BLUEPRINT: Sunbear Pickups
Stuart Robson of Sunbear Pickups is a man who loves to talk tone. So it was no surprise that, during a casual conversation with the UK-based maker, the subject of the best-sounding humbuckers we’d ever heard came up. I nominated a spectacular set I’d played on an early 60s ES-335 at Vintage ‘n’ Rare Guitars in Bath.
“What year was the 335?” asked Stuart, somewhat intrigued.
“1961,” I replied.
“Ah…” he said – and thereby hung a tale.
It transpired Stuart had come to believe the pickups made right at the end of the fabled PAF humbucker’s production run ( just as it transitioned into the so-called ‘Patent Number’ humbucker that was its successor) had something really special about them – a kind of warm but biting tone that was just a tad crisper and more incisive than many of the PAFs that went before.
By around mid-to-late 1961, Stuart explained, when the single-cut Les Paul was already being replaced by the SG-shape Les Paul, Gibson’s humbuckers were in an interesting place. On the one hand, they were becoming more standardised, as the company moved to using the then-new Meteor winding machines in a more systematic way. On the other
