Hanson
Guitars
BY CHRIS KIES
Firenze T- 90
Cigno
It all started with pickups for John and Bo Pirruccello of Hanson Guitars—bass
pickups to be specific. In 2005, John—who’s
also CEO and co-owner of Lakland Basses—
wanted to develop a line of pickups and electronics voiced for Lakland instruments. “My
brother Bo expressed that he’d like to take a
crack at developing some pickups, so he put
his money where his mouth was and headed
up the project,” John says. “About a year later,
we had developed a 3-band internal preamp
and hum-canceling pickup system called the
LH3.” Another year later, the Pirruccello
brothers had a full line of single-coil, split-coil,
and hum-canceling Lakland-Hanson pickups
for almost every bass heading out the door.
So the next logical step for the duo was
to venture into the copper-coiled frontier of
guitar pickups. “My favorite guitar pickup
has always been the P- 90, because of its tonal
qualities and voicings,” John says. “So Bo and
I—still thinking along the lines of expanding
our pickup business—came up with what we
felt was an exceptional-sounding set of P-90s
that had a clear, articulate tone and a strong,
focused sound. We try to take pickups to the
edge, where they start to lose the frequencies
we like, and then push the envelope through
coil shapes to go a little further—it’s subtle
stuff, but plenty of people hear it!”
Soon after their first P- 90 creation, the
Pirruccellos started pondering which guitar
they should put them in. John and Bo com-
piled some ideas and qualities from their
favorite, go-to guitars—like fatter, baseball
bat-like neck profiles, Tune-o-matic bridges,
Bigsby vibratos, and other appointments that
they felt would complement their pickups.
Hanson Guitars made its official launch
at the 2009 Summer NAMM Show, and
they made a pretty big splash. “The original
concept of Hanson Guitars was to build
affordable, professional-grade instruments
that sound and feel great,” John says. “We
don’t mind being a small shop, and we’re
happy to spend as much time on an instrument’s setup as necessary to make if feel
good during quality-control checks when
the assembled guitars arrive in our Chicago
shop—just what I personally would hope
for from a manufacturer.”
Firenze T- 90
Hanson’s newest model—the Firenze
T- 90—has a solid ash body with a quilted-maple top and a translucent orange finish. It features a T-style control assembly,
