StewMac Parsons Street Humbucker Pickups
Straight-up raw vintage tone! Closely modeled after outstanding original P.A.F.s, these humbuckers capture the tone that changed music forever.
Crafted by tone experts
Our own Erick Coleman tracked down priceless original P.A.F. humbucker sets and meticulously studied the materials and construction that gives these pickups their truly timeless tone. Once he cracked the code, that tone was undeniable!
We christened these exceptional humbuckers in tribute to the famous Kalamazoo address where the holy grail of pickups, the legendary P.A.F. (Patent Applied For), was born.
We build them like they used to!
Just like the originals, the slug coil has more windings than the polepiece coil, and both coils are unpotted. Old P.A.F.s weren't made in separate neck and bridge-position models, and their DC resistance varied from 7-9K ohms. We give you a choice: Parsons Street neck position pickups are wound to mid 7K range, and bridge position models to low 8K range.
Name: Conrad Warre
Location: Boston, MassachusettsGuitar: The Beecaster
As the guitarist for the Boston-based, acid-blues band Bees Deluxe,there were two different guitar problems I needed to address. We sometimes play shows that can last more than three hours, and we occasionally play venues that have prehistoric electric wiring in the building, especially if they’re running older kitchens for their dinner crowds. The extremely long shows could be helped by my playing a much lighter-weight guitar than I typically play.
The older (more venerable) venues who haven’t shielded or upgraded their electrical wiring properly result in my single-coil guitars picking up local television news stations and re-transmitting their signals or merely humming along with them tunelessly, and require some level of humbucking support. So I commissioned a local expert luthier, Michael McCarten of Athol, Massachusetts, to build me a single, noiseless-pickup guitar made of the lightest appropriate wood.
McCarten specializes in building archtop guitars, mandolins, resonator guitars, ukuleles, and pocket violins, and proved very amenable to collaborating with me on the design. We chose basswood for the single-cut body, a maple set neck with ebony fretboard, and a Seymour Duncan Noiseless Stack Neck P-90. I wanted him to install a P-90 because they aren’t as far removed from single-coil pickups in timbre as full-blown humbucking pickups. I need a certain amount of bite in the guitar sound to cut through the similar keyboard frequencies in the band.
In order to enable the guitar to have as wide a range of “voice” as possible, we threw in two push/pull pots. The single volume and single tone pots each push-pull. The volume is positioned as close to my right hand as possible to enable “violining” and switches the pickup output from series to parallel, and, at McCarten’s suggestion, the single tone pot changes the capacitor in use, bringing a sharper, spankier, brighter, more Telecaster flavor to the P-90 when needed. The Beecaster weighs less than 6 pounds, so now as soon as the venues in the Northeast reopen, and we get back on the road headed north and south, I’ll be ready to play the guitar tirelessly from dusk to dawn, like a musical vampire.
Send your guitar story to submissions@premierguitar.com.
Clip 1: Eastwood Sidejack Baritone DLX with Curtis Novak Widerange Jazzmaster pickups into a Goodsell Valpreaux 21. Neck pickup, first with pedal bypassed, then engaged with Lucky 13 level at max and neck pickup selected, then middle position, then bridge, then back and forth between positions, adjusting guitar volume to various levels throughout.
Clip 2: Curtis Novak Tele-V Telecaster bridge pickup into the Lucky 13 (bypassed first, then engaged with level at 3 o’clock and guitar volume at max) then into the boost side of a SoundBrut DrVa MkII and a Ground Control Tsukuyomi mid boost, then into a 1976 Vibrolux Reverb with a Celestion G10 and a WGS G10C/S.
RatingsPros:Myriad fuzz tones—from thick and gnarly to reedy and sqwonky—via guitar-volume tweaks. Cleans up really well with humbuckers. Pretty decent price. Cons: Somewhat unpredictable sounds, guitar to guitar/rig to rig. Can be quite noisy with single-coils. Street: $119 Vick Audio Lucky 13 vickaudio.com | Tones:  Ease of Use: Build/Design: Value:  |