Pickup Lines
Gibson’s original Firebird pickup design is far more than just a regular mini-humbucker…
Released in 1963, the Gibson Firebird I, III, V and VII guitars were a new breed. While automobile designer Raymond Dietrich was drafted in to collaborate on the guitar’s distinctive bodywork, Gibson set about creating a bespoke pickup for the new models. Sporting custom colours and the sleek, angular geometry of car tailfins, Firebirds didn’t just look different – with their unique pickup design, they sounded different, too.
Derived from the Kalamazoo-era Epiphone mini-humbucker (itself a derivative of the Seth Lover-designed PAF), original Firebird humbuckers are constructed with two bobbins wound with 42 AWG wire and have around 15 per cent fewer turns than a PAF on account of their smaller size. Being ‘underwound’, their DC resistance is lower, and a brighter tone
Firebirds didn’t just look different – with their unique pickup design, they sounded different, too
is produced. However, unlike PAFs and other mini-humbuckers, which have a single Alnico bar magnet positioned below ferrous polepiece screws and slugs, Firebird pickups use a pair of Alnico bar magnets located near the strings – one ‘blade’ in each coil – along with steel reflector plates located underneath and above the bobbins.
“They were very different to other Gibson pickups at the time,” says Ash ScottLockyer of London’s Oil City Pickups. “They are a bit of a special case in the sense they didn’t appear on any other guitar, but the Firebird pickup was a logical progression from the mini-humbucker. If you don’t have enough cut in the mids or enough bass – a criticism people level at the mini-humbucker – a reflector plate can help with that, and there’s a certain bite that comes from using magnetic polepieces, as opposed to passive polepieces.
“The Firebird pickup uses two blade magnets,” continues Ash. “Generally speaking, the wider the gap between the bobbins of a humbucker, the more bass frequencies you sample from the strings. Therefore, the narrower the gap, the more upper mids and treble you get, which is another reason Firebird pickups sound different – they have a narrower aperture than PAFs. The reflector plates are simple ferrous metal plates and work in a similar way to the baseplate of Tele bridge pickups: they increase inductance. And that gives you a bit of a free ride as far as power’s concerned – it rounds off the treble a bit and gives more punch to the lower and midrange frequencies.
“The original Firebird pickups measure around 6.5kohms, which is somewhere between a Strat pickup and a PAF in terms of DCR. They’re the ideal halfway house between a full-size humbucker and a single coil. They give sparkle, bite and directness of a single coil but with the benefits of a humbucker. The DCR, the twin magnets, the reflector plates, and the narrow coil aperture all bias the response of the pickup towards frequencies in the upper midrange. Slide players like them for their midrange bite. Used in the right way, they’ve got a kind of rude tone – it’s raunchy and a bit aggressive. I used to play slide on a Tele with Firebird pickups through a [Fender] Bassman and it sounded bloody amazing! That was a great setup.
“Johnny Winter played a Firebird, and one of the reasons I started making Firebird pickups was because, as a teenager, I was obsessed with his sound – that thick, chewy, not quite a humbucker but not a single coil, biting tone that he used a lot. My Winterizer and Winterizer II Firebird Pickups are standard early Firebird-style pickups, albeit the Winterizer II is in a [PAF-sized] humbucker shell. They work well in other guitars. Firebird pickups have got something different. They’re fabulous in the neck of Telecaster, for example. It’s a different palette of sound and it bites through an awful lot better in the mix, plus they make an interesting change from putting a regular humbucker in the neck.
“Gibson have never done a proper remake of it. All the reissues have been different from the originals – either way overpowered, or they have ceramic magnets, or it’s a sidewinder design. I’m fascinated by all this, because it seems to be the forgotten Gibson pickup.”