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Thank you. I appreciate that. But I do tend to agree with you.  And it comes down to the tension on the wire when us builders wind the coil. You take any of us builders, and if we were to use the same exact components and build a humbucker, they will still sound different and that difference is from the tension. The tension is where the magic is hidden.

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There are a few key factors:

·        The gauge and coating of the coil wire needs to be 42 AWG with a plain enamel coating.

·        The number of turns of wire per bobbin which tends to be around the 5000 mark.

·        The material the bobbin is made of which needs to be butyrate.

·        The magnet needs to be AlNiCo.

·        The baseplate needs to be nickel silver

·        The lead wire needs to a braided single lead

·        A wood spacer

·        And the most expensive part of the whole equation…the cover.  The cover needs to drawn and it cannot have a layer of copper underneath the plating – this is a huge differentiator.

While they never stopped producing their humbucker, drastic changes from what was initially built occurs in 1961 when then change the material used to make the bobbins and the coating on the coil wire and is ultimately an entirely different pickup come 1968.

The first guitars to feature humbucker pickups were the Gibson lap steels, in 1956. The begin to appear on Gibson’s high end guitars in 1957.