Pickin' up what you're puttin' down - Guitar Pickups Vol. 1: Wide Range Humbuckers [012]
Stuck in my head: "Lucky"
Radiohead
OK Computer
The following entry was originally composed on October 9, 2017, on an older blog. I have copied / pasted the information here for the sake of preserving the entry, and will be doing so for the small number of entries on that gear-related effort. I have made small edits to the original post (dead links, better html, and reorganized where necessary), provided a "Stuck in my head" song for your listening pleasure, and a composed an epilogue that updates the narrative.
Thank you.
I think I first saw a Telecaster Deluxe being used by Radiohead's Thom Yorke. I've been a huge fan of theirs for a long time, and the instrument looked really cool, so I knew I had to have one. I didn't know all that much about the Deluxe at that point, but we often buy instruments that satisfy two essential points:
1.) It looks cool, and I look cool with it.
2.) It feels good, which makes me want to play it.
I'm not sure when I fell upon the matter, but I'm pretty sure I was unemployed and bored, so I was reading a lot of web forums at the time.
Enter the Wide Range humbucker.
So much has been written about the "wide range humbuckers", and we should all know the story. There will always be a lot of folks out there who will accept what guitar manufacturers do, but this issue was too much for me to swallow... and, look, I love Fender! I wouldn't call myself a toxic fangirl or anything, but I own several of the damn things and, yeah, I want more. I'm building some! I even chase down weirdo pickups because like the title of [the previous] blog says, I'm "the nerd who loves it" (don't get me started on the search and eventual location of the “Custom Vintage Style Single-Coil Tele Bridge Pickup” as featured on the ‘52 Hot Rod Telecaster). However, Fender is not infallible, and like all manufacturers, they continue to perpetuate the legend rather than the truth on this topic.
Legends sell; the truth... not so much.
If you haven't managed to read about this from various sources over the years,
Here's a little history...
Seth Lover lived and worked in Kalamazoo, Michigan. During the 1940s, he began his term with a little guitar company called Gibson (suck company though - #PlayAuthentic), and Mr. Lover is credited with having invented the humbucking pickup in 1955. In 1967, Mr. Lover began working for Fender Musical Instruments, as Fender wanted to create a guitar and pickup combination that could rival Gibson. At the time, if you wanted a single coil sound, you went with Fender; if you wanted a humbucker sound, Gibson was the way to go. In the early 1970s, Seth Lover invented the "Wide Range" humbucker, Fender's attempt to break into the humbucker market at which Gibson was king of the hill.
("Dammit, Bobby...")
"Okay, thanks for the history lesson, professor, but what's this got to do with me?"
See, unlike the AlNiCo humbuckers that were being made by Gibson (who was on the precipice of their move from Michigan to Tennessee), the wide range humbuckers were made from CuNiFe (Copper, Nickel, and Iron), and were designed to have properties - both in sound and construction - to Fender's famous single coil pickups [2022 EDIT: The name "Wide Range Humbucker" is both accurate and a misnomer - while the pickup does indeed "buck the hum", it's basically a noise-cancelling single coil! It took me a lot longer to realize that than I care to admit §]. The wide range pups were available on some of Fender's Telecaster models, as well as the initial-flop-but-now-highly-sought-after Starcaster.
(Image from the blog of Lawing Musical Products)[Oh, the Starcaster... my friends, your humble narrator has never played a real 1970s Fender Starcaster. I've heard many different opinions on them, but, that's a topic for a later entry. 2022 EDIT: See epilogue for more information on the Starcaster.]
By the end of the decade, the Wide Range pickup was no more; by the mid-eighties, CBS had sold Fender to a group of employees, and the company's Great ReOrg into Fender Musical Instruments Corporation ("FMIC") had begun. Production was moved to Japan - my favorite era of Fender guitars thanks to FujiGen Gakki; the factory in Enseñada, Baja California, was just getting established; Don Lace was building the pickups of the future; FMIC had to build a American factory in Corona, California, because Fullerton belonged to someone else. With all of these goings-on, Fender fans started getting touchy-feely about the past and started buying into the idea of the burgeoning “vintage” market.
As part of their dealer training, Fender sales reps are always very clear: "Fender's real competition isn't Gibson or Paul Reed Smith - it's the used market".
"There's a sucker born every minute."
-- P. T. Barnum
"Fuck what they want!"
-- Vince McMahon
"I guess it looks as if you're reorganizing your records. What is this though? Chronological?"
"No..."
"Not alphabetical..."
"Nope..."
"What?"
"Autobiographical."
"No fucking way."
After getting laid off from "my old job" (hello, recession!) I spent a few severance bucks on a 2006 '72 Tele Deluxe which I nicknamed, "Lucky". I figured that if I were gonna be out of work for a while, I might as well have a new toy to enjoy, something to keep me busy while I sought new employment.
I was not prepared for the obsession it would unleash.
Now, after all of that, here are the meat and potatoes of the issue:
I don’t recall where I read it, but I think I was seeking to replace the pickups because I used to strip pickups out of pretty much everything. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that wasn’t going to be so easy - the wide ranges were larger than standard "PAF" humbuckers, and I hadn't bothered to think about it before I purchased the guitar. It led to a lot of late-night reading and researching and a lot of "oh shit" moments. There really wasn't a good solution at that point, and players had conjured up several fixes to the matter:
FIX #1: Use normal humbuckers and have a new pickguard made to hold them.
PROBLEM: Having a new pickguard made to accommodate standard-sized humbuckers defeats the purpose of having a ’72 Tele Deluxe. At that point, it's basically any two-humbucker guitar.
FIX #2: Change the pots from the pre-installed 250kΩ to 1 megΩ pots that were installed on the original Deluxes.
PROBLEM: Yes, the originals had 1 megΩ potentiometers, but the originals also used CuNiFe wide range humbuckers, not the AlNiCo reissues, and one cannot expect one to respond the same way as another, or:
About the pot change -- no pot change is going to make the Fender reissue pickups sound like the originals. They're totally different pickups. Slight changes in loading are not going to change the pickup's sound.
(an email response from the author of Anchor States.)
FIX #3: Install Rio Grandes!
PROBLEM: Okay, so I did end up doing this, but it was expensive, and it took some time (more on that, later). At the time, everyone had “heard” about them, but nobody seemed to know anything about actually using the true-to-size drop-in Rio Grande replacements.
FIX #4: Telenator!
PROBLEM: Telenator does use CuNiFe to get super close to the way the originals sound, but at the time, the expense was not option [2022 EDIT: I seem to recall that his true CuNiFe options were $400 each]. Beyond that, I don’t think I was really into the idea of recapturing “vintage tone”... and I’m still not.
FIX #5: Curtis Novak!
PROBLEM: A great solution, and by all reports, Curtis is quite meticulous with his rebuilding work, but it just wasn’t what I wanted at the time.
Since I discovered all of this during the winter of 2010, I’ve learned so much more, and so many more options have become available: The Creamery out of the UK has stepped up their custom production, Lindy Fralin and Lollar now make their own AlNiCo drop-in replacements, Seymour Duncan is more open to custom orders... the options really are becoming rather solid, and tailored to whatever it is you’re seeking.
The problem still persists at Fender, though, and it’s great to see that they can have Tim Shaw update their flagship Made-in-America whatever-caster lines, but their models with Wide Range reissues are still carrying a half-hearted (cost effective?) replica of something that initially was pretty amazing.
As noted in the Seymour Duncan forums, and per Dave Hunter’s The Guitar Pickup Handbook (source):
●CuNiFe is expensive and hard to source.
●Fender still can’t make humbuckers (and lately, one could argue that they can barely make single coils).
●Fender inserted poorly-voiced standard AlNiCo humbuckers into the casings for the larger Wide Range humbuckers and just called them… Wide Range humbuckers.
●5,000 turns of polysol-coated 42-ga. wire
●10-10.5k ohms
●Six individually threaded Cunife magnets per coil, with 3 adjustable, and 3 slot-down
I’ve only ever managed to play through an original ‘70s neck wide range that was installed on a '70s original Thinline Tele; the bridge was removed and a Lollar was inserted, but that neck pickup... I’m not sure I’d ever heard something sound so clear and crystalline bright without sounding ice pick-y, with a crisp bass response, and worthy of all the legends written around it.
“Ironically, Fender really just wanted him to make a PAF-styled pickup to compete in the 70's rock era. But I think Seth showed his brilliance yet again with this design.” (source)
As always, dear reader, make the decision that sounds best to you.
UPDATE: February 21, 2022.
What I thought would be a quick copy/paste job turned into a half-day's worth of editing work. So much for considering myself a good writer...
Several things changed between the writing of the original piece and now, with the fun yet equally frustrating news that Fender "magically" secured a source of CuNiFe and has been selling true replacements of the Wide Range humbucker since 2020. I was honestly pretty pissed that I'd devoted so much time and energy and interest into this subject only for Fender to come in and say, "Just kidding, here are the real things and they will only ever sound like the real thing and you need these otherwise it's not right because tone magnets lulz."
Fuckers.
I'd learned a lot from Jesse at Revel Custom Pickups (§), specifically that it was the build design that created the magical tone, and not the composition of the magnet. Along with his contemporaries, Jesse had been using a blend of AlNiCo and FeCrCo (Iron, Chromium, Cobalt) alloys for the magentic slugs, but nostalgia is a motherfucker...
I'd love to get a set of Revels - and I do have a set of his standard humbucker-sized wide range pups in a Squier Telecaster - but the pull for the CuNiFe pups is rather strong.
Of course, Fender's has theirs priced at $200 per pickup - not per set, per individual pickup. I'm not even sure how many people actually have them, considering the cost.
I'm gonna need another '72 Tele Deluxe... and those are also now out of production.
Telenator's been out of business since the end of 2017.
I've had a pending order for a Stratocaster neck plate with Rio Grande for almost two years, and he hasn't answered my last email. I'm not sure at what point the "COVID material shortage" is a legitimate concern or convenient boogeyman. A sixteen-dollar neck plate and two years to either ship it or cancel my order has seriously changed my attitude about Rio Grande as a company.
Of course, I now own a Fender Starcaster, BUT of the "Modern Player" series that was in production from 2014 - 2017, and not one of the originals from the seventies. I've decided that a set of Creamery pickups that are specifically balanced for the Starcaster are in order.
Here's a list of builders for your viewing pleasure; keep in mind that I do not own any of these, so let the buyer beware. Always do your research.
Revel Custom Pickups
The Creamery - and please note he offers several variations.
Curtis Novak
Rio Grande
Lindy Fralin
Mojotone
Catswhisker
Brandonwound
Porter Pickups
Of coure, the chase continues...
Fuck Gibson.
Re-upload of original Mark Agnesi "Play Authentic" video
Gibson Guitars Rick Beato and Marty Schwartz REACT "Play Authentic" Video
Gibson Steps on its own D**k ( Play Authentic )
My response to Mark Agnesi & Gibson | Play Authentic
Play Authentic...or Else!
Play Authentic - Or Else!
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