Pickup Artist

We catch up with Fender’s pickup guru Tim Shaw in his Nashville lair to learn more about the process behind the American Performers

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Designing a new pickup and making it in your shed can be a fun pastime. But designing a pickup that will be part of the biggest electric guitar company’s Big New Launch is an entirely different matter altogether. Tim Shaw seems to take it all in his stride. It certainly helps that he’s been doing it a while and, based in Nashville, he has some helpful and talented friends – such as Grammy Award-winning producer Dave Cobb who unwittingly helped Tim onto the trail that would lead to the new Fender Yosemite single coils.

“Fender wanted stuff [for the new Performer series] with flush polepieces, which I thought, ‘Okay, that de-complicates a bunch of stuff, but aside from that I was pretty much given free rein,” Tim explains. “It occurred to me that, pretty much, Alnico 4 had never been extensively used before as rod magnets; there is no reason it couldn’t have been.

“As you know, the various grades are recipes, mixtures of different materials, so Alnico 4, in terms of its power and its recipe, ends up somewhere between Alnico 2 and 5. For instance, Alnico 2 is 17 per cent nickel, 10 per cent aluminium, 12.5 per cent cobalt and the balance is iron. Alnico 4 is 28 per cent nickel, 12 per cent aluminium, 5 per cent cobalt and, again, the rest is iron. Alnico 4 is a bit more powerful than 2 – some measurements are higher, some lower – but it’s kind of in the ballpark. Gibson used Alnico 4 on the Firebirds because they didn’t want something as bright and clanky as Alnico 5.”