RAISING THE TONE
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
