Had fun chatting with the guys at The Cultured Guitarist podcast. We had a pretty lively discussion and not just about pickups.

https://link.chtbl.com/The_Cultured_Guitarist

Here’s a map showing our international Shipping Rates to the most popular countries.

Our shipping is charged in New Zealand dollars and we use DHL for all our international shipping. Our shipping is insured and tracked; we’ll let you know your tracking number once your pickup is posted.

We find DHL are the quickest and most reliable. We don’t want to leave our customers waiting for weeks on end to receive their pickups.

Shipping queries:

If you’re looking to buy from the UK, don’t see your country listed below, or you have a question about shipping, please contact us before you purchase by clicking the Contact form, or emailing us directly www.mrglynspickups@gmail.com

Shipping rates:

Here’s a short list of some of our most frequent shipping destinations:

And here’s the full list of our international shipping rates by country:

https://www.youtube.com/c/MrGlynsPickups/videos

Had some fun today making a short stop-motion movie of Roboguy to demonstrate an Integrity humbucker in a HSS Strat.

The ‘real’ guitar is being played by Warren Mendonsa aka Blackstratblues.

Of course, any of my humbuckers will work as part of a HSS Strat set but I think the Integrity matches single coil pickups best.

For more demos of this pickup have a look here: https://mrglynspickups.com/2020/03/29/integrity-vintage-humbucker-2/

Inspired by the early Gibson PAF pickups the Integrity-vintage humbucker give the classic full, balanced tone we all love. Asymmetric coils give an open sounding mid range and the Alnico II magnet gives clarity and balance. A rich bottom end, characterful mids and sweet treble make this a pickup set for every situation – Jazz, Blues, Rock, it does it all.

Every pickup manufacturer makes a “Vintage” humbucker based on the Gibson PAF, of course they do – old Gibsons sound so good.

So how come they all sound so different? Well, the simple answer is that PAF’s were all different. I’ve been a full time luthier since 1995, whenever I come across an old humbucker I test the ohms and the gause and have a good listen. They’re all different. My conclusion is that pickup manufacturers have taken the PAF they like and based their own version on that. Old PAF’s vary so much so modern ones do as well.

I like my own version to be clear sounding, have obvious string separation and definition and to keep clarity no matter how much gain. The mids must be strong and woody, this is not a “scooped” pickup. The clean sound needs to be chimey and clear with no mush; through a valve amp I want clarity. When I tickle it I want clean and vocal sounding when it clips. The bridge pickup needs to be well behaved with high gain and clear with enough cut through so the drummer knows you’re there. The neck smooth, clear and articulate. Warm but with none of the boom you get with a more powerful pickup.

I don’t want much do I.

My “Integrity”-vintage humbucker has an Alnico II magnet and I’ve used plain enamel insulated magnet wire with asymmetric coils to open up the mids. The very first pickup I ever made back in 1995 was a PAF style and I’ve been tweaking the recipe ever since. Like all my pickups I’ve used a number of test pilot players in its development as well as gigging it myself. It wasn’t until around 2015 that I settled on this particular design. I did a gig with a set in a PRS SE series only last weekend – sounded great to me.

The full and honest sound of the Integrity-vintage humbucker along with it’s timeless tone inspired the name “Integrity”. https://mrglynspickups.com/

Integrity humbucker in a HSS Strat

Had a great time chatting with the guys at The Guitar Knobs Podcast the other day. We talked about pickup design, methods of construction, materials and my favourite pedals.

If you want to hear more, here’s a chat with The Australian Guitar Show from 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-t1MWB87hY&t=13s

MrGlyn’s Pickups is based at Muriwai Beach near Auckland, New Zealand. From low powered “vintage” to powerful rock monsters. We care about your tone.

My Story

My name is Glyn Evans. I have been a full time pickup winder and luthier since 1995.

I wound my first pickup under the guidance of legendary guitar repairer Ted Lee while studying guitar making/repair under him at City of Leeds College of Music in the North of England.

There’s something about the physics that really appealed to me. I went straight home, built my own winding machine, bought some wire and started experimenting.

In those pre-internet days there just wasn’t any information available on how to make good pickups. I made pickup after pickup, I wound and I listened. I made notes of every variation both good and bad so I could learn what was happening.

Looking back I think that time was invaluable for developing an intuition for making pickups. Whenever I came across a result I didn’t understand I swatted up on the physics; there’s a lot to learn. I wrote all the experiments down in a notebook, I still have the notebook and I’m still adding to it. https://mrglynspickups.com/

In 2012 I had the idea for my own range of pickups. In 2020 MrGlyn’s Pickups website went live.

I’ve been lucky enough to know many professional players who’ve given their time and expertise to help me. Every pickup design I make has been tested both by me and some of these “test pilots”. They’ve been in and out of numerous guitars, recorded, gigged, analysed and altered more times than I can remember.

I am really happy with the results, I hope you will be too.

The Guitar Knobs Podcast

In this episode I talk to Rod Capper and get to completely re-think some of the things I thought I knew about guitar construction. Rod’s years of experimentation have brought him to some interesting conclusions.

Rod Capper has been making classical guitars near Auckland for 35 years. I was interested in discussing the conflict between tradition and innovation in the classical guitar making world. I got way more than I bargained for. Rod’s constant experimentation has led him to some interesting conclusions and caused me to re-think my view of how guitars work. http://www.capperguitars.com/

Hi all, some of you will know how keen I am on NZ made musical gear. We have world class makers here in Aotearoa and the World needs to know about them. Rather than just having a good moan I’ve been trying to think of ways I can help. After many conversations with other small manufacturers I’ve come up with an idea. I’m starting a series of YouTube videos where I chat with NZ makers so we can all get to know them a little better. I figure that seeing and hearing the person behind the product, hearing their story, their philosophy, will help promote what they do beyond just their website. Some of these makers you may not even have heard of. It’s a very simple format, just recording a Skype conversation. There is some editing mainly cutting out my own waffle but I do try and keep edits to a minimum. I am not a professional presenter I’m just an ordinary bloke working with what I’ve got and this is way out of my comfort zone but I hope you’ll find the content interesting. I’ve called the series “MrGlyn Meets Your Maker”. In episode #1 I’m talking with Aiden from Archetype Guitars in Palmerston North who very graciously agreed to go first. If these videos go any way towards you considering buying NZ made then I’ve succeeded. Please share, link to, subscribe and spread the word, that’s how you can help. Thanks, Glyn. ​ https://mrglynspickups.com/ https://mrglynspickups.com/

I’ve been doing quite a few bass pickup re-wind jobs recently.

If your pickup has stopped working or suddenly started sounding thin and quiet it may well need re-winding.

This old Fender pickup was completely dead, now it lives again.

Pickup re-winds are a big part of what I do.

In the early days back in the 1990’s I re-wound a lot of pickups. It was an invaluable introduction into the inner workings of electric guitar pickups.

Back then there were a lot of 60’s and 70’s quality pickups around to practice on, they weren’t as valuable or sought after as they are now. Because of that I got to see how pickups were put together in the old days, the construction, the potting material…

There wasn’t much information available so experimentation was the only way to learn. I made so many bad pickups back then but made a note of every single one, how I’d wound it and what the result was. By using that method I got closer and closer to what I wanted. I also made a note of all the re-winds I did and the original spec if I could get it. I’m still writing in that note book to this day and it’s becoming a fantastic reference tool when I receive an unusual pickup repair from a customer.

I still really enjoy re-winding pickups, I think I have a strong instinct to fix things. I would much rather repair a faulty old pickup than sell a customer a new one. Sometimes, of course, the customer wants a different sound that the old pickup can’t give them and a new pickup is the way to go.

Please feel free to contact me about any faulty pickup by email (mrglynspickups@gmail.com) or by phone (021 912 678).

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcDggiRTQyFec5KAVHsC2xA

www.mrglynspickups.com

Bass Pickup re-wind

Red Witch Pedals

This was a real treat for me, getting to have a chat with Ben Fulton from Red Witch Pedals https://redwitchpedals.com/ . He’s a Kiwi legend and has designed some of the most imaginative pedals out there. I’m amazed at his constant evolution and pushing the boundaries. He talks about the past, his current designs and a few hints about future designs in the pipeline. I urge you to have a listen to his sound samples, better still try his pedals, you won’t be disappointed.

Here’s what the Red Witch Pedals website says about Ben:

Ben Fulton has never killed a man.

Not even once.

Not even just a little bit, down some dark back alley, in the middle of the night, when no one else was around and all evidence of the crime was suitably bleached and limed away.

Not even ever.

Honest.

Ben Fulton has designed a range of effects pedals that a whole lot of extremely good musicians use and love on a daily basis – in the arenas, studios and bedrooms of the world.

This would have been a difficult feat if he had killed someone because he inevitably would have let it slip “Oh yes, the other day, you know, the day after I killed that guy….”

And the game would have been up.

Very hard to design world-class effects pedals in prison.

Very hard indeed.

People like Andy Summers and Reeves Gabrels are pleased that Ben ended up designing marvellous guitar pedals instead of going to prison.

Though we’re sure some of the guys in prison are sad that it worked out like this.

He’s got quite pretty hair.

Ben Fulton’s Mum is relieved that he hasn’t killed anyone and quietly proud that he has designed these rather lovely effects pedals.

We are too.

I started designing an Extreme Metal Pickup back in August with the help of Raj Singarajah from Dynamic Rage Studio in Auckland, well, today we finalized the design.

It’s been a long journey but I’m delighted. I heard the final prototype in the studio this afternoon and it does everything I wanted it to.

Raj has put in so much work and catalogued the audio for each stage.

It’s still going to be a little while before there are any production models though.

I’m having magnets made, I need to get poles made, I’ve redesigned the base plate so I need to get those made, I need to get bobbins made, there are some other parts I’ve added to shape the magnetic field, they need to be made. All that stuff will me made in NZ except the magnets.

In the end there will be 6 and 7 string models as well as a slanted version for multiscale.

So folks, keep watching this space, the Extreme Metal Pickup it is on the way.

https://www.facebook.com/DynamicRage

Here’s Raj with one of the early prototypes.

About MrGlyn’s Pickups

MrGlyn’s Pickups is based near Auckland, New Zealand.

My name is Glyn Evans. I have been a full time pickup winder and luthier since 1995. I wound my first pickup under the guidance of legendary guitar repairer Ted Lee while studying guitar making/repair under him at City of Leeds College of Music in the North of England. There’s something about the physics that really appealed to me. I went straight home, built my own winding machine, bought some wire and started experimenting.

In those pre-internet days there just wasn’t any information available on how to make good pickups. I made pickup after pickup, I wound and I listened. I made notes of every variation both good and bad so I could learn what was happening. Looking back I think that time was invaluable for developing an intuition for making pickups. Whenever I came across a result I didn’t understand I swatted up on the physics; there’s a lot to learn. I wrote all the experiments down in a notebook, I still have the notebook and I’m still adding to it.

I love hearing my pickups played live or on recordings; it feels good to have played a very small part in that sound.

My day to day work has always been in guitar repair so I’ve been privileged to be able to study first hand some of the great vintage (and modern) pickups. I have re-wound and repaired countless faulty pickups to either restore them to their original state or to improve them. This is how you learn and I think I will always be learning.

In 2012 I had the idea for my own range of pickups. In 2020 MrGlyn’s Pickups website went live. https://mrglynspickups.com/

I’ve been lucky enough to know many professional players who’ve given their time and expertise to help me. Every pickup design I make has been tested both by me and some of these “test pilots”. They’ve been in and out of numerous guitars, recorded, gigged, analysed and altered more times than I can remember.

I am really happy with the results, I hope you will be too.

In this episode of Mr Glyn Meets Your Maker I talk with Trevor Binford, he’s the real deal. As well as a top class guitar maker he runs a school of guitar making in Auckland NZ.

I wanted to find out how he got to where he is and where he learned his craft. Turns out we’re very lucky to have him here in New Zealand.

Hi all,

some of you will know how keen I am on NZ made musical gear. We have world class makers here in Aotearoa and the World needs to know about them. Rather than just having a good moan I’ve been trying to think of ways I can help.

After many conversations with other small manufacturers I’ve come up with an idea. I’m starting a series of YouTube videos where I chat with NZ makers so we can all get to know them a little better. I figure that seeing and hearing the person behind the product, hearing their story, their philosophy, will help promote what they do beyond just their website.

Some of these makers you may not even have heard of.

It’s a very simple format, just recording a Skype conversation. There is some editing mainly cutting out my own waffle but I do try and keep edits to a minimum. I am not a professional presenter I’m just an ordinary bloke working with what I’ve got and this is way out of my comfort zone but I hope you’ll find the content interesting.

I’ve called the series “MrGlyn Meets Your Maker”.

https://www.youtube.com/c/MrGlynsPickups/videos

In episode 1 I’m talking with Aiden from Archetype Guitars in Palmerston North who very graciously agreed to go first. If these videos go any way towards you considering buying NZ made then I’ve succeeded. Please share, link to, subscribe and spread the word, that’s how you can help.

Thanks,

Glyn

https://mrglynspickups.com/

A huge thanks to Nik Dobbin for his demo of MrGlyn’s Integrity vintage humbucker.

Every pickup manufacturer makes a “Vintage” humbucker based on the Gibson PAF, of course they do – old Gibsons sound so good.

So how come they all sound so different? Well, the simple answer is that PAF’s were all different. I’ve been a full time luthier since 1995, whenever I come across an old humbucker I test the ohms and the gause and have a good listen. They’re all different. My conclusion is that pickup manufacturers have taken the PAF they like and based their own version on that. Old PAF’s vary so much so modern ones do as well.

I like my own version to be clear sounding, have obvious string separation and definition and to keep clarity no matter how much gain. The mids must be strong and woody, this is not a “scooped” pickup. The clean sound needs to be chimey and clear with no mush; through a valve amp I want clarity. When I tickle it I want clean and vocal sounding when it clips. The bridge pickup needs to be well behaved with high gain and clear with enough cut through so the drummer knows you’re there. The neck smooth, clear and articulate. Warm but with none of the boom you get with a more powerful pickup.

I don’t want much do I.

My Integrity vintage humbucker has an Alnico II magnet and I’ve used plain enamel insulated magnet wire with asymmetric coils to open up the mids. The very first pickup I ever made back in 1995 was a PAF style and I’ve been tweaking the recipe ever since. Like all my pickups I’ve used a number of test pilot players in its development as well as gigging it myself. It wasn’t until around 2015 that I settled on this particular design. I did a gig with a set in a PRS SE series only last weekend – sounded great to me.

The full and honest sound of this pickup along with it’s timeless tone inspired the name “Integrity”.

Is pickup was originally called the “Blue Sky”.

Just published Ep#7 of “MrGlyn Meets Your Maker” with Kiran from FirehorseFX in Hamilton. We talk about his range of pedals, how he develops them and what cool stuff is in the pipeline including a Mu-Tron Phaser that’s got my GAS going. I even have one of his pedals on my own board.

Hi all,

some of you will know how keen I am on NZ made musical gear. We have world class makers here in Aotearoa and the World needs to know about them. Rather than just having a good moan I’ve been trying to think of ways I can help.

After many conversations with other small manufacturers I’ve come up with an idea. I’m starting a series of YouTube videos where I chat with NZ makers so we can all get to know them a little better. I figure that seeing and hearing the person behind the product, hearing their story, their philosophy, will help promote what they do beyond just their website. Some of these makers you may not even have heard of.

It’s a very simple format, just recording a Skype conversation. There is some editing mainly cutting out my own waffle but I do try and keep edits to a minimum. I am not a professional presenter I’m just an ordinary bloke working with what I’ve got and this is way out of my comfort zone but I hope you’ll find the content interesting.

I’ve called the series “MrGlyn Meets Your Maker”.

In episode #1 I’m talking with Aiden from Archetype Guitars in Palmerston North who very graciously agreed to go first. If these videos go any way towards you considering buying NZ made then I’ve succeeded.

Please share, link to, subscribe and spread the word, that’s how you can help.

Thanks,

Glyn

www.mrglynspickups.com

This 7 String pickup is on its way to a customer in Sweden.

For a while I’ve been working on extending my range of humbucking pickups for rock players. The Cloud Nine will do just about anything but I wanted to offer a more specific pickup for modern rock/metal.

I decided to start with a 7 string which is a slightly unorthodox way of going about it but I was concerned with getting the bottom end right. If there was any sogginess in the bottom end a 7 string would show it up more than a 6 string.

7 string pickups are not like others. The low bass string reacts so differently, there’s a lot of string deflection and low harmonics. My mission was to tame this bass and keep it tight but not to sacrifice the sound quality of the treble strings. The treble still needed to be sweet and singing. The mids needed to be balanced and noticeable. I didn’t want this pickup scooped; the mids had to stand out from the mix when needed to.

So in October 2019 I got back in touch with my old mate Graham Young in Yorkshire. He’s an amazing player and really knows his gear.

Back in 1998 I wound a 6 string humbucker for Graham. In those days I had a guitar shop and repair business in Leeds in the North of England and he wanted a bridge pickup to suit his style for a parts caster.

Years passed and he became a 7 string player, so when I decided to develop a 7 string pickup Graham was the person I asked to be test pilot. We’d very loosely kept in touch over the years and it turned out he was still using the 6 string pickup I’d made for him back in the 90’s.

We had a chat via messenger and it turned out he’d tried a lot of pickups but none quite did it for him. So I listened to his thoughts, came up with a design and went away and made a prototype.

The first one wasn’t quite right, so he sent it back and I changed a few things and returned it. I don’t know how many adjustments I made but that pickup accumulated quite a few air miles between NZ and the UK over the next few months.

Every time we got closer, every adjustment less than the one before. When you get that close you know you’ve got a good pickup. I was at the point when I felt we really had something great but I just needed that confirmation.

Then Covid 19 happened, the mail got too unreliable to send stuff overseas with any confidence of it arriving and the process was put on hold.

At the end of June 2020 I got a call from Gabe Dovaston in Papamoa. He’d done some demos for me with some of my other pickups and was asking if I did a 7 string, just in case, for an Ibanez of his. Well, this seemed like a chance to test my new pickup on fresh ears. I made a copy of the last one I’d sent Graham, the one I was happy with, and got it off in the post. I sat back and waited. It only took a few days and I got a very happy call, he loved it and he’d already made a demo that he’d put on YouTube.

Great news, but what was I going to call it? The pickup was already on YouTube, it wasn’t on my website yet and it didn’t even have a name!

I got on Facebook and asked people to come up with a name; there were so many excellent suggestions but nothing quite did it. In the end this pickup that had taken so much work to develop, traveled so far and refused to go away I called the “Attitude”.

The Attitude is available in 6 and 7 string, for neck and bridge positions.

This old Telecaster Pickup Repair came to me for a re-wind but as you can just see from the picture the problem turned out to be outside the coil.
You can just see the broken wire on the left. That blob of solder is a clue too, this pickup has been messed with.
It’s very common for a pickup to come to me for a full re-wind but it turns out to have a smaller problem.

This one is a fiddly Telecaster Pickup Repair because the broken end is the inner winding but I managed to fix it.

Pickup re-winds are a big part of what I do.

In the early days back in the 1990’s I re-wound a lot of pickups. It was an invaluable introduction into the inner workings of electric guitar pickups.

Back then there were a lot of 60’s and 70’s quality pickups around to practice on, they weren’t as valuable or sought after as they are now. Because of that I got to see how pickups were put together in the old days, the construction, the potting material…

There wasn’t much information available so experimentation was the only way to learn. I made so many bad pickups back then but made a note of every single one, how I’d wound it and what the result was. By using that method I got closer and closer to what I wanted. I also made a note of all the re-winds I did and the original spec if I could get it. I’m still writing in that note book to this day and it’s becoming a fantastic reference tool when I receive an unusual pickup repair from a customer.

I still really enjoy re-winding pickups, I think I have a strong instinct to fix things. I would much rather repair a faulty old pickup than sell a customer a new one. Sometimes, of course, the customer wants a different sound that the old pickup can’t give them and a new pickup is the way to go.

Please feel free to contact me about any faulty pickup by email (mrglynspickups@gmail.com) or by phone (021 912 678).

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcDggiRTQyFec5KAVHsC2xA

Hi all,
just published “Ep#6 MrGlyn Meets Your Maker”with Tony Pepers from Pepers Pedals in Dunedin.

Please help promote NZ made guitar gear by sharing, subscribing and telling your mates.

Pepers Pedals is creating quite a name, not only in New Zealand but in the U.S. The “Dirty Tree Boost” is pushing the front end on amps all over the world while the “Russian Doom Machine” must be the ultimate in fuzz. In this episode I have a chat with Tony about his beginnings, the designs, how he builds his pedals. https://peperspedals.bigcartel.com/​

​https://mrglynspickups.com/​

Hi all, some of you will know how keen I am on NZ made musical gear. We have world class makers here in Aotearoa and the World needs to know about them. Rather than just having a good moan I’ve been trying to think of ways I can help. After many conversations with other small manufacturers I’ve come up with an idea. I’m starting a series of YouTube videos where I chat with NZ makers so we can all get to know them a little better. I figure that seeing and hearing the person behind the product, hearing their story, their philosophy, will help promote what they do beyond just their website. Some of these makers you may not even have heard of. It’s a very simple format, just recording a Skype conversation. There is some editing mainly cutting out my own waffle but I do try and keep edits to a minimum. I am not a professional presenter I’m just an ordinary bloke working with what I’ve got and this is way out of my comfort zone but I hope you’ll find the content interesting. I’ve called the series “MrGlyn Meets Your Maker”.

I hope you all enjoy it and subscribe to my YouTube Channel.

Just posted Ep#5 of “MrGlyn Meets Your Maker” on Youtube. In this one I talk with Russ from Mattsen Guitars about his handmade Resonator guitars. If you have any interest in Resonators, Slide guitar or guitar construction this one is for you.

Please Subscribe and/or Share.

Hi all,

some of you will know how keen I am on NZ made musical gear. We have world class makers here in Aotearoa and the World needs to know about them.

Rather than just having a good moan I’ve been trying to think of ways I can help. After many conversations with other small manufacturers I’ve come up with an idea. I’m starting a series of YouTube videos where I chat with NZ makers so we can all get to know them a little better. I figure that seeing and hearing the person behind the product, hearing their story, their philosophy, will help promote what they do beyond just their website.

Some of these makers you may not even have heard of.

It’s a very simple format, just recording a Skype conversation. There is some editing mainly cutting out my own waffle but I do try and keep edits to a minimum. I am not a professional presenter I’m just an ordinary bloke working with what I’ve got and this is way out of my comfort zone but I hope you’ll find the content interesting.

I called the series MrGlyn Meets Your Maker.

If these videos go any way towards you considering buying NZ made then I’ve succeeded. Please share, link to, subscribe and spread the word, that’s how you can help. Thanks, Glyn. https://mrglynspickups.com/

I’ve been doing a fair few re-winds recently, saving old pickups. This nice old bridge pickup had stopped working. It’s a Fender Strat ‘62 re-issue from 1982. You can see the corrosion around the pole pieces. This corrosion had spread through the pole and caused a break in the windings. I see this all the time with Fender pickups so this is a routine job for me, I must have re-wound hundreds of old Fender pickups.

Once I’d stripped the wire off and cleaned the rust away I lacquered the inside of the pickup and then wrapped a very thin tape around the poles to protect the new windings.

It was just a case of winding it with AWG42 plain enamel wire to the original spec, wax potting and testing it.

The Strat ‘62 re-issue was a great vintage voiced pickup and the guitars were pretty good too.

I get to repair a lot of vintage pickups in the course of my work. If you’re interested in a new Mr Glyn’s Strat Pickup take a look at the Bellbird vintage voiced pickup for Strat. If you like a bit more power then maybe the Tui is for you. It’s an over wound Strat pickup with a steel baseplate to give you a touch more grit in your Strat tone. You can find a full description, demos and sound samples on my website.

You can contact me on mrglynspickups@gmail.com

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcDggiRTQyFec5KAVHsC2xA

Just posted this HSS demo on YouTube, some fantastic playing by Warren Mendonsa from Blackstratblues https://music.blackstratblues.com/ . I urge you all to go and listen to his album “When It’s Time”.

The “Tui”

I’ve wound a lot of Strat pickups since I started in 1995. I started off re-winding cheap pickups and then moved on to repairing old dead Fender pickups. Every experiment was written down in a notebook with tone comments. Back when I started there wasn’t much information available so there was a lot of reverse engineering and a lot of trying things out. That learning time was invaluable to developing instinct for how to change the sound of a pickup. I’ve still got the note book and I’m still adding to it.

In, I think, 2014 a customer of mine approached me wanting a set of Strat pickups. He’s a great blues player and had recently moved from using a Les Paul to a Strat. He described the sound he was after and it seemed to me it was the same as I’d been after myself so I put some time in to designing a pickup set for him.

The “Tui”- hot Strat needed to be most definitely a Strat sound – I hear plenty of Strat replacement pickups that are fine but just not Strat-ish. Secondly I wanted a bit more power, just a bit, enough to make a good old valve amp clip a bit easier than a “vintage” pickup would. And there needed to be dynamics – tickle it and it’s clean, dig in and it grits up. As I was making the original version of this set for a player used to humbuckers I wanted to reduce the ”ping” of the attack. I’ve added steel base plated as standard to this set. This changes the shape of the magnetic field, broadening the harmonic window. They add a wee bit of power, a wee bit of bass and reduce that pesky ping.

The neck pickup needed to have “that” Strat sound with fullness and clarity. It’s the ‘go to’ sound for most Strat players. The middle pickup needed to have some ‘quack’ to it with its own distinctive personality. The bridge pickup shouldn’t be too thin, it needs to have plenty of highs but not too much of that ‘ping’ or it’s almost useless. Then there are the other sounds – positions 2 and 4, mistakenly referred to as ‘out of phase’. They are really just 2 pickups in parallel. It’s hard to predict what those sounds will be, there was a lot of experimenting.

So I consulted my old note book and wound a lot of pickups and fitted them in a few test Strats. I’ve been lucky enough to have some great players as repair customers and so I was able to get quite a few opinions.

Eventually I was happy and I fitted a set for my ex Les Paul customer and he loved them straight away. A few months later he contacted me to say he was still loving them. I love it when players do that.

I’ve fitted resulting sets into a lot of instruments and it turns out that not only blues players like them, they seem to work for everyone. I shouldn’t be surprised, the Stratocaster is such a versatile guitar, of course they do.

Further experiments have shown they balance really well as part of a HSS set with either my Integrity or Cloud Nine humbuckers in the bridge position. https://mrglynspickups.com/2020/03/29/tui-hot-strat-set/

“Integrity” Humbucker

Every pickup manufacturer makes a “Vintage” humbucker based on the Gibson PAF, of course they do – old Gibsons sound so good.

So how come they all sound so different? Well, the simple answer is that PAF’s were all different. I’ve been a full time luthier since 1995, whenever I come across an old humbucker I test the ohms and the gause and have a good listen. They’re all different. My conclusion is that pickup manufacturers have taken the PAF they like and based their own version on that. Old PAF’s vary so much so modern ones do as well.

I like my own version to be clear sounding, have obvious string separation and definition and to keep clarity no matter how much gain. The mids must be strong and woody, this is not a “scooped” pickup. The clean sound needs to be chimey and clear with no mush; through a valve amp I want clarity. When I tickle it I want clean and vocal sounding when it clips. The bridge pickup needs to be well behaved with high gain and clear with enough cut through so the drummer knows you’re there. The neck smooth, clear and articulate. Warm but with none of the boom you get with a more powerful pickup.

I don’t want much do I.

My “Vintage” Humbucker has an Alnico II magnet and I’ve used plain enamel insulated magnet wire with asymmetric coils to open up the mids. The very first pickup I ever made back in 1995 was a PAF style and I’ve been tweaking the recipe ever since. Like all my pickups I’ve used a number of test pilot players in its development as well as gigging it myself. It wasn’t until around 2015 that I settled on this particular design. I did a gig with a set in a PRS SE series only last weekend – sounded great to me.

The full and honest sound of this pickup along with it’s timeless tone inspired the name “Integrity”. https://mrglynspickups.com/2020/03/29/blue-sky-vintage-humbucker/

Big Noise Amplification

Just posted Ep#4 of MrGlyn Meets Your Maker withBig Noise Amplification. It would be great if you could help support Kiwi made musical gear by subscribing or sharing.

Stephan Gilberg makes a huge range of guitar pedals from his workshop in Nelson NZ.

In this episode he talks about pedal design, the inspiration behind his creations and what drives him.

If you’re at all interested in unique guitar sounds, expanding on the traditional palette or just want something funky on the floor then this episode is for you. https://bignoiseamplification.com/

https://www.facebook.com/BigNoise-Amplification-310448832757786

Mr Glyn’s Pickups – NEW

Hi all, some of you will know how keen I am on NZ made musical gear. We have world class makers here in Aotearoa and the World needs to know about them. Rather than just having a good moan I’ve been trying to think of ways I can help. After many conversations with other small manufacturers I’ve come up with an idea. I’m starting a series of YouTube videos where I chat with NZ makers so we can all get to know them a little better. I figure that seeing and hearing the person behind the product, hearing their story, their philosophy, will help promote what they do beyond just their website. Some of these makers you may not even have heard of. It’s a very simple format, just recording a Skype conversation. There is some editing mainly cutting out my own waffle but I do try and keep edits to a minimum. I am not a professional presenter I’m just an ordinary bloke working with what I’ve got and this is way out of my comfort zone but I hope you’ll find the content interesting. I’ve called the series “MrGlyn Meets Your Maker”. In episode #1 I’m talking with Aiden from Archetype Guitars in Palmerston North who very graciously agreed to go first. If these videos go any way towards you considering buying NZ made then I’ve succeeded. Please share, link to, subscribe and spread the word, that’s how you can help. Thanks, Glyn https://mrglynspickups.com/