Another thing you might have heard people get excited about now is the PAF version, the original pickup with the little "Patent Applied For" decal on the base. That was one of the reasons for me designing this humbucking pickup, to get away from those big, heavy pickups, and to get away from hum. But I don't know whatever happened to them, because they disappeared. I showed them a lot of different ways to build humbucking pickups—here's a double-coil construction, three on one, three on another, then here for the bass it's two on one, two on another. Hughes made our pickup covers, too. I could make more money out here [in California] at Fender. For previous installments, take a look at Tony's interviews with Tom Petty and Chet Atkins, as well as conversations with Leo Fender's longtime partner George Fullerton, Fender visionary Dan Smith, and Gibson's Ted McCarty. How did you come to work for Gibson, Seth? If you got lucky enough to find more than one guitar, you could try them all to find the best sounding. The first ones that they approved was I think an even worse-looking shape than this. And this [points to yet another pickup on the table] was the original bass humbucking pickup that I built for Gibson. Tell me about the Fender humbucking pickup you designed. Every time I'd shield something, I'd take away some of the noise. Rounding it out, I gave the neighbors a break and opted for a clean amp setting for bigger full chords and single note lines. Your purchases help youth music programs get the gear they need to make music. The Seth Lover neck model gives you a smooth but articulate tone by striking the perfect balance of warm, full low-end and a nice ⦠As I covered in a recent evaluation of the Mojotone Hot Classic humbucker, plain enamel wire was used until about 1963. So I designed this amplifier for Gibson that would take it up to full power output, and you couldn't drive it any more—the harder you drove it, the more bias it put on that to hold it back. Anyone that could bring out a new sound—like we brought out the fuzz tone, I designed the solid state Fuzz-Tone for Gibson [Maestro Fuzz-Tone, 1962] from an idea that someone down in Tennessee or somewhere had for an amplifier that went bad and distorted. Yeah, but a lot of this is describing the pictures I had here. And there was just one claim. This Super 400 has that pickup, and this L-5CESN too. When I was working for Fender, I designed a special effects guitar that you could double the frequency, you could divide the frequency, you could automatic-wah the frequency. Because if you have the coil sideways with the magnet coming up, it works, but it's not as efficient. Seems like everybody is copying it. So that made that one a little heavier than this one. A bona fide trailblazer in the earliest days of the electric guitar. Here, see? Then they spread for more. The machine heads were bolted fast to it and the pickups were bolted to it, and it worked very well to give sustain. Cunife is copper, nickel, and iron. Where would guitarists be today without Seth Lover? Well, at that time I was getting 9,000 a year from Gibson, and they offered me 12,000. Yes, it was the same magnet used in the P-90, only we used just one instead of two. The pickups were selected at random to go in whichever pickup position on the guitar. Oops, looks like you forgot something. I finally got a patent with one claim—claimed I built a humbucking pickup [laughs]. See, that's nickel silver, German silver, whatever they want to call it. It wasn't the most efficient way to do it, but it worked. In '57 was when I think they first started building them, and I think I had started work on it in '55. They thought it sounded pretty good—in fact Julius Bellson, who was the treasurer at Gibson at the time, he thought it sounded pretty good, but I could never get them to do that. The SH-55 Seth Lover model is Seymour Duncanâs tribute to the father of the humbucking pickup. Was that a long process? Always louder was better. The thing of it is, always for the guitar player, louder is better. Gold is a very good conductor, and it doesn't take a very heavy coat to damp out the high-frequency response, and that's why I didn't want 'em to use gold. The old ES-125 had that P-90 pickup. Matter of fact I was born and raised in Kalamazoo, which is sometimes called Oozamalak [laughs], born there January 1, 1910. I'll go and have a look at my catalogues. The Seth Lover neck model gives you a smooth but articulate tone by striking the perfect balance of warm, full low end and a nice sweet treble. mould for Gibson. I figured Fender is known for his brilliant type sound, so I kept a little more brilliance in the pickup than what there was in the Gibson. No, the only difference is that a cover helps to prevent pick-up from fluorescent and neon lamps. Seth (1910â1997) devised the "Patent Applied For" humbucker at Gibson in the mid-'50s, and for that alone he was near the top of my list of ⦠Stay tuned for more interviews from Bacon's Archive coming soon. Hey! The guy liked that idea. What we wanted to do was to shield out the external noise from neon signs and so forth. The neck position adds more of the flutey and woody traits. Were there many more prototypes beyond the one you've got here? [Lavone: "When you're 64 years, 11 months, and 29 days you're fine. Other key features include our specially manufactured 42AWG plain enamel mag wire, nickel silver ⦠Did anyone else at Gibson work on the humbucker design, or was it mainly yours? You'll never get mine away from me. Add to Cart. The Seth Lover vintage output humbucker pickups are the perfect choice for players wanting to transform a solid body or semi hollow into a singing classic rock machine. One of each. What was the difference between plating and painting? I remember that we went to one of the trade shows in Chicago and we had a humbucking pickup, and there we discovered that another company had built a humbucking pickup. And of course they would connect in series, so you had close to 9,000 turns total on the humbucking pickup. I think it was in April 1941 I went to work for them. They did away with the magnet on the bottom—the pole pieces were cunife magnets. It had a doubler, a divider, wah, fuzz, and everything. The un-potted nickel silver cover gives the tone an almost piano like percussive q But anyway, yes, in '45 I went back to work for Gibson and started to design some amplifiers, the GA-50 amplifiers. During the war, I spent most of the time teaching radio and electronics at Bliss Electrical School, just outside of Washington D.C. Then after the war, I went back to work for Gibson. What impression did you get of the company? I can't remember talking to him as to how he felt about the humbucking pickup. There were a couple more, but this one I kept for myself. That nickname, the Alnico pickup, I think refers to the metal used. But I think the conductive coating idea never made them very happy. I designed a switch that got away from that noise, but it never happened [laughs]. I called it the Special Effects Guitar. EG Apparently it performed so much better than the P-90, that was the reason why they… and of course, when you bring out something new, it always gets a certain following to it. Matter of fact I can show you one. The P-90 already existed, yeah. They spent the money for the mounting ring, so from then on we had mounting rings to put that pickup on [laughs]. But do you think they would go with it? ], When the sales force over in Chicago saw it, they said they didn't have anything to talk about adjusting screws. I've had loads of ideas of how to do things, and ideas of things to build since I left there. Yeah, this is alnico. Also, the Seth Lovers have full strength alnico II and not aged or degaussed. The Seth set has a very well-balanced character and a dynamic vibe… oodles of harmonic complexity with salient definition. He quit and came out to Fender. He contacted me and wanted to know if I was interested in a job out here. I think it was mainly my idea, but chances are Gretsch got their idea from someone—who, I don't know. Did someone come to you and say this is specifically what we want, a pickup that would not pick up hum? See, this was the old P-90 mounting ring, and I just cut it out to fit this in. Also I had a fuzz tone on there that you could play chords with. I wanted them to put a shield on the switch. Have you heard about that? Seymour’s Seth Lover set really does impress with incredible versatility and a huge range. When mine arrived, imagine the resulting grin of finding a double cream bobbin under the cover of the bridge Seth…. I was in the Naval Reserve and I decided I just did not want to be transferred out to Minnesota. Ted McCarty just wanted me to build a new pickup, and I thought well, why don't we get an improvement over… because every time you got a regular guitar near an amplifier you had to twist yourself to get away from the hum. Because I went through a detailed study of that to find out how far I had to go to get rid of the noise. That P-90 was a good pickup, except that it wasn't humbucking, that was the only thing I had against it. German silver has high resistance, and I tried the different covers just to see what effect they would have on it, and nickel silver and stainless steel did not affect the high-frequency response. I'm gearing up to build a semi-hollow guitar with a mahogany back & neck, carved spruce top, and 24.75" scale IRW fret board. I didn't want to have an exact copy of Gibson's. So we were not gonna stop production just for that. So about the only difference between the Fender and the Gibson humbucking pickup was the appearance and the type of magnet used. That went over for a year or two but never stayed too long. Each Seth Lover Model humbucker is hand built in Santa Barbara the way Seth Lover designed them. It breaks easily, doesn't have the strength of alnico. They used that on quite a lot of models in the '70s, like the Telecaster Custom and so on. No. This is the one that I designed for them. Seymour Duncan Seth Lover Humbucker ⦠We learnt about the basic principles that they wanted the Navy radiomen to know—radar had just been born. I think you have the patent for your humbucking pickup in your papers there. So [laughs] they wanted adjusting screws, and that's why we brought out this style here that has the adjusting screws. Clones, even others from Seymour Duncan (Joe Bonamassa limited 1959s) and Iâve got a Gibson Custom diamond anniversary Gold top with custom buckers in but the Seth ⦠I loaded them into one of my regular double humbucker test guitar, tuned to E Standard, and running into the same amp with the same amp settings as always. Playing these reminds me of that crystal clear transparency of using a Neve console in the studio: incredible clarity between what you play and what you hear. Seymour Duncan Seth Lover Humbucker Gold-Neck Rating * Select Rating 1 star (worst) 2 stars 3 stars (average) 4 stars 5 stars (best) Name Anyway, they ran out of black material, but they had white. They didn't want to give 'em any information as to what patent to look up to make copies [laughs]. Now the thing of it is, to completely shield everything in a guitar costs money, and that's one of the things that makes manufacturers hesitate. The patent had not quite run out—it had one more year to go—so I designed them a pickup, but I made it different. Doesn't take much to snap it, but alnico won't snap. Ted joined in '48. While the Antiquity was my personal favorite because of the even greater smoothness in distortion and softer mids largely due to the aging process, many may prefer the Seth Lover as it is closest to what a PAF design ⦠Quick view. So, in theory, there isn't much difference in sound between one with a nickel silver cover on and a cover off? And then they had them turned sideways like this, and this is the most efficient way, which we used, having a coil laying flat with the magnets coming up. Only thing was, you can't solder to it. So I picked out the German silver because you could solder to it. So I had them make me a humbucking choke coil. Your purchases also help protect forests, including trees traditionally used to make instruments. Where did it go from there? I wanted to be different—I didn't want round [laughs]. The neck pickup has a more bassy sound, PAF type, is very sweet. The Seth Lover vintage output humbucker pickups are the perfect choice for players wanting to transform a solid body or semi hollow into a singing classic rock machine. They were similar to this. [He gets out from his box a recognizable humbucker pickup and puts it on the now-crowded table. Well, he was alright. Both pickup are very clean and have a medium output, that makes them vey cotrollable. Anyway, I said yeah, so I went to work and designed a pickup for them. The Seth Lover is a true and true vintage humbucker. But because of the pickup hitting two points on the string, you were able to get considerable sound level, even though you used just one magnet. It has about 72 transistors in it. Do you have a guitar that seems to sound a little woofy or too congested with some of the pickups you’ve tried?… this Seth Lover set might be the cure for your situation. The early Gibson bass, I think the EB series. No. As far as I recall, the old P-90 was wound with 10,000 turns of number 42 wire. It might have been. Designed jointly by Seymour and humbucker inventor, the late Seth Lover. The alnico 2 bar magnet helps to smooth the high end response, while the vintage output coils bring out this pickup's rich harmonic content. It was bucking the hum that you pick up from amplifiers. Editor's note: This post is part of a series of unpublished interviews from the personal research archive of noted guitar writer Tony Bacon. I called it the bent beer can [laughs]. And they sent me a ticket to fly out, talk to 'em, look the place over, and I figured it was worthwhile. Before, it was up in the main building on the second floor. Single notes will have that perfect singing quality, and the un-potted nickel silver cover gives the tone an almost piano-like percussive feel. I did all the work on the design of it. Made it very stiff. The tenor guitar had the same four strings as the banjo normally has. Did anyone else have much to do with the design of the Gibson humbucker? Works especially well with maple and ebony fingerboards. That was my reason for using a cover. So we couldn't get quite 10,000 turns, it's 4,300 or 4,400 turns per coil, something like that. When I first went to work there it was just the main building, 225 Parsons Street. Lavone asks me if it really does rain all the time in London. Later they completed that building, and when I went back in '52 that's where the lab was at. That was what they asked for? [Seth goes off to his workshop. Why was that? Yeah, the magnetic material. For brighter toned instruments. design. They painted them, but the thing of it was, people playing 'em would knock the paint off [laughs]. The wire was dark brown enameled wire, number 42 was the standard wire size for years. Harmony came along and wanted to buy that pickup to use on some guitars they were building for Sears, and they put out the money for a mounting ring [laughs]. It was not—well, I didn't think they were paying me enough. After I had been with the training center there, Ted McCarty came to me and wanted to know if I would design a single-coil pickup for them. If you're going to improve something, make it different. You can look up how he designed the Varitone or, later on, the Wide Range pickup. By using conductive paint, we could get a complete shielding of the whole system. Remember this one here? are there: airy (or open), sweet, and vocal. [Laughs.]. are there: airy (or open), sweet, and vocal. Originally, he was a radio repairman, and I often thought that his early amplifiers were just outgrowths of the radio amplifiers that he was familiar with. We never got along too well—he never came over to visit or anything like that. They had built additional buildings. I built a couple of banjos using this bridge, and by switching it back and forth I could change it from a banjo to a tenor guitar. Were things successful at Gibson when you left in '67? Add to Cart. How different did the Alnico pickup sound? Only thing was you couldn't play chords because it would wobble around. $145.00. Umm, not really necessary, because this pickup was very sensitive and you could pull it up close to the strings, so long as when you picked on 'em they didn't buzz against the cover. To make a louder pickup? I don't know whether they ever gave this one a name or not, but it was put on a couple of models of guitars. We also had steel guitars that had humbucking pickups, the eight-string guitar. Seymour Duncan SH55N Seth Lover Humbucker Pickup for NECK position.. Hand built exactly the way Seth Lover designed, these faithful PAFs deliver an open airy humbucker tone for your bridge position. Seymour Duncan Seth Lover Humbucker Nickel-Bridge. Magnets ranged from different grades of alnico, based on what was available. Then I circled back around to heavy blues and some complex jazz chords. How many stages of development did it go through? You think the adjustment screws weren't especially useful? And I said what does it pay? About the Author: Tony Bacon writes about musical instruments, musicians, and music. So the Navy built a training center in Kalamazoo, and I could make more working for the Navy than I could working for Gibson. It took to 1959 for us to get that patent. He is a co-founder of Backbeat UK and Jawbone Press. I didn't want—well, I'd built my home there in Kalamazoo, and I just didn't feel like selling the house and moving out. They would not go for that, because it cost money. To start out with, Gibson made their covers out of celluloid, but a guitar sitting in the window, the heat on that plastic would tend to flatten it out. I won’t tell Larry DiMarzio if you won’t! Also, by doing that I could put these screws here like that [in between the pole pieces] for adjustment. Now if it was brass on that it'd deaden it, and aluminum would have deadened the high end. For now, let’s focus on when Seth partnered with Seymour W. Duncan to revisit his most famous design, the P.A.F. The following is excerpted from an interview with Seth Lover conducted by VGâs Stephen Patt in 1996. Learn More, The original Gibson Guitar factory in Kalamazoo, Michigan (1941). But I would always draw a schematic of it to start with, and the draughtsman would go and pretty it up. Nothing but blue sky. You might say in the late '40s the pickups that they had were big and heavy. [CDATA[ (function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){ (i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o), m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m) })(window,document,'script','//www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js','ga'); ga('create', 'UA-68856018-1', 'auto'); ga('send', 'pageview'); // ]]> Sustain Blocks, Vol.1: Brass and Titanium, Seymour Duncan Antiquity Surfer Strat Set, Flattening The Hills: Fixing A Fretboard, pt 3, Mojotone British Style 4×12 Straight Speaker Cabinet, Seymour Duncan Alnico II Pro Slash Humbucker Set, Mojotone Lee Dickson Brown-E Strat Pickup Set. The aforementioned hallmarks of a good P.A.F. I did teaching there as well as installing all their electronic equipment and stuff of that nature. Nothing but blue sky. Some were great and some, well, not so much. It was just one of those ideas I had that we tried, but I don't think they ever stayed with it. They finally wound up with a rotary switch, because they were already on the market, to change the tone of the guitar. In fact I have one here that I built for myself, because when I built it for Fender they never produced it. I said, well, don't put gold plating on it, paint 'em gold. I know that when I designed a humbucking pickup for Fender, I changed to cunife. The Seth Lover neck model gives you a smooth but articulate tone by striking the perfect balance of warm, full sounding low end with a nice sweet treble. Oh no. Yes, I thought they were doing fairly well. Learn More, We understand the importance of online privacy and are committed to complying with the EU General Data Protection Regulation. That's copper, nickel, and iron. His latest is a new edition of Electric Guitars: The Illustrated Encyclopedia (Chartwell). Let’s face it, the early humbuckers could be all over the place. The SH-55 Seth Lover pickups were created between Seymour Duncan and humbucker inventor Seth Lover to be as true as ⦠Seth Lover: On the humbucker the adjustable pole piece extends out the bottom. In some ways—I didn't think he paid me enough. They always wanted pretty looks on the thing, so the last thing they did was put a coat of lacquer over it, and that would wrinkle that conductive coating, and it didn't look good. Did you try to make it different to the P-90? Interview: Seth Lover on Inventing the PAF Humbucker and Why He Left Gibson for Fender | Bacon's Archive, Kalamazoo Public Library Historical Photographs. Seymour Duncan Seth Lover SH55B Series resistance: 8.00k ohms Series inductance: 4.835H Gauss: 280 slug, screw 310G, AlNiCo 2 bar Unloaded: V: 19.4dBV f: 6.07kHz (black) Loaded (200k & 470pF): V: 17.6dBV f: 2.50kHz (red) Seymour Duncan Seth Lover SH55N Series resistance: 7.39k ohms Series ⦠Were there any changes to the number of turns on the windings? But I don't know, apparently it cost too much. Alrighty, then. Can you recall any ideas that didn't make production? A lot of musicians used to the acoustic sound didn't like that. I didn't want that. Alnico? The Seth Lover Model is also the basis for Duncanâs excellent Antiquity PAF and Duncan came to refer to Seth as his âhumbucker mentorâ. I think one of the first models to get the Alnico pickup was the Les Paul Custom, in '54. It may have been the EB-2. This video is comparing Seth Lover vs Duncan 59s guitar pick ups. But they did. Seymour W. Duncan and Seth Lover. I know that I designed this one to fit exactly in the space that it took for the old-style pickup, which was single-coil. It also had a good treble, because of this type of cover material. If you had a magnet that was quite weak you could absorb some of the energy, depends on how far through that screw was, because itâs going to absorb some of the energy there. For decorative purposes! The Seth Lover is hand built exactly like the original PAFs as Lover designed them. Oh very, they were more and more important. Two number 55 magnets, one on each side there, set sideways. That was one of the reasons why he probably wasn't too happy with the humbucking pickup, but I really don't know. So I designed the pickup. Would have been about 1973, '74, right along in there. There was also cunico, and I suppose the "co" there stands for cobalt. And I think white was a better color for winding the pickups, because you could see the wire in there a lot easier than you could with the black. With this strong a magnet, it has a tendency to produce wolf tones, you know? Ceramic is kind of a strange magnet. And this [points to another pickup] is the original humbucking pickup, one of my handmade samples. I interviewed Seth Lover in 1992 for The Les Paul Book, my first book about Gibson's various Les Paul models, and our conversation focused on the humbucking pickup. It is 2 switches (one for each coil) discreetly sent into the pickup surround, this gives you the option to put each coil on, off or out of phase. I hesitated there. It may have come in his 80s, but thanks to Seymour Duncan adverts, interviews and trade-show appearances, Seth finally got the recognition he deserved. But if you completely shield all the things in the guitar—take the switch that they use to switch from pickup to pickup, if you put a shield around that, that helps. At the time I did meet Leo Fender, but he never talked too much to me. The one just west of that they had built between the time I left in '41 and got back in '52, although as I said, I came back in '45 and stayed for a couple of years. Not recommended for use with ultra high ⦠Just like the original 1955 P.A.F.s, the SH-55 utilizes a nickel silver bottom plate, butyrate plastic bobbins; plain enamel wire, an Alnico bar magnet, a wooden spacer, and ⦠You left Gibson in 1967, Seth. There were several people who had designed humbucking pickups, and that's why I had a hell of a time getting a patent. I don't like to copy things. But I can remember some of the very early ones where the dealers used to complain, because they had it sitting in their window for a while, and the thing would flatten out. Not the first electric [Electric Bass/EB-1]—for that I'd wound a single-coil pickup. 1964 Silvertone 1446 with Seth Lover pickups. There they even balked at paying the cost of the mounting ring for that. Based on your location, we've changed your settings: Shipping Region: So they'd magnetize two points on the string there, and those voltages generated in the coil would be added together. Then, all at once, the guys started taking the covers off the pickups, you know? Because CBS owned it at that time, and when you're 65, well, you're too old to work. Electric guitars were important for Gibson by this time. The original application was June 22, 1955. Every time you pushed it, it'd go clunk and the sound would come through the amplifier. Seymour Duncan Alnico Pro Ii Emg-81 Active Humbucker Guitar Pickup Ibanez V7 Alnico Pro Ii Guitar Pickup For Your Project Repair Telecaster Neck Guitar Pickup Standard Stratocaster Pickup Humbucking Neck Alnico Ii Pro Single Coil Middle Guitar Pickup Pickup For Your Project Repair Fender Vintage Noiseless Dimarzio ⦠The aforementioned hallmarks of a good P.A.F. Sweetwater customer ⦠On one side they'd have soft iron pole pieces underneath, and the other side soft iron screws. A slurring type of tone. This helps shield away electrostatic noises from fluorescent lamps and so forth, and I wanted to get rid of that, because the older pickups that had plastic covers, with this wiring and so forth connecting up to it, the pickup itself would tend to pick up that noise. The sales force wanted a copy of the Gibson humbucking, wanted it to sound exactly like that. I gave it that name. The Seth Lover neck doesn't sound muddy at all and handles distortion quite well while also having a very nice clean tone which I think is it's strength. And by winding on extra turns, I was able to get very good bass response with it—and I not only made a guitar pickup with it, but a bass pickup with the same idea.
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