Fender WIDE RANGE HUMBUCKERS suck ! !

maw4neu

Crikey . . Jamie at the Creamery offers upgrades from as little as £30 which is pretty cheap, all the way up to £90 for a full custom rewind packed neatly into the original Fender WRHB cover . .

OilCityPickups

Which all goes to prove ... keep it UK chaps ...

GuitarMonkey said:

A covered 6-string humbucker from Bare Knuckle is £117 without any options.

Tim must of course play his own game ... I prefer to price to give people a hand wound alternative at a Duncan or Dimarzio pricepoint.

ToneControl

I firmly believe that chasing accuracy with old designs does not guarantee the best results. Designs and technology have improved, and I'd happily consider the modern variants. Sometimes the old stuff still works best, not more often not.

Can I just check - are the WRHB in the pawnshops the same size as the originals and the Oil city version?

what would work in the bridge? I don't go for the overwound mid-heavy ones, normally quieter PAFs and single coils

 

OilCityPickups

My Wide Ranges are the same as the Japanese and US ones (and vintage 1972 ones) as far as size and fitting ... so providing they used that 'model' for the Pawnshop ... mine ... and indeed pretty much everyone else's WR will fit. The string spacing on mine is as per the 1970 originals mind ... in otherwise wide at bridge and neck ... so the strings don't go directly over the centres of the poles ... exactly like the originals.
As to the bridge ... you need something a bit poky to compete with a proper WR ... personally I'd go for a bucker with a fair bit of top ... but over wound enough to split nicely for single coil tones.

ChrisMusic

@TheGuitarWeasel said:

GuitarMonkey said:    A covered 6-string humbucker from Bare Knuckle is £117 without any options.

Tim must of course play his own game ... I prefer to price to give people a hand wound alternative at a Duncan or Dimarzio pricepoint.

Which is, of course, why I won't be playing Tim's game (with all due respect)

And will be playing Ash's game, the rules on his seem pretty fair to me. (when I've sussed what I am doing)  

Heartfeltdawn

GuitarMonkey said:

ThePrettyDamned said:

Bloody hell. I knew they need to be more expensive (only after you described the building process) but 120 quid for A pickup?

You'd need to be slightly anal over it, but if it is the most accurate you want...

A covered 6-string humbucker from Bare Knuckle is £117 without any options.

I don't see that as expensive. For me, the pickups are the most important part of an electric guitar. Average wood and fab pickups sound a damn sight better than great wood and average pickups. 

£117 for a pickup is no more ridiculous than the sums many here will pay for an overdrive or delay pedal. 

ddlooping

Heartfeltdawn said:

£117 for a pickup is no more ridiculous than the sums many here will pay for an overdrive or delay pedal. 

It seems to me the markup is ridiculously high though compare to other pups of similar quality.
You do end-up paying for the name.

ChrisMusic

Heartfeltdawn said:  £117 for a pickup is no more ridiculous than the sums many here will pay for an overdrive or delay pedal. 

ddlooping said:   It seems to me the markup is ridiculously high though compare to other pups of similar quality.

You do end-up paying for the name.

Aye, that's the power of marketing hype for you, and the faith that many put into: "more expensive is best".

The value for money argument seems somewhat absent, especially when a product is virtually identical in performance

Buy with your ears, and bear in mind as @ddlooping says: (often) "You do end-up paying for the name"

JookyChap

To be fair to Bare Knuckle they have gone the route of selling them retail, so the prices have to be higher to cover the cut of the middle men, never mind advertising  and other marketing which Oil City and Mojo don't really get into.

What's disappointed me more with them is the lack of innovation and the fact that they have moved away from the situation where you could get things tailored for you - to speak to the guy who is going to wind you your pickup for your guitar and style.Which is OK if you are intent on building a brand, I guess.

I think in a few years we'll be looking at them in the same way as we see Seymour Duncan and Kent Armstrong now, memories of something innovative, interesting and special but a mass produced reality sold on the back of a brand name.

OilCityPickups

JookyChap said:

To be fair to Bare Knuckle they have gone the route of selling them retail, so the prices have to be higher to cover the cut of the middle men, never mind advertising  and other marketing which Oil City and Mojo don't really get into.

What's disappointed me more with them is the lack of innovation and the fact that they have moved away from the situation where you could get things tailored for you - to speak to the guy who is going to wind you your pickup for your guitar and style.Which is OK if you are intent on building a brand, I guess.

I think in a few years we'll be looking at them in the same way as we see Seymour Duncan and Kent Armstrong now, memories of something innovative, interesting and special but a mass produced reality sold on the back of a brand name.

I think you are probably quite right in many ways. I think BK's long game is very heavily focused on the other side of the Atlantic ... and I wish Tim luck ... especially butting heads with Larry (DiMarzio)

stickyfiddle

Re BKP I think the name is built up enough that you can also sell them easily if you don't like them. No disrespect to GW but you can't yet flip Oil City, Mojo or Creamery stuff on ebay without losing much coin. That allows BK to up the prices a bit- just as a Fender is easier to sell than a G&L. Doesn't mean the BK/Fender is the best product though, as we all know

OilCityPickups

I build pickups for people who play guitar ... not those who want to use them as trading chips

I do seriously hope that anyone who has one of my pickups and might have  'fallen out of love' with it would ring me before selling. I take mahoosive care to 'fit' a pickup to a guitarist and their instrument ... and if I get it wrong I will always do my best to rebuild, rethink rewind ... whatever it takes.

ICBM

TheGuitarWeasel said:

I think you are probably quite right in many ways. I think BK's long game is very heavily focused on the other side of the Atlantic ... and I wish Tim luck ... especially butting heads with Larry (DiMarzio)

Do DiMarzio hold the patent on Victorian-style boxing, too? They invented it back in 1851 of course. Or they might have a trademark on moustaches, I'm not sure.

ThePrettyDamned

ICBM;64602" said:

TheGuitarWeasel said:



I think you are probably quite right in many ways. I think BK's long game is very heavily focused on the other side of the Atlantic ... and I wish Tim luck ... especially butting heads with Larry (DiMarzio)












Do DiMarzio hold the patent on Victorian-style boxing, too? They invented it back in 1851 of course. Or they might have a trademark on moustaches, I'm not sure.

I heard he patented patenting things.

ICBM

ThePrettyDamned said:

I heard he patented patenting things.

lol

They do genuinely have a trademark on the term 'PAF', which is pretty close to that!

It seems the US grants patents and trademarks in clear contravention of the prior use and 'obvious' exclusions.

OilCityPickups

The US big boys play very hard ball indeed, they have the world wide pie cut more or less in half ... with Seymour out a little on top if I remember rightly from the figures I chased down some time ago. All the smaller brands are very small potatoes compared to SeyMarzio ... I don't see them surrendering a place at the trough as easily as all that.

yakacm

maw4neu said:

I have a MIM 72 Reissue Telecaster Custom . . the bridge pickup has already been swapped out for one of Jamies Finest Creamery jobbies but the neck pickup is flatter than the flattest botty burp in Flatville . . . To make things worse its MASSIVELY bigger than a standard humbucker which means you either have to get the original pickup rewound by someone who has ears ( unlike the original manufacturer ) or come up with an adapter plate that takes a standard humbucker and picks up on the WRHB mounting holes.

Ggggrrrrrrr Fender, you make me so mad ! !

Rant over . . . . That said though the Mexican 72 Reissue Telecaster Custom's are a fantastic guitar ! ! !

Oh . . . Fender you make me so happy I could smile :-)

There is a 3rd option and that's get a new custom scratch plate made and fit a normal size humbucker, which is what I did and fitted a Bare Knuckle. This was about 12 years ago, can't remember who did the custom scratch plate, but it wasn't expensive.

Gassage

I have had the MIM and I now have a 73. Original WRHBs are quite stunning..somewhere between a HB and a Sc in tone. Nothing like the reissues.

i believe Fender let their licence to use the WRHB Lapse....it was designed and licensed by Seth Lover

victorludorum

TheGuitarWeasel said:

GuitarMonkey said:

TheGuitarWeasel said:

Myself, Mojo and the Creamery are, I think the players in the UK ... though there are lots more in the States ... though postage and VAT kinda knobbles them a bit.

Each builder seems to have their own mods to the original design.

With all due respect to @TheGuitarWeasel, Curtis Novak seems to have the most accurate repro. http://curtisnovak.com/pickups/wrhb.shtml

Absolutely, the Curtis Novac is pretty accurate and also, unless I'm mistaken, $190 each (£117.58) ... which will be plus carriage ($40) and 20%vat.
I believe Mark at Mojo and myself are sub £90 each ...

At current exchange rates you're looking at more like 150 quid plus.