RAISING THE TONE …
Want P-90 tone but with a bit more clarity? Try a staple pickup, writes Jamie Dickson, as he readies his modded Tele for a new addition
Many years ago, in one of the first issues of Guitaristmagazine I ever read, there was a report from a vintage guitar show. Among the pics of Paisley Telecasters and ’Bursts was a shot of a black Les Paul Custom fitted with what, to my inexperienced eyes, appeared to be an unusual neck pickup. It had chunky rectangular polepieces and looked like a relic from an earlier era. This, I later discovered, was Gibson’s Alnico Vpickup, also known as the ‘Staple’ pickup because of those evenly spaced rectangular polepieces.
It was not all that surprising that I didn’t know what it was, however, because it had a short life in Gibson’s guitars. Introduced in 1954, it was designed to take the warm tone of the P-90 pickups fitted to most Gibson electrics at that point and add a little more clarity to the equation. Stuart Robson of Sunbear Pickups believes it was created to placate that eternal tinkerer Les Paul, who often fitted heavily modified pickups of his own devising to his Les Pauls, sometimes home-wound on DeArmond pickup internals. This would hardly have reflected well on Gibson’s then-standard P-90, the stock pickup of nearly all Les Pauls from 1952 to 1957, so Stuart believes they devised the Alnico Vpickup to get closer to the style of neck pickup Les really wanted.
“Like so many things with the early Gibson stories, you never quite know what’s absolutely the truth or what’s what people have surmised over the years,” Stuart says with a chuckle. “But my personal take on this is that there are pictures of Les Paul in the early 50s playing what were probably the very first Les Paul Customs. And you can see that in the neck of those guitars, he had pulled out what was presumably a stock P-90 and put in [what looks like] a Dynasonic [also known as DeArmond Model 2000] pickup.
“So, while I’ve never heard this directly from anyone at Gibson, my presumption has always been that Gibson probably turned around to Les and said, ‘Well, we really would rather not have a Gretsch pickup in the guitar that you’re playing on stage every night. Why don’t we make something which is basically the same thing?’ Because the truth is that the original Gibson Alnico Vstaple pickup – with the exception of the wire and the shape of the magnet – is, in terms of construction, almost a direct replication of the Dynasonic.
“Nearly everything about it is the same, right down to the way that the magnets are raised and lowered,” Stuart continues. “So I think I think probably what Gibson were doing was trying to
