One of my favorite projects is pickup installation. There’s omething very satisfying about taking a pile of wires, coils, and potentiometers and turning them into an awesome tone
machine. Recently, I had the opportunity to install a set of vintage
humbuckers designed by the late, great Seth Lover. His pickups are
considered to be the Holy Grail of tone. Out of thousands of pickups
on the market, few can compare to those created by Seth Lover.
Project Overview
The guitar I was hired to retro-
fit was a reissue Fender ’ 72 Tele
Thinline. My job was to remove
the two ’ 72 reissue Wide Range
humbuckers and replace them
with two original Seth Lover
Wide Range pickups that came
from a ’ 72 Telecaster Deluxe the
client owned in the mid-’70s.
The guitar is long gone, but
amazingly he’d held onto the
pickups along with their har-
ness. For almost 40 years, they’d
been stored in a box and hauled
back and forth across the
country. The client didn’t even
know if they still worked, but
he wanted me to put them in
his modern Thinline. The swap
sounded simple enough, but
every project has its challenges,
and you never know what lurks
beneath the control plate until
you get in there. We’re about
to find out what can—and
did—happen.
Who Is Seth Lover?
Before we dive into the details of
pickup replacement, it’s worth
taking a moment to get some
background on Seth Lover. He
invented the original PAF (Patent
Applied For) humbucker in
1955, while working for Gibson
(Lover’s tenure spanned 1952-
1967). The PAF humbucker was
the first successful attempt at
creating a hum-canceling pickup,
and it revolutionized the electric
guitar industry. Lover’s invention
virtually eliminated the 60-cycle
hum associated with single-coil
pickups, and it allowed guitarists
to play louder and with more
dynamics. It also introduced a
new sound to the electric guitar
palette—a fatter, rounder tone
that worked equally well for mel-
low jazz and cranked rock ’n’ roll.
Lover began working for Fender
in 1967, and stayed with the
company until he retired in 1975.
In 1972, Seth invented the Wide
Range humbucker for Fender.
The Original Wide
Range vs. the Reissue
As I discovered, you can’t judge a
pickup by its cover. The original
and reissue pickups look nearly
identical, but they couldn’t be
more different. In lieu of a
typical humbucker’s slugs and
adjustable pole pieces, the origi-
nal ’ 72 Wide Range (WR) pick-
up has “cunife” (copper/nickel/
ferrite) threaded rod magnets.
Additionally, it has overwound
coils (consisting of about 6,800
wraps of copper wire) and cranks
out approximately 10.6k Ω of
DC resistance. In other words,
it’s a loud and bright power-
house of a pickup.
Red w o o d
Expect the lightweight champion
of the world to be like this:
a full-grown Huber, but lighter than
anything you‘ve ever seen before.
Tasteful the way it looks, elegant
in the way it sounds, this redwood
redefines the relationship between
weight and sound. Expect its pure
tone to take over your world.
Nik Huber Guitars
Borsigstr. 13
63110 Rodgau /Germany
Fon + 49 - (0) 61 06 - 77 21 66
Fax + 49 - (0) 61 06 - 77 21 67
www.nikhuber-guitars.com
