A Winding RoAd
Bare Knuckle Pickups’ founder, Tim Mills, shares some insider knowledge surrounding Greeny’s hallowed out-of-phase tone and reveals how he managed to nail that elusive sound with his PG Blues set of humbuckers… Words Rod Brakes 64 GUITARIST APRIL 2020
What is it that makes Greeny unique? “A great deal of what constitutes tone is in the fingers, of course. But ’59 Les Pauls like Greeny do have a reputation for being bright, lively, resonant guitars – certainly the ones I’ve played have all been pretty consistent in that respect.”
To what extent do an electric guitar’s acoustic properties affect its amplified sound, do you think? “The way a guitar resonates has more of an effect on the harmonics that come off the string than anything else. A guitar pickup is an electromagnetic transducer. It has to have something ferrous moving in the magnetic field to create a current, so it can’t ‘listen’ to the wood, but it will listen to the overtones that come off the string. And in my experience, the main thing that affects what comes off the string is how the neck resonates in relation to the body. The whole construction of the guitar affects how the string resonates – particularly the type of neck joint, but also the type of timbers that are used to strengthen, or not strengthen, the neck; the bridge; the layout of the machineheads; the nut material; the fret material. It all goes into the pot to alter the way that the string will resonate, and that is what the pickup will then be able to listen to.”
How did you go about nailing that classic Greeny tone? “I tend to wind by ear. After a great deal of R&D and playing around with a lot of Les Pauls, I was quite happy that I’d got it. In the end, I settled for just slightly underneath 8kohms for the bridge and just under 7.5kohms for the neck pickup. With that, I found that when the two were paired in the middle position with both volumes flat out, I wasn’t getting a massive volume drop like you get with a fully out-of-phase pickup. I thought, ‘Right, that’s usable,’ and it also sounded like what I was hearing. It was backing up the stories I’d been told.”
There have been a lot of stories about Greeny over the years… “There are plenty of stories going around about the neck pickup. Some people say that the magnet was fitted the wrong way around, meaning it has reverse polarity in relation to the bridge pickup – that would give you an out-of-phase sound in the middle position. I’ve spoken to people who are 100 per cent adamant that it’s magnetically out of phase, because they’ve tested it. And fair enough; I wouldn’t contest that. All I would say is, that’s always assuming the guitar has the same pickups in that it did originally. As with a lot of these guitars, they do get tinkered with, and Greeny is no exception. It’s certainly ‘been to the repair shop’, shall we say, on several occasions. Gary [Moore] had it for the longest time and he lent it out to several people who had it for quite a long while and did all sorts of things to it. It’s changed hands several times.”
It certainly looks like it’s been worked on… “I don’t want to go into too much detail, because it’s highly contentious and you just get into all these silly arguments, but the story I was told was that Peter took out the neck pickup – that’s well documented, and you can see plenty of pictures online of Peter playing without that neck pickup
“I came to my own conclusions and nailed my colours to the mast. As far as building pickups go, it’s far more interesting than just flipping a magnet” – Tim Mills
installed – and when he went to put it back in, he found it didn’t work properly. So he got a repairer to look at it and it was subsequently fixed by rewinding the coils on a record player. Therefore, rather than winding the coil counterclockwise like Gibson had historically done, they were wound clockwise.”
All of which is different from simply wiring the pickups out of phase… “Absolutely. The above is about polarity, which is different from being electrically out of phase.”
Allegedly, what kind of wire was used in the rewind? “One of the people who worked on it told me that when he had to repair the neck pickup, he saw that it was Formvar wire. Getting hold of plain enamel wire in the UK probably wouldn’t have been that easy around that time, whereas Formvar wire was readily available.”
And simply turning the pickup 180 degrees like Peter did won’t affect phase… “You can turn a pickup backwards and forwards, but you won’t change the polarity. The polarity is fixed by the pickup itself.
Spinning a neck pickup around so that the screws are closer to the bridge will make it marginally brighter, but it won’t correct phase.”
Greeny has certainly had a colourful life… “Whatever story’s right, at the end of the day, none of it really matters, because we’ll never know the real truth. Sometimes you just have to go, ‘Right, I’m going to have a play with this and see what I actually think.’ I came to my own conclusions and decided to nail my colours to the mast. As far as building pickups go, it’s far more interesting than just flipping a magnet.”
What were your conclusions? “I started experimenting with flipping the magnet in a PAF-style pair of pickups, winding the neck pickup with Heavy Formvar, and winding the coils the wrong way around. Not just switching the wires. You could switch the wires, but I thought, ‘Let’s go the whole kit and caboodle, regardless of whether these things actually happened or not.’ To my ears, that gave me the sound.”
How did you know for sure you’d got it right with the PG Blues? “I was fortunate enough to make a couple of sets for Gary [Moore]; they went into a couple of prototype Custom Shop signature model Les Pauls Gibson had sent to him. Gary reported that it completely nailed the tone, and he used those on tour for the Greeny numbers in the set. I thought, ‘Well, that’s good enough for me!’” www.bareknucklepickups.co.uk
“I was told that Peter took out the neck pickup… and found it didn’t work properly. So a repairer fixed it by rewinding the coils on a record player – clockwise” – Tim Mills