'Bear Necessities

Jamie Dickson asks Stuart Robson of Sunbear Pickups for advice on getting more from your magnets

- Jamie Dickson

Sunbear pickups have been popping up in increasing numbers of high-end guitar builds at the moment, most notably in Ivison Guitars’ Firebird-like Dakota model. Sunbear Pickups’ founder, Stuart Robson, is endlessly fascinated by the roots of great guitar tone and, in particular, how pickups interact with the rest of your guitar rig to make incredible sounds – or not, as the case may be. So, as this month’s issue is more or less devoted to the quest for tone, I thought I’d tap Stuart up for some advice on getting the best from your pickups, starting with how he would recommend going about choosing a new set of pickups for a guitar that seems to be lacking a certain something.

“The first thing that jumps to my mind is to think about the guitar’s natural character itself when you’re purchasing pickups,” Stuart suggests. “A lot of my work is about trying to match pickups to people’s particular guitars. And my philosophy about pickup making generally is that pickups aren’t really additive, they’re more attenuating or accentuating frequencies that you have at your disposal in the first place. And so, for me, a big part of why I even got into making pickups in the first place was: ‘Here’s a really nice guitar – but how do I get that really nice guitar to be what it is through my rig?’ I think that’s something people often don’t think about enough: trying to match their pickups to the natural character of their guitar and playing style as best they can. So that’s maybe something worth throwing in.”