Put that router away and say hello to brighter, grittier tone with these drop-in, humbucker-sized single-coils.
Transforming a guitar’s sound with a new set of pickups is exciting, but it’s not always easily doable without routing. We’ve assembled 10 options designed to serve up delicious P-90 tone, but sized to slip right into your humbucker-routed guitar.
H90 Standard
These low-wind pickups offer snappy and brighter single-coil tones for those in need of more chime and less power, and can be ordered with custom wood tops.
P90 – Humbucker
Boasting clear lows, thick mids, and percussive highs, this vintage-voiced P-90 was designed for versatility, clarity, and snarly midrange, and is available in a number of finishes.
Dream 90
These P-90s are reported to provide fat, warm-yet-crunchy body, and can offer full humbucking performance when both pickups are selected, because the neck pickup is reverse wound.
Heavy House P94
Based on the company’s House Special P-90, this pickup brings all the power and tone of a true P-90 but in a humbucker package—measuring 7.4k for the neck and 7.8k for the bridge.
Humbucker Sized P-90
A faithful recreation of a vintage P-90, these pickups feature spec plain enamel wire, alnico 4 magnets for the neck for clear and fat sounds, and alnico 5s for the bridge for bite and grind.
Pro-90
For those chasing authentic tone, these pickups duplicate the construction, materials, and growl of a vintage ’50s-era P-90 by using the company’s proprietary Vintage Core specifications.
Hum-90
Housing alnico 2, 4 , or 5 magnets and 43AWG coil wound around its humbucker-sized P-90 bobbins, these pickups are said to offer single-coil tones with clarity, presence, and a defined voice.
Fat Bastard
These single-coils are designed to offer plenty of crunch by capturing the classic P-90 tone of the 1950s with “a little South Texas funk” thrown in.
V-90
Regardless of your style, these degaussed alnico 5 pickups were made to be touch sensitive, respond well to pick attack, and provide tight lows, grinding mids, and singing highs.
A gigging guitarist in Boston needed a lighter guitar with humbucking support, so he called on a local luthier to build it.
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.
On a tip from Mod Garage guru Dirk Wacker, the famed Hellecaster bags a Filtertron-fueled prize.
I always keep my eyes and ears open for new gear. A few months ago, I was conversing via email with fellow PG contributor Dirk Wacker, who writes the Mod Garage column. He was telling me about a European company called Harley Benton that makes good, inexpensive guitars. So I started searching eBay for that brand. After a while, I found this guitar, which looked interesting. It was a TE-90 FLT SB Deluxe T-Style that had Roswell Filtertron pickups, a reverse headstock, an S-style bridge, a Mary Kay-type finish, and a maple fretboard. It had a “Buy It Now” price of $195 plus $55 shipping.
I wasn’t sure I wanted it, but after several days I pulled the trigger. After taxes and shipping, the total was $268. It wasn’t a great deal, but it was okay. Then the seller informed me that he was going to remove the neck for shipping. I almost threw a fit over that, but finally reasoned that if I was meant to have the guitar, it would be fine. Bottom Feeder Tip #367: Make sure you read the fine print on an auction.
Note the additional hole our columnist drilled through the Wilkinson ashtray bridge he installed, to allow more fluid movement of the B-string without snagging or popping off the saddle.
It arrived a week later from California, and it looked stunning. I quickly assembled the neck, put on a set of strings, and, I have to confess, it really had me at hello. It felt solid in my hands, stayed in tune, and played easily. I plugged it in and it did not disappoint. The Roswell Filtertrons didn’t exactly sound like the Gretsch versions, but they sounded really good and seemed to have their own personality. After a few hours playing my new 6-string, I made a decision reserved for only a select few guitars: I was ready to slap on a Hipshot B-Bender.
Here’s a close-up of the reverse headstock, with two double-string retainers and chrome hardware.
So, I took the strings off, shimmed up the pickups with stiff foam rubber to be closer to the strings (there are no springs), then went to my bridge drawer and grabbed a Wilkinson half-size T-style ashtray bridge with 3-way compensated saddles. It’s a handy bridge to keep on hand for all kinds of projects, because it can work on top-loading as well as bottom-loading guitars.
The contoured rear body is a nice ergonomic touch. The semi-transparent, pink, Mary Kay-type finish also nicely displays the grain of the ash.
I could’ve used the existing hole for the B string, but since the angle over the B-string saddle is critical, I like to drill a second, higher hole in the back of the ashtray for tuning stability. Too steep an angle and the string tends to hang up, not going back down to pitch properly. Too little angle and the string will pop out of its slot on the saddle, especially if you use a pick and fingers like I do. Finally, installing the Hipshot was the easiest part.
Everything took about three hours from start to finish, but I wound up with a nice playing and sounding guitar with a bender. So, is it a keeper? For now I’d say it is. The guitar really feels solid, sounds great, and is fun to play. What else do you need?