JAMES TYLER ELECTRIC GUITAR PICKUPS

Sound Clips

We invited a couple of friends into the studio to play our full line of pickups.
Listen to the results and see what they had to say about each of them.

Pickups aren’t magic, and then they are…

Designing a pickup requires the understanding of magnets, metals, and wire. You also need to know how to properly combine these elements. Once a great pickup is developed and is matched to the right guitar, the science that made it happen turns into magic, with the sound of your guitar at the center of it all.

There has been a lot of talk about using scatter and hand winding to try and recreate the sound of the old 50s and 60s pickups. While it is a worthy cause, the truth is that not all of those pickups sounded good. They were inconsistent, some sounding great and others dull. We’ve taken the time to analyze the winding patterns of pickups and have developed one of our single coils and humbuckers that produces a full range of tones and good presence at the top. Out patterns are programmed into computer controlled winding machines, which insures they all come out the same. These things sound great, consistently.

The quality of materials is also very important when making pickups. The cloth covered hookup wire that is still so popular has about 7 strands of tin plated copper wire. Compare that to the wire we use, which has 18 strands of individually silver plated oxygen free copper wire that is then insulated with Teflon. Plus, these wires are braided much like high-end audio cable so they don’t hum when you touch them. The 4-conductor wire used on the humbuckers is made to the same specs and is a larger gauge than industry standard.

We do not have an inventory of pickups
Each one is wound when ordered