SIGNATURE TONE (PART 2)

In the second part of our look at signature pickups, Dave Burrluck gets up close and personal with a beastly tone

- Dave Burrluck

Fresh from the shock of the new in the form of Rabea Massaad’s excellent Bare Knuckle Silo humbuckers that we checked out in last issue’s Mod Squad, it’s time to consider the opposite strand of the signature pickup world, and so we’re looking backwards!

For every top-level player who’s deserving of their own signature pickup (tweaked for their signature guitar perhaps), there seems to be an increasing number of signature pickups that aren’t improved or enhanced, they’re simply recreations of the artist’s pickups in one of their significant guitars, presumably with the warts ’n’ all of time and heavy use.

Few pickup makers, however, base their entire range on such historic signature designs. But one exception here in the UK is the revitalised Cream T brand that centres on this ‘historic signature’ pickup theme with models that have either been wound for the artist – be that Keith Richards or Jeff Beck – or are actually proper artist endorsed signature pickups for, notably, Billy F Gibbons. His BFG WhiskerBuckers on a Patrick James Eggle Macon sounded magnificent and certainly outshone my own well-used 2001 PRS Singlecut.

“Why don’t you try our new Bernie Buckers?” suggested Cream T’s Tim Lobley. In truth, I’d been thinking about upgrading that model as PRS’s Singlecut has moved on in two decades, and while many would simply trade and move on up, I’ve always liked the guitar. Could I make it more like a 1959 Les Paul – or even Bernie Marsden’s fabled Beast? Before I could think any further, the