WIDENING THE RANGE

For the first time in its illustrious history, Fender has launched a range of new pickups can't buy on a guitar. Dave Burrluck asks, what's the deal? that you

This story starts in the late 60s when Seth Lover had jumped ship from Gibson to work for Fender. Pretty T soon, he'd been tasked with coming up with a humbucking pickup design - something that Fender didn't have. But not wanting to plagiarise his patented Gibson humbucking design, he took a different route. Crucially, the new design differed from Seth's Gibson humbucker by using threaded CuNiFe magnetic polepieces, instead of an Alnico bar magnet - and the Fender Wide Range humbucker was born, gracing a trio of Teles in the early 70s (pictured below on the new American Vintage II 1972 Telecaster Thinline; pic 1).

But what exactly is CuNiFe? "It's an alloy of 60 per cent copper, 20 per cent nickel and 20 per cent iron," states Fender's longstanding pickup guru Tim Shaw. "Seth discovered pretty quickly that because there's not a lot of iron in a CuNiFe magnet - a regular Alnico magnet is about half iron - that there wasn't a lot of inductance: the pickup sounded really, really hi-fi and unpleasant. What he ended up doing was making the coil forms bigger and in the process of doing that he could put more wire on them and get the inductance up and make them sound better. That's how the Fender Wide Range came to exist and that's why it is, in fact, a wide range pickup. Those coil forms are bigger and they're further apart and at that point the pickup is picking up a bigger section of the string.

"CuNiFe's big use at the time was in speedometers and tachometers for planes, cars and boats that needed those things," Tim continues. "All was going well. Fender launched the pickups on Tele Deluxes, Customs [and the second version of the Thinline] and then the speedometer and tachometer business went electronic, and at that point nobody needed a CuNiFe magnet any more. So, largely, the material disappears by the end of the 70s." And so did the original Fender Wide Range pickup.