Small Size, Big Tone

The mini-humbucker deserves better than also-ran status as Gibson’s ‘other’ pickup, writes Jamie Dickson

- Jamie Dickson

While we were putting together issue 492’s tribute to 70 years of the Les Paul, I asked Gibson’s senior director of product development, Mat Koehler, what his favourite pickups for Les Pauls were. While acknowledging the allure of the fabled PAF, he named the humble mini-humbucker as his favourite, under-rated tonemaker.

“It’s just a very specific sweet tone that I really enjoy,” he mused. “And a lot of the great recordings of the 70s and beyond were done on mini-humbuckers – and you just don’t realise it.”

Not to be confused with the similar-looking Firebird pickup, which was constructed by winding coils round two bar magnets mounted edgewise on a baseplate, the mini-humbucker, as its name suggests, was somewhat truer to the concept of a downsized standard ’bucker. Like its full-size brethren, the Gibson mini-humbucker featured an Alnico bar magnet laid flat on a nickel-silver baseplate at the base of the pickup, with two unpotted coils mounted on top. One coil featured adjustable nickel-steel pole screws to conduct the magnet’s field upwards towards the strings. The other coil, less conventionally, featured a barlike slug of steel, mounted edgewise, at its centre. This also served to conduct the underlying magnet’s field upwards through the coil, though unlike the screw poles it was non-height-adjustable. Typically, DC resistance was between 6 and 7kohms, only a tad cooler than the average PAF.