Huw Price ’s Nitty Gritty
The versatile Filter’Tron has been char ming guitarists since the late 1950s
It’s astonishing that Chet Atkins, George Harrison, Neil Young, Steven Stills, Malcom Young, Pete Townshend and Brian Setzer all relied on the same pickup to achieve some of their greatest tones. Whether it’s country fingerstyle picking, 60s rock, indie jangle, power pop or classic rock, the Filter’Tron can do it all. Even so, this particular pickup fell out of favour for over a decade after music became heavier and louder, and players became sustain‐obsessed. The main issue was that they were exclusive to hollowbodied Gretsch guitars that were largely unsuited to the latest trends.
In the early 1980s, a Long Island greaser called Brian Setzer brought his virtuoso chops to the rockabilly revival and made Gretsch guitars cool again. Goths and indie players followed suit, with the likes of Billy Duffy, Kirk Brandon, Roddy Frame, Ian McNabb and Johnny Marr breaking new sonic ground. When Fred Gretsch relaunched the family firm during the 1990s, pickup manufacturers gradually got in on the Filter’Tron act. And these days, it’s possible to retrofit Filter’Trons into a wide variety of guitars without making major modifications.
Getting ’Bucked
Was the first humbucker Seth Lover’s Gibson PAF or the Filter’Tron Ray Butts designed for Chet Atkins? The actual answer is neither. The ‘humbucking’ principle had its origin in transformer manufacturing and was employed by the tape machine company Ampex for hum-cancelling record heads, and microphone manufacturer Electro-Voice. The first humbucking pickups actually appeared in the late 1930s and were used by Baldwin, Vega and others, while Les Paul reportedly employed humcancelling dummy coils and wound his own stacked humbuckers back in the 1940s.
Seth Lover had already used a humbucking circuit in the power supply choke of an amplifier he designed for Gibson and understood that the same technique could be applied to pickups. Meanwhile, over in Cairo, Illinois, Ray Butts was busy working on a humbucking pickup design of his own. Ray had established his reputation as a custom amp builder, and his Echosonic amplifiers featured an integrated tape machine to replicate the studio echo effects popularised by Les Paul and Sam Phillips. They sounded excellent, and Ray’s tape echo design was so innovative that Mike Battle and Don Dixon basically copied it to develop the Maestro Echoplex. Clearly, Ray was well versed in tape technology and later confirmed that the Ampex hum‐cancelling record head inspired his pickup design.
Chet Atkins, George Harrison, Malcom Young and Brian Setzer all relied on the same pickup
Prior to the official launch of the PAF and Filter’Tron, Ray a
