A humbucker, humbucking pickup, or double coil, is a guitar pickup that uses two wire coils to cancel out noisy interference from coil pickups. Humbucking coils are also used in dynamic microphones to cancel electromagnetic hum. Humbuckers are one of two main types of guitar pickups. The other is called a single coil.
A single-coil pickup is a type of magnetic transducer, or pickup, for the electric guitar and the electric bass. It electromagnetically converts the vibration of the strings to an electric signal. Single-coil pickups are one of the two most popular designs, along with dual-coil or "humbucking" pickups.
Seth E. Lover was a designer of amplifiers and musical instrument electronics and effects. He is most famous for developing the Gibson humbucker or hum-cancelling electric stringed instrument pickup, most often used on the electric guitar.
Paul Reed Smith Guitars, also known as PRS Guitars or simply PRS, is an American guitar and amplifier manufacturer located in Stevensville, Maryland. The company was founded in 1985 in Annapolis, Maryland by Paul Reed Smith. Products manufactured by PRS include electric and acoustic guitars, basses, and amplifiers.
The Gretsch 6120 is a hollow body electric guitar with f-holes, manufactured by Gretsch and first appearing in the mid-1950s with the endorsement of Chet Atkins. It was quickly adopted by rockabilly artists Eddie Cochran, Duane Eddy, and later by Eric Clapton, Brian Setzer, Reverend Horton Heat, and many others. Pete Townshend received one as a gift from Joe Walsh in 1970, which he would later use on recordings for Who's Next and Quadrophenia. It has been Manu Chao’s preferred electric guitar to play live since 2002. Poison Ivy Rorschach of The Cramps notably played a 1958 Gretsch 6120, which she bought in 1985. She said it was her favourite guitar to play. After George Harrison played Gretsch Country Gentleman and Tennessean models, Gretsch found that they could scarcely keep up with demand.
Gretsch is an American company that manufactures and markets musical instruments. The company was founded in 1883 in Brooklyn, New York by Friedrich Gretsch, a 27-year-old German immigrant, shortly after his arrival to the United States. Friedrich Gretsch manufactured banjos, tambourines, and drums until his death in 1895. In 1916, his son, Fred Gretsch Sr. moved operations to a larger facility where Gretsch went on to become a prominent manufacturer of American musical instruments. Through the years, Gretsch has manufactured a wide range of instruments, though they currently focus on electric and acoustic guitars and drums.
A pickup is an electronic device that converts energy from one form to another that captures or senses mechanical vibrations produced by musical instruments, particularly stringed instruments such as the electric guitar, and converts these to an electrical signal that is amplified using an instrument amplifier to produce musical sounds through a loudspeaker in a speaker enclosure. The signal from a pickup can also be recorded directly.
The Gibson Firebird is a solid-body electric guitar manufactured by Gibson beginning in 1963.
The Fender Telecaster Deluxe is a solid-body electric guitar originally produced from 1972 to 1981, and re-issued by Fender multiple times starting in 2004.
The P-90 is a single coil electric guitar pickup produced by Gibson Guitar Corporation since 1946, as well as other vendors. Compared to other single coil designs, such as the Fender single coil, the bobbin for a P-90 is wider but shorter. The Fender style single coil is wound in a taller bobbin, but the wires are closer to the individual poles. This makes the P-90 produce a somewhat warmer tone with less edge and brightness, As with other single-coil pickups, the P-90 is subject to AC hum unless some form of cancellation is used.
A P.A.F., or simply PAF, is an early model of the humbucker guitar pickup invented by Seth Lover in 1955, so named for the "Patent Applied For" decal placed on the baseplate of each pickup. Gibson used the PAF on guitars from late 1956 until late 1962, long after the patent was granted. They were replaced by the Patent Number pickup, essentially a refined version of the PAF. These were in turn replaced by "T-Top" humbuckers in 1967, and production ended in 1975. Though it was not the first humbucking pickup ever, it was the first to gain widespread use, as the PAF's hum-free signal, tonal clarity, and touch sensitivity when paired with overdriven amplifiers made the pickups popular with rock and blues guitarists. The PAF is an essential tonal characteristic of the now-famous 1957–1960 Gibson Les Paul Standard guitars, and pickups of this type have gained a large following.
DiMarzio, Inc. is an American manufacturing company best known for popularizing direct-replacement guitar pickups. The company also produces other accessories, such as hardware, guitar straps, and instrument cables.
Fender Telecaster Custom is a model of electric guitar made by Fender.
Joseph Raymond Butts was an American inventor and engineer best known for designing several devices that influenced the evolution of electrified music, in particular those used with the electric guitar. Most notably, Butts is the inventor of the EchoSonic, a guitar amplifier with a built-in tape echo, and the Filter'Tron, one of the first humbucker guitar pickups. He was active in other fields from studio equipment maintenance to sound engineering, and had intimate working relationships with people such as Sam Phillips at Sun Studios and Chet Atkins.
The mini-humbucker is a humbucking guitar pickup. It was originally created by the Epiphone company. The mini-humbucker resembles a Gibson PAF humbucker, but is narrower in size and senses a shorter length of string vibration. This produces clearer, brighter tones that are quite unlike typical Gibson sounds. It fits in between single-coils and full-sized humbuckers in the tonal spectrum. It is frequently used in jazz guitars, mounted under the fingerboard or on the pickguard.
Electric guitar design is a type of industrial design where the looks and efficiency of the shape as well as the acoustical aspects of the guitar are important factors. In the past many guitars have been designed with various odd shapes as well as very practical and convenient solutions to improve the usability of the object.
TV Jones is an American guitar pickup manufacturer founded in 1993 by luthier Thomas V. Jones in Whittier, California. Now based in Poulsbo, Washington, the company is best known for creating vintage-style Filter'Tron pickups, using materials and a manufacturing process similar to what was used in the late 1950s and 1960s by Ray Butts and Gretsch.
The Fender Telecaster, colloquially known as the tele, is an electric guitar produced by Fender. Together with its sister model the Esquire, it was the world's first mass-produced, commercially successful solid-body electric guitar. Its simple yet effective design and revolutionary sound broke ground and set trends in electric guitar manufacturing and popular music. Many prominent rock musicians have been associated with the Telecaster for use in studio recording and live performances, most notably Bruce Springsteen, Prince, Luis Alberto Spinetta and Keith Richards.
The EchoSonic is a guitar amplifier made by Ray Butts. It was the first portable guitar amplifier with a built-in tape echo effect, and it allowed guitar players to use slapback echo, which dominated 1950s rock and roll guitar playing, on stage. He built the first one in 1953 and sold the second one to Chet Atkins in 1954. He built fewer than seventy of those amplifiers; one of them was bought by Sam Phillips and then used by Scotty Moore on every recording he made with Elvis Presley, from the 1955 hit song "Mystery Train" to the 1968 TV program Comeback Special. Deke Dickerson called the amplifier the Holy Grail of rockabilly music.
The Fender Cabronita Telecaster is a class of guitars built by Fender Musical Instruments Corporation based on the company's Telecaster body shape. The name Cabronita is Spanish slang and roughly translates as little bastard or little devil. While retaining the shape and general feel of a Telecaster, they are a radical departure from the traditional electronics and sounds associated with the instrument. Like all Telecaster submodels, they are labeled simply as a Fender Telecaster on the headstock logo, identifiable only by their features.
