Robillard has made more than 40 albums fronting his own band and with Roomful of Blues.
One of today’s most notable DeArmond players is the revered blues and jazz guitar virtuoso Duke Robillard, a deep student of vintage tone who has learned how to recreate many historic guitar sounds. We asked Robillard to share his expertise and experience with DeArmond pickups, which goes back to the mid-1950s, when he and his father built his first guitar for a school science fair. They took the neck from an old, acoustic Kay Kraftsman and cut a Tele-shaped body from two pieces of 3/4" plywood, inspired by the guitar James Burton played on TV’s The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. Then, they recycled the Kay’s bridge and tailpiece, and ordered a DeArmond. “A week after that, I was in a band,” Robillard says.
DeArmond originally referred to its pickups as “guitar microphones,” as they were designed to amplify acoustic guitars without altering their organic tone. Of course, once plugged into an amp all bets on that were off, given the breakup characteristics of the small combos that were common at the time. The RH pickups, which James and Szabó, for example, used, are held in place by clamps. The FH and Rhythm Chief models are floating pickups, mounted by what’s often called the “monkey-on-a-stick” method. Essentially, the pickups are held in place by a metal bar that’s screwed to a guitar’s body, and the pickups can slide up and down the bar, like a simian might scale a tree, to find the sweet spot.
DeArmond’s Rhythm Chief 1100.
By the time Robillard founded the swing and jump blues band Roomful of Blues in 1967, he was playing a Gretsch Synchromatic archtop fitted with a DeArmond, in quest of the authentic vintage tones he heard on records from the ’30s, ’40s and early ’50s. “Then I went to a Gibson ES-125, where I ended up finding a way to make a Rhythm Chief 1100 work in the neck position,” he recounts. “Then I added a P-90 for the bridge. I didn’t want to use a guitar with a cutaway because I wanted every setback that the guitar players in 1940 had. That stopped me from going high on the neck all the time, which I think was a discipline that made me a better musician.”
“The cheapest model [the 1000] is really the best sounding one.”
Today, he uses a variety of DeArmond pickups on his guitars, but his favorite is the Rhythm Chief 1100, which has screwdriver-adjustable pole pieces. And he applies the tricks he’s learned over the years, like placing stick-on felt pads under DeArmonds positioned near the bridge, to raise the floating pickup to the correct height. He also notes there is an alternative to attaching the monkey stick behind the bridge. “A lot of jazz players would shorten the bar and have it flattened out, so you could screw it to the side of the neck. That became popular with guitarists who played Strombergs, D’Angelicos, and L-5s, for example.
“The cheapest model [the 1000] is really the best-sounding one,” he continues. “And you need to use a wound G string on an archtop, or it’s going to howl like crazy. It isless of a pickup than a microphone. You can actually talk into it, and I’ve done gigs where something went wrong with the PA and I’ve sung through the pickup.”
Robillard’s latest album, Roll With Me, includes “You Got Money,” played on his DeArmond-outfitted J.W. Murphy archtop.
These days his favorite archtop is a J.W. Murphy with an 1100 with a shortened bar attached to the side of the neck. He puts stick-on felt pads under the treble side to keep the pickup height as he likes, and to preserve the natural sound of the guitar. You can hear Robillard play his DeArmond-outfitted Murphy on “You Got Money,” a track from his new album, Roll with Me, on Bandcamp.
One more recommendation: “Use a small amp because that’s what they sound best with,” he says. “Small tube amps are what these pickups were made for, but if you’ve got a closed-back cabinet they tend to feed back on the low end. Keeping the bass side of the pickup lower helps with that. When you’re setting up the pickup, press down on the last fret and get the treble side high and the base side low, and then just balance it out till you get the right sound.”
The magic is in the interactive nature of all these factors … and then some. (This list is for passive pickups and does not include many aspects of active pickups.) Sometimes I see pickups boiled down to only a few factors, and I do not think that is a sophisticated enough view of these complicated and potentially beautiful-sounding devices.
As an example, it is thought that most players have an idea of the sound that humbucking pickups with alnico 4 magnets that are wound to 7.8k make. They’re historically associated with PAF humbuckers, but those qualities don’t fully explain what gives those pickups character. For example, if the pickup’s wire is standard-size 42 gauge, at 5,000 turns the pickup would have a resistance of about 7.5k. If you use 42-gauge wire that is undersized (which is a common inconsistency) and 4,800 turns, the pickup would still be around 7.5k. Because of the wire diameter and different number of turns, the pickups would sound different even though it’s the same magnet and same resistance. The wire matters; 7.5k is just the resistance of both coils. Just as wire diameter varies, alnico 4 purchased from four manufacturers sounds four different ways, so you have to compensate for that in other design areas as well.
If you think about the sound of a Strat, there is a “whistle note” (or you can think of it as a “ping note”) in every note you play. Think about playing on the neck pickup on a Strat; you can hear that whistle sound in every note. The pickup without a load is resonating at about 11k and at about 15 dB. Fifteen decibels is a lot. Imagine adding 15 dB of 11k (high treble) to your vocal at a gig! The potentiometers on a Strat, and those are 250k (which is a fairly low value for a volume and tone control), calm down how loud the whistle note is. When these single-coil pickups are built well, this whistle note can be very musical. Just think of Robbie Blunt playing “Big Log” on Robert Plant’s 1983 album The Principle of Moments. For us at PRS, getting the whistle note to be the right frequency and the right volume is very important. It is believed, for good reason, that an old PAF pickup can sound very much like a single-coil Strat pickup. That is because of the frequency and volume of the whistle note coming out of these vintage pickups.
“In the end, it’s really simple. Do you like the sound of the pickup? Will it do the job that you’re looking for the instrument to do?”
In the end, it’s really simple. Do you like the sound of the pickup? Will it do the job that you’re looking for the instrument to do? When David Grissom worked with us on our DGT pickups, he spent almost a year on them, and at the end of the process, he was adjusting the coil wire by 25 turns at a time until it was exactly where he wanted it. And that’s only the amount of turns. We also evaluated the magnetic type, strength, etc. I bring up all these parameters to give you an idea of how complicated it is to get all the specifications to dance well together. I like what’s going on pickup-wise at PRS and believe that our 2025 offering is gonna turn some heads. Normally, I don’t bring up what we do at PRS in these articles, but this time I think it’s worth mentioning, so stay tuned.
Consider all the types of pickups out there: humbuckers, covered humbuckers, P-90s, Strat single-coils, Tele single-coils, Gretsch Filter’Trons, Jazzmaster, P Bass, Jazz Bass, no-hum single-coils, and mini-humbuckers that make single-coil sounds. Within each one of these types, there can be scores of variations. How to choose? Simply try a pickup and see if you like it!