Patent Applied For Pickups (Part 1)

Back in the 1950s, single-coil pickup noise was a big issue for players and all the major guitar manufacturers were aware of it. Gibson employee Seth Lover had adapted a well-proven humbucking circuit for the power supply choke in his GA-90 amp design and realised the same idea could be used to make a humbucking pickup. Ted McCarty gave Seth the go-ahead in 1954, and by the following year he had a working prototype with a plain cover and flat slugs.

Seth considered P-90-style adjustable polepieces unnecessary but relented when Gibson’s marketing team argued it would give them a good selling point. Others were working on noise-free pickups, too, with Les Paul’s guitar tech, Tom Doyle, reporting Les using a hum-cancelling dummy coil in the 1940s and winding his own stacked humbuckers. Meanwhile, in Cairo, Illinois, Ray Butts was developing a humbucker that would become the Gretsch Filter’Tron.

The first Gibson humbuckers appeared on steel guitars in 1956, but the PAF and