Forgotten Gems

Our obsession with PAF humbuckers and Fender single coils means many pickup designs from the 50s and 60s have long been lost

- Dave Burrluck

While the Rapier 22’s mini-humbuckers are a pretty standard humbucking design, designer Alan Entwistle shares some additional info with us: “Each coil uses a steel blade polepiece and a ceramic bar magnet, and they’re wound with 44 AWG wire.” Meanwhile, the Saffire’s Astrosonic single coils are “based on the earliest version of the Burns Tri-Sonic pickup, which would have been around 1959/1960,” says Alan.

“They used six Alnico magnets – they called them ‘Alcamax’ but it’s the same difference – but it was a nightmare to produce,” he adds. “I think [Burns] went on making them for a few years and then when they went on to produce models such as the short-scale Jazz Guitar [which was in production from 1962 to ’65] they thought, ‘Let’s make a simpler version.’ This was the bar magnet version, which was always considered as a ‘lesser’ product. In actual fact, that was the one Brian May used [on the Red Special] and that was it – end of story!