RAISING THE TONE …
The mini-humbucker deserves better than also-ran status as Gibson’s ‘other’ pickup, writes Jamie Dickson
While we were putting together issue 492’s tribute to 70 years of the Les Paul, I asked Gibson’s senior director of product development, Mat Koehler, what his favourite pickups for Les Pauls were. While acknowledging the allure of the fabled PAF, he named the humble mini-humbucker as his favourite, under-rated tonemaker.
“It’s just a very specific sweet tone that I really enjoy,” he mused.“And a lot of the great recordings of the 70s and beyond were done on mini-humbuckers – and you just don’t realise it.”
Not to be confused with the similar-looking Firebird pickup, which was constructed by winding coils round two bar magnets mounted edgewise on a baseplate, the minihumbucker, as its name suggests, was somewhat truer to the concept of a downsized standard ’bucker. Like its full-size brethren, the Gibson mini-humbucker featured an Alnico bar magnet laid flat on a nickel-silver baseplate at the base of the pickup, with two unpotted coils mounted on top. One coil featured adjustable nickel-steel pole screws to conduct the magnet’s field upwards towards the strings. The other coil, less conventionally, featured a barlike slug of steel, mounted edgewise, at its centre. This also served to conduct the underlying magnet’s field upwards through the coil, though unlike the screw poles it was nonheight-adjustable. Typically, DC resistance was between 6 and 7kohms, only a tad cooler than the average PAF.
So far, so interesting. But why, with a successful fullsize humbucker and P-90s to play with, did Gibson feel the need to produce a third mainstream pickup design? The mini-humbucker was sonically brighter and crisper than either a PAF or a P-90, but was that the main reason it was developed? Mat Koehler picks up the story, which, as was so often the case, had commercial not sonic imperatives behind it.
“The story there is that when Gibson purchased Epiphone, the idea was that they could now find new markets outside of Gibson dealers. They could find dealers in competitive areas that wouldn’t sell Gibson against Gibson, so they created the Epiphone brand, basically, as an offshoot of Gibson,” Mat explains. “It was also approached more as [a project led by specific individuals]. So it was Ward Arbanas who was leading Epiphone and then the mind behind the new models was Andy Nelson, one of their performers and salespeople who did all the Gibson clinics and things. So that was how those designs came about.
“But it was very
