Some years ago, Roger Fritz—a bassist turned builder who builds custom instruments like the Rat Bastard, Super Deluxe, and the Roy Buchanan Bluesmaster at his 2000-square-foot shop in Mendocino, CA— was at a recording session with a famous producer who piqued his interest in Kay guitars and basses. Before long, Fritz found himself becoming a key player in bringing the funky-chic brand back from the dead.
If Kay is a new name to you, one thing you should know is that, at one point in the 1950s, it was among the biggest manufacturers of guitars in the world, building instruments under a variety of names and at a wide range of price points. In fact, Kay was actually the first to mass produce an electric guitar—a flattop acoustic instrument with a transducer—long before Fender and Gibson became household names. Over the years, discerning players and collectors have discovered some of the company’s more upscale models. For example, the original Kay Thin Twin was a favorite of blues great Jimmy Reed, and it might just be the coolest-looking guitar ever made, with its flamed-maple top, checkerboard binding, and tiger-striped pickguard. (It sounds pretty darn good too—just ask T-Bone Burnett.) Further, the original Jazz II model was favored by a very young Eric Clapton, and it can still be seen strutting its Deco stuff on stage with Sarah McLachlan.
It’s a well-known fact that vintage Gibsons and Fenders are priced well into the stratosphere these days, and the aforementioned original Kay models, as well as the company’s Barney Kessel series, are likewise becoming increasingly valuable. That’s why it’s so cool that Kay is back in business and ready to put some of that mojo in your hands for more down-to-earth prices. Let’s let Fritz tell us how it all came about.
What attracted you to Kay guitars?
I was working with singer Shelby Lynn, who was being produced by Bill Bottrell at the time. Bottrell had an affinity for the Kay 162 hollowbody electric bass—he said it was his secret weapon. When he was working with Sheryl Crow, they would try other basses on a track but would always end up using that one. I had built Bill a couple of guitars, so one day he said, “If you did a replica of this Kay bass, I know it would be a hit.” I said, “You’re probably right,” and I built one. People started wanting them, so I built a couple of dozen, and then a few Thin Twin guitars.
How did you become involved with the reissues?
My friend Dan Erlewine forwarded me a message from Tony Blair, who had bought the Kay trade name in the ‘70s. For 30 years, Tony ran it as an importer of low-end musical merchandise, then he decided that he wanted the company to get back into making guitars—for that to be his legacy. His email said he was looking for someone to help him recreate some of the popular Kay models from Kay’s heyday in the late ’50s. I figured that if he got someone else, my making Kay knockoffs might become a problem, so I responded to him. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, right?
I ended up doing all the designs for this new line. We are having them made in China, but I suggested that the people who were real collectors should be offered a USA-made version. He agreed, so I formed the Kay Custom Shop. I make the American handmade stuff in my Mendocino shop.
 Fritz with a Kay K162 Pro Bass |
What would you say are some of the most unique features of these guitars and basses?
The Kay bass was the very first hollowbody production bass, and it has a certain sonic capability that, to this day, no other bass can really get. The 162 has a subsonic sound that worked really well at the low volumes of the blues bands back then. The body has two fairly large braces running down the middle, from the neck block to the tail block. They keep the body from caving in and add sustain. It has a curly maple plywood top and back, and on the originals the arched back was pressed into the body. This method of construction is what kept it from feeding back. The new Thin Twin guitar is basically the same instrument—same body, same pickups—just made into a guitar.
What else can you tell us about the pickups?
The pickups Kay manufactured were fairly microphonic, so they would pick up sound through the entire body. Later on, Kay developed a copy of a P-90 pickup with Barney Kessel. It was a bit hotter than the P-90 that Gibson was making, and people called it the “Kleenex box” because the covering resembled the Kleenex tissue box of that era. The Thin Twin pickup morphed into a pickup called the “speed bump,” which had a big rectangular cover so the coil and the magnet could get closer to the string than with the Thin Twin. These pickups were pretty unique.
Which models do you plan to reissue?
The Thin Twin and K162 Pro Bass are currently in production, and after that will be the Jazz II electric guitar—a kind of ES-335-shaped body with a Bigsby—and the Jazz Special Bass. The Jazz Special is sometimes called the Paul McCartney model because he was pictured playing one. It’s basically the 162 morphed into a double-cutaway with an abstractshaped pickguard. It has the same Thin Twin pickup. Following those, we’re scheduled to reissue the Upbeat guitar, which was kind of a poor man’s jazz guitar: It’s an archtop with a big, 17"-wide body, maple-plywood back and sides, a laminated spruce top, and two Kleenex box pickups. They came in one-, two and three-pickup versions, and I think we’re going to do the same. We’re also going to come out with a scaled-down version of the Upbeat called the Pro. At one point it was called the Kay Pro, but when Barney Kessel came onboard in the late ’50s, they started calling it the Barney Kessel Pro. It’s the size of a Les Paul but with a rounded cutaway, and it’s totally hollow. It’s about 2.75" thick and about 12.5" wide, with an arched top and back. You see the originals in stores for around $2,500. We are also planning to bring out three or four Barney Kessel models. I am not sure if we’re going to call them that, though, because we haven’t worked out a deal with his estate yet. After the Pro, we hope to bring out the Barney Kessel Artist, which is one step bigger. It has a 15" body and two Kleenex box pickups. We also want to do the biggest one, the Barney Kessel Jazz Special. It had split parallelogram inlays, a 17" body, and solid woods. It was the top of the line when it was introduced, but it didn’t sell that well because people hesitated to buy a Kay for $400 when they could get a Gibson Super 400 for the same price.
What changes have you made from the original designs?
The originals were made for a variety of house brands. You will see the same guitars under the names Old Kraftsman, Silvertone, and Galliano, with different versions of the headstock. The basic Kay headstock was just the name Kay, sometimes with the metal logo and sometimes with the mother-of-pearl inlay logo. Tony Blair thought he would offer them all with the “Kelvinator” headstock [Editor’s note: The headstock’s nickname comes from the refrigerator-brand logo it resembled.] to tie the whole line together—and to distinguish it from the originals. In the custom shop version, I offer original headstocks as an option. Another change is that we put a one-degree pitch on the necks. Many of the original instruments were unplayable because the necks were pitched flat and tended to rise over the years. Also, from 1953 to 1958 they had no truss rods, but I decided to go modern and put in a two-way truss rod. Also, the necks used to be really big. Though some think the big necks were great, there are only a few people out there that want gigantic necks. We made them smaller, sort of like a 1958 Les Paul. Also, we use a Tune-o-maticstyle bridge instead of the original wooden bridge—which was in the wrong place and made intonation impossible.
With the Thin Twin, we kept the best features of the 1958 version—like the checkerboard binding. Up until that year, they had flat backs, but we went with the arched back that started in ’58, and instead of using a one-piece top, we bookmatched the maple top. The original Jazz II had a bolt-on neck, a floating bridge, and no bracing in the body, so you rarely find one that is completely functional. We ran parallel braces down the middle of the body, set the neck, and put on a fixed bridge. It is now a really great guitar.
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Submarine Pickups boss Pete Roe at his workstation.
Still, we think we know what pickups should sound and look like. Lucky for us, there have always been plenty of pickup builders who aren’t so convinced. These are the makers who devised the ceramic-magnet pickup, gold-foils, and active, high-gain pickups. In 2025, nearly 100 years after the first pickup bestowed upon a humble lap-steel guitar the power to blast our ears with soundwaves, there’s no shortage of free-thinking, independent wire-winders coming up with new ways to translate vibrating steel strings into thrilling music.
Joe Naylor, Chris Mills, and Pete Roe are three of them. As the creative mind behind Reverend Guitars, Naylor developed the Railhammer pickup, which combines both rail and pole-piece design. Mills, in Pennsylvania, builds his own ZUZU guitars with wildly shaped, custom-designed pickups. And in the U.K., Roe developed his own line of hexaphonic pickups to achieve the ultimate in string separation and note definition. All three of them told us how they created their novel noisemakers.
Joe Naylor - Railhammer Pickups
Joe Naylor, pictured here, started designing Railhammers out of personal necessity: He needed a pickup that could handle both pristine cleans and crushing distortion back to back.
Like virtually all guitar players, Joe Naylor was on a personal tone quest. Based in Troy, Michigan, Naylor helped launch Reverend Guitars in 1996, and in the late ’90s, he was writing and playing music that involved both clean and distorted movements in one song. He liked his neck pickup for the clean parts, but it was too muddy for high-gain playing. He didn’t want to switch pickups, which would change the sound altogether.
He set out to design a neck pickup that could represent both ends of the spectrum with even fidelity. That led him to a unique design concept: a thin, steel rail under the three thicker, low-end strings, and three traditional pole pieces for the higher strings, both working with a bar magnet underneath. At just about a millimeter thick, rails, Naylor explains, only interact with a narrow section of the thicker strings, eliminating excess low-end information. Pole pieces, at about six millimeters in diameter, pick up a much wider and less focused window of the higher strings, which works to keep them fat and full. “If you go back and look at some of the early rail pickups—Bill Lawrence’s and things like that—the low end is very tight,” says Naylor. “It’s almost like your tone is being EQ’d perfectly, but it’s being done by the pickup itself.”
That idea formed the basis for Railhammer Pickups, which began official operations in 2012. Naylor built the first prototype in his basement, and it sounded great from the start, so he expanded the format to a bridge pickup. That worked out, too. “I decided, ‘Maybe I’m onto something here,’” says Naylor. Despite the additional engineering, Railhammers have remained passive pickups, with fairly conventional magnets—including alnico 5s and ceramics—wires, and structures. Naylor says this combines the clarity of active pickups with the “thick, organic tone” of passive pickups.
“It’s almost like your tone is being EQ’d perfectly, but it’s being done by the pickup itself.” —Joe Naylor
The biggest difficulty Naylor faced was in the physical construction of the pickups. He designed and ordered custom molds for the pickup’s bobbins, which cost a good chunk of money. But once those were in hand, the Railhammers didn’t need much fiddling. Despite their size differences, the rail and pole pieces produce level volume outputs for balanced response across all six strings.
Naylor’s formula has built a significant following among heavy-music players. Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan is a Railhammer player with several signature models; ditto Reeves Gabrels, the Cure guitarist and David Bowie collaborator. Bob Balch from Fu Manchu and Kyle Shutt from the Sword have signatures, too, and other players include Code Orange’s Reba Meyers, Gogol Bordello’s Boris Pelekh, and Voivod’s Dan “Chewy” Mongrain.
Chris Mills - ZUZU Pickups
When Chris Mills started building his own electric guitars, he decided to build his own components for them, too. He suspected that in the course of the market’s natural thinning of the product herd, plenty of exciting options had been left unrealized. He started working with non-traditional components and winding in non-traditional ways, which turned him on to the idea that things could be done differently. “I learned early on that there are all kinds of sonic worlds out there to be discovered,” says Mills.
Eventually, he zeroed in on the particular sound of a 5-way-switch Stratocaster in positions two and four: Something glassy and clear, but fatter and more dimensional. In Mills’ practice, “dimensional” refers to the varying and sometimes simultaneous sound qualities attained from, say, a finger pad versus a fingernail. “I didn’t want just one thing,” says Mills. “I wanted multiple things happening at once.”
Mills wanted something that split the difference between a humbucker’s fullness and the Strat’s plucky verve, all in clean contexts. But he didn’t want an active pickup; he wanted a passive, drop-in solution to maximize appeal. To achieve the end tone, Mills wired his bobbins in parallel to create “interposed signal processing,” a key piece of his patented design. “I found that when I [signal processed] both of them, I got too much of one particular quality, and I wanted that dimensionality that comes with two qualities simultaneously, so that was essential,” explains Mills.
Mills loved the sound of alnico 5 blade magnets, so he worked with a 3D modeling engineer to design plastic bobbins that could accommodate both the blades and the number of turns of wire he desired. This got granular—a millimeter taller, a millimeter wider—until they came out exactly right. Then came the struggle of fitting them into a humbucker cover. Some key advice from experts helped Mills save on space to make the squeeze happen.
Mills’ ZUZUbuckers don’t have the traditional pole pieces and screws of most humbuckers, so he uses the screw holes on the cover as “portholes” looking in on a luxe abalone design. And his patented “curved-coil” pickups feature a unique winding method to mix up the tonal profile while maintaining presence across all frequencies.
“I learned early on that there are all kinds of sonic worlds out there to be discovered.” —Chris Mills
Mills has also patented a single-coil pickup with a curved coil, which he developed to get a different tonal quality by changing the relative location of the poles to one another and to the bridge. Within that design is another patented design feature: reducing the number of turns at the bass end of the coil. “Pretty much every pickup maker suggests that you lower the bass end [of the pickup] to compensate for the fact that it's louder than the treble end,” says Mills. “That'll work, but doing so alters the quality and clarity of the bass end. My innovation enables you to keep the bass end up high toward the strings.”
Even Mills’ drop-in pickups tend to look fairly distinct, but his more custom designs, like his curved-coil pickup, are downright baroque. Because his designs don’t rely on typical pickup construction, there aren’t the usual visual cues, like screws popping out of a humbucker cover, or pole pieces on a single-coil pickup. (Mills does preserve a whiff of these ideals with “portholes” on his pickup covers that reveal that pickup below.) Currently, he’s excited by the abalone-shell finish inserts he’s loading on top of his ZUZUbuckers, which peek through the aforementioned portholes.
“It all comes down to the challenge that we face in this industry of having something that’s original and distinctive, and also knowing that with every choice you make, you risk alienating those who prefer a more traditional and familiar look,” says Mills.
Pete Roe - Submarine Pickups
Roe’s stick-on Submarine pickups give individual strings their own miniature pickup, each with discrete, siloed signals that can be manipulated on their own. Ever wanted to have a fuzz only on the treble strings, or an echo applied just to the low-register strings? Submarine can achieve that.
Pete Roe says that at the start, his limited amount of knowledge about guitar pickups was a kind of superpower. If he had known how hard it would be to get to where he is now, he likely wouldn’t have started. He also would’ve worked in a totally different way. But hindsight is 20/20.
Roe was working in singer-songwriter territory and looking to add some bass to his sound. He didn’t want to go down the looping path, so he stuck with octave pedals, but even these weren’t satisfactory for him. He started winding his own basic pickups, using drills, spools of wire, and magnets he’d bought off the internet. Like most other builders, he wanted to make passive pickups—he played lots of acoustic guitar, and his experiences trying to find last-minute replacement batteries for most acoustic pickups left him scarred.
Roe started building a multiphonic pickup: a unit with multiple discrete “pickups” within one housing. In traditional pickups, the vibration from the strings is converted into a voltage in the 6-string-wide coils of wire within the pickup. In multiphonic pickups, there are individual coils beneath each string. That means they’re quite tiny—Roe likens each coil to the size of a Tylenol pill. “Because you’re making stuff small, it actually works better because it’s not picking up signals from adjacent strings,” says Roe. “If you’ve got it set up correctly, there’s very, very little crosstalk.”
With his Submarine Pickups, Roe began by creating the flagship Submarine: a quick-stick pickup designed to isolate and enhance the signals of two strings. The SubPro and SubSix expanded the concept to true hexaphonic capability. Each string has a designated coil, which on the SubPro combine into four separate switchable outputs; the SubSix counts six outputs. The pickups use two mini output jacks, with triple-band male connectors to carry three signals each. Explains Roe: “If you had a two-channel output setup, you could have E, A, and D strings going to one side, and G, B, and E to the other. Or you could have E and A going to one, the middle two strings muted, and the B and E going to a different channel.” Each output has a 3-position switch, which toggles between one of two channels, or mute.
“I’m just saying there’s some unexplored territory at the beginning of the signal chain. If you start looking inside your guitar, then it opens up a world of opportunities.” —Pete Roe
This all might seem a little overly complicated, but Roe sees it as a simplification. He says when most people think about their sound, they see its origin in the guitar as fixed, only manipulatable later in the chain via pedals, amp settings, or speaker decisions. “I’m not saying that’s wrong,” says Roe. “I’m just saying there’s some unexplored territory at the beginning of the signal chain. If you start looking inside your guitar, then it opens up a world of opportunities which may or may not be useful to you. Our customers tend to be the ones who are curious and looking for something new that they can’t achieve in a different way.
“If each string has its own channel, you can start to get some really surprising effects by using those six channels as a group,” continues Roe. “You could pan the strings across the stereo field, which as an effect is really powerful. You suddenly have this really wide, panoramic guitar sound. But then when you start applying familiar effects to the strings in isolation, you can end up with some really surprising textural sounds that you just can’t achieve in any other way. You can get some very different sounds if you’re applying these distortions to strings in isolation. You can get that kind of lead guitar sound that sort of cuts through everything, this really pure, monophonic sound. That sounds very different because what you don’t get is this thing called intermodulation distortion, which is the muddiness, essentially, that you get from playing chords that are more complex than roots and fifths with a load of distortion.” And despite the powerful hardware, the pickups don’t require any soldering or labor. Using a “nanosuction” technology similar to what geckos possess, the pickups simply adhere to the guitar’s body. Submarine’s manuals provide clear instruction on how to rig up the pickups.
“An analogy I like to use is: Say you’re remixing a track,” explains Roe. “If you get the stems, you can actually do a much better job, because you can dig inside and see how the thing is put together. Essentially, Submarine is doing that to guitars. It’s allowing guitarists and producers to look inside the instrument and rebuild it from its constituent parts in new and exciting ways.”
Offering precise tuning accuracy and a super bright display screen, the Crazy Little Thing is approximately the size of your guitar pick – easy to use, unobtrusive and utterly dependable.
Housed in a sturdy shell, the Crazy Little Thing can be rotated for easy viewing from any angle, and its amazingly bright display makes it perfect for the sunniest outdoor stages or the darkest indoor studios. You can clip it to the front of your headstock or on the back of your headstock for extra-discreet usage – and you can easily adjust the display to accommodate your preference.
As the newest addition to Snark’s innovative line of headstock tuners, the Crazy Little Thing is rechargeable (no batteries!) and comes with a USB-C cable/adapter for easy charging. Its display screen includes a battery gauge, so you can easily tell when it’s time to recharge.
The Crazy Little Thing’s highly responsive tuning sensor works great with a broad range of instruments, including electric and acoustic guitar, bass, ukulele, mandolin and more. It also offers adjustable pitch calibration: its default reference pitch is A440, but also offers pitch calibration at 432Hz and 442 Hz.
Snark’s Crazy Little Thing rechargeable headstock tuner carries a street price of $21.99. For more information visit snarktuners.com.
At 26, Blu DeTiger is the youngest musician ever to have a signature Fender bass guitar. The Fender Limited Player Plus x Blu DeTiger Jazz Bass, announced in September, pays tribute to the bassist and singer’s far-reaching impact and cultural sway. She’s played with Caroline Polachek, Bleachers, FLETCHER, Olivia Rodrigo, and more, and released her own LP in March 2024. In 2023, Forbes feature her on their top 30 Under 30 list of musicians. So how did DeTiger work her way to the top?
DeTiger opens up on this episode of Wong Notes about her career so far, which started at a School of Rock camp at age seven. That’s where she started performing and learning to gig with others—she played at CBGB’s before she turned 10. DeTiger took workshops with Victor Wooten at Berklee followed and studied under Steven Wolf, but years of DJing around New York City, which hammered in the hottest basslines in funk and disco, also imprinted on her style. (Larry Graham is DeTiger’s slap-bass hero.)
DeTiger and Wong dish on the ups and downs of touring and session life, collaborating with pop artists to make “timeless” pop songs, and how to get gigs. DeTiger’s advice? “You gotta be a good hang.”
