Pickup Lines - Custom P-90s

In the third part of our focus on P-90s, we meet with Lindy Fralin to find out how his classic pickup design can be tweaked to meet the needs of today’s discerning guitarist

- Lindy Fralin

Although we may associate vintage P-90s with a certain tone, the variations inherent in Gibson’s manufacturing methods and materials back in the day mean that no two of those highly coveted original examples will be exactly the same. Therefore, when it comes to finding the right pickups for your guitar, trawling the vintage market and stumbling across something that accurately measures up to your expectations in terms of sound can often prove tricky.

Fortunately, as we saw in the last two installments of Pickup Lines, there are some incredibly detailed (and consistent!) P-90 replicas now available on the repro market. And if retro-modern custom builds, hybrid specs and modding happen to be your thing, the path to your ultimate P-90 tone has never been easier to find thanks to some clever twists and (more or less) turns on the winder from the likes of Fralin Pickups.

“I’ll talk to everybody about what they want from the pickup,” Lindy Fralin, founder of Fralin Pickups, tells us from across the pond. He’s just finished repairing his amp before a jam-packed weekend of gigging and is about to set off to the same workshop in Richmond, Virginia that he’s been operating from for the last 18 of his 30-plus-year pickup winding career.