The MOD SQUAD
While we’re celebrating the best of the year’s reviewed gear, The Mod Squad has had its hands on some stellar kit, too. Dave Burrluck says 2023 might well go down as The Year Of The Pickup!
Retrofit pickups have dominated our modding coverage over the past 12 months. While that’s of little surprise bearing in mind the crucial effect they can have in upgrading or altering the voice of your guitar, new pickup sets or new-to-us pickup makers seem to pop up at an increasing rate. So many pickups, so little time…
And it’s not just dedicated pickup makers that are adding to the ever-tempting market out there. Increasingly, it seems that guitar companies now view the aftermarket pickup as good business, too. After all, many pickup makers (understatement) have been ‘improving’, cloning or making endless variations on the classic pickup themes since this whole thing kicked off. But the classic pickup designs of Fender and Gibson are increasingly joined by ‘less popular’ designs, either from their history like the trendy offset Jazzmaster and Jaguar, or Gibson’s Staple P-90. Gretsch’s Filter’Tron and other styles are now wellcovered, too, even the previous single-coil Dynasonic, while the less specific Gold Foil genre is uber-trendy at the moment.
Ironically, the rise in quality of Eastern Asian guitar manufacturing means even a lowly instrument’s pickup set sounds considerably better than it did a decade ago, and many of those are offered as retrofits. Ihad agood example of that at the start of our gear year when I fitted a pair of Roswell pickups (pic 1), as used by low-end champs Harley Benton and made in considerable numbers somewhere in Asia. The units in question were a Filter’Tron and a Gold Foil style that I bought new for £86. With them loaded into an equally low-end StewMac Offset kit build, Iwas more than surprised, especially considering the cost/tone quality ratio.
Meanwhile, Wilkinson pickups feature on plenty of affordable brands, but Trev has also been working hard on developing anew upper-level tier called the ‘R Series’. The Korean-made PAF repros, the RSeries Caliber 5761 WVC set (which cost £192 with solid nickel silver covers) proved quite exceptional (pic 2).
But the big guns aren’t getting left behind, either. For the first time in its history, Fender launched a mini-range of pickups that hadn’t previously been used on actual guitars, centring on CuNiFe and Cobalt Chrome magnets in a pair of Jazzmaster sets, and a pair for Strat and Teles respectively. The CuNiFe/Cobalt Chrome Jazzmaster set (£279; pic 3) haven’t left that expe
