Another day in The Mod Squad, another pickup inspired by the Gibson PAF. Should we be excited? Well, the recipe used here comes directly from Seth Lover aka Mr Humbucker himself
Chances are you’ll have played a guitar – or even purchased one – with a Wilkinson pickup on it and, odds on, it’ll be an instrument with a pretty lowly price tag. In fact, although Trev Wilkinson has designed hardware that has, and is, used by many top pros (and we can include the late, great Jeff Beck here) via licensing deals with numerous Asian factories, affordability has been central to the brand for a few decades now. It’s often said that you can successfully go down in price point – Gibson/Epiphone, Fender/ Squier, PRS USA/PRS SE and so on – but going the other way is less common. And yet that’s exactly what Trev has done with a raft of new ‘premium’ hardware and – get to the point! – anew range of R Series pickups that includes single coils and humbuckers for the usual suspects.
The new Wilkinson website states: “The R series of pickups is the result of years of listening to pickups, time spent with legendary inventors such as Seth Lover and Leo Fender discussing all aspects about sound, materials and production methods. Add these ingredients to hours and hours of testing and tweaking and you have the R series, our finest pickups.”
The humbucking Caliber collection starts with the 5761 (which we have here, pictured above) then moves up in output with the 7484, followed by the high-output 7884 – all use Alnico V magnets. The 9020 moves to a ceramic magnet, with “classic PAF tone but higher output and four-conductor hook-up”, we’re told. Finally, and a little more uniquely, the 2020 uses one coil with a ceramic magnet and steel slugs, the other coil with Alnico V rod magnets.
There’s no truck with boutique packaging. Our 5761s arrive well packed in cardboard and brown paper that goes straight in the recycling bin. We have no problem with the outer appearance, either. The baseplate is nickel silver as are the unplated covers, which are lightly scuffed for a subtly used look and will obviously tarnish quickly in use. We have vintage-style single-conductor wiring, so these are not intended to split, and the only way to change the phase – intentionally, or to match the different phase of another brand pickup if you were purchasing just one – means removing the cover and reversing the magnet.
Plug In
Using a base-spec Knaggs Kenai as the donor guitar, swapping out vintage-spec pickups such as these is probably the easiest modding job there is that involves your soldering iron – the musical equivalent of mastering the 1st position F barre chord. So long as your strings aren’t really dead,
