Oil City Pickups: 2020 ... the year of the Neo-X-Breed

OilCityPickups

As many of you will know, here at Oil City Pickups we always try to stay at the cutting edge of pickup design. We started working with neodymium about two years ago because of it's huge potential in enabling new tone possibilities and breaking the traditional mold of what a guitar pickup was capable of.  

Guitarists today are making more and more demands on their pickups ... down tuning and extended range instruments are pushing the limits of conventional design, and we thought it was time for a radical change. Enter the Oil City Masterwound Neo-X-Breed.

Our first move into neodymium power was the 'Graduated Field' neo humbucker. This uses different tuned length neo magnets for each string in order to control string pull. After a lot of testing and putting pickups into players hands we settled on a final design. These work best with 250k pots as the frequency response is far more like a single coil than a traditional humbucker. 

We wanted however to produce a Neo powered pickup that would be a straight drop in for any HB equipped guitar, and work with 500k pots like any normal humbucker. After a lot more testing we came up with the Neo-X-Breed: a pickup that uses the advantages of the stunning bass tightness of neodymium (far better than even ceramic) and combines it with the warmer, more organic response of alnico for the higher strings. 

The Neo-X-Breed and the Graduated Field humbucker have been available for a while on Stone Wolf guitars (see above pic), and the Neo-X-Breed is about to become standard equipment on a new Californian made range of guitars (more on that when I have the go ahead from the maker to go public) ... but because of the complex nature of their construction we have not made them available to the general public. That will change in early 2020. 

The Neo-X-Breed will be available in two versions: the higher output 'Chainsaw'  and the low wind 'Hacksaw' (with seperate OEM spec models for our makers). 

The Chainsaw will be around 12k bridge and 9k neck (though power wise, will be similar in output to other company's 'high output' offerings) ... the lower relative winding level making them way more open and harmonically rich. 

The 'Hacksaw' ... as well as being an 'artist' pickup (more of that at a later date) uses a 'PAF' style wind level, suited to many applications where you'd normally use a conventional low output humbucker ... and particularly in the  'doom metal' and 'post metal' genres where it works super well with fuzz and distortion pedals.

More and more of our pickups are being bought for use in all types of metal ... but these X-Breeds are far from one trick ponies :-)



     

SquireJapan

Colour me very excited indeed. Super keen to get my hands on the Neo pickups.

Anything that plays in the same spectrum as the Blackbird pickups is super interesting. Blackbird bridge pickup is by far my favourite pickup of all time.

No joke!

OilCityPickups

SquireJapan said:

Colour me very excited indeed. Super keen to get my hands on the Neo pickups.

Anything that plays in the same spectrum as the Blackbird pickups is super interesting. Blackbird bridge pickup is by far my favourite pickup of all time.

No joke!

The mid output Neo-X-Breeds have a similar output to my blackbirds ... but of course with the advantages of neodymium for the bass strings. 

sgosden

Such a cool idea 

OilCityPickups

sgosden said:

Such a cool idea 

We should have a demo instrument at the Birmingham Guitar Show for folks to try out :-)

Roland

To avoid adding to the volume wars, and make sure that the pickup can he heard clearly, would it be possible to have a headphone box that people can plug their own earphones into?

OilCityPickups

Roland said:

To avoid adding to the volume wars, and make sure that the pickup can he heard clearly, would it be possible to have a headphone box that people can plug their own earphones into?

we should be able to do that, we ran purely on headphones last year :-)

We were good boys