.
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By the early 1970s, I noticed that certain guitarists like Paul Stanley, Ace Frehley and Rick Derringer had these odd-looking pickups with Allen screws replacing the Gibson studs and screws, and black electrical tape around the outside of the coils. They sounded amazing and I soon discovered that a man named Larry DiMarzio at the Guitar Lab was making these pickups. I recall paying about $35 plus furnishing the old Gibson pickup core for my first one. He actually rewound the coils with more wire and used a large ceramic magnet, probably the same type as the Alembic kit. The Allen screws conducted the magnetic field differently; the black cloth electrical tape covered some of the foil shielding as well. Thus began the custom pickup industry. Some of the earliest B.C. Rich guitars had these DiMarzios in them, while soon after Seymour Duncan would enter the industry with a wide range of models.