Forgotten Gems
Guitarist|April 2023
Our obsession with PAF humbuckers and Fender single coils means many pickup designs from the 50s and 60s have long been lost
Dave Burrluck
Forgotten Gems

While the Rapier 22’s mini-humbuckers are a pretty standard humbucking design, designer Alan Entwistle shares some additional info with us: “Each coil uses a steel blade polepiece and a ceramic bar magnet, and they’re wound with 44 AWG wire.” Meanwhile, the Saffire’s Astrosonic single coils are “based on the earliest version of the Burns Tri-Sonic pickup, which would have been around 1959/1960,” says Alan.

“They used six Alnico magnets – they called them ‘Alcamax’ but it’s the same difference – but it was a nightmare to produce,” he adds. “I think [Burns] went on making them for a few years and then when they went on to produce models such as the short-scale Jazz Guitar [which was in production from 1962 to ’65] they thought, ‘Let’s make a simpler version.’ This was the bar magnet version, which was always considered as a ‘lesser’ product. In actual fact, that was the one Brian May used [on the Red Special] and that was it – end of story!

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