ROCKET MEN
In a new series of features on how guitar gear is designed, Tim Mills talks about the tricky technical challenges of crafting Bare Knuckle Pickups’ new Silo humbuckers for the formidable guitar talents of Rabea Massaad
Music never stops moving and the current generation of virtuosic but eclectic players are demanding more versatility and performance from their gear than ever before – especially when it comes to pickups. Rabea Massaad is well known from both his work in bands such as Dorje and also from his insightful YouTube demos of new gear. His playing ranges from intense, geometrically precise metal to Hendrixian fusion but also serene soundscapes of clean, contemporary tone. Therefore, making him a signature set of humbuckers to cover all bases without being bland was an intriguing puzzle that Tim Mills of Bare Knuckle Pickups was happy to take on.
“Rabea’s used my pickups in his guitars for donkey’s years,” Tim reflects. “He’s a very genuine person and he’s absolutely 100 per cent obsessed with playing guitar and creating music. So I felt that it would be interesting to see if we could really home in on a set of pickups that would define who he is as a player.”
Rabea had long used Bare Knuckle’s Warpig humbuckers, but wanted an even greater breadth of tones than these deceptively flexible high-output pups could give him – posing Tim one of his toughest design challenges for a while.
“Rabea is very much at the forefront of a modern movement of guitar playing. He has a very broad skill set: some of the music he plays is very heavily down-tuned and there’s a lot baritone work, but then again, there’s a lot of stuff he does that isn’t, too. So the design had to sort of straddle a wide range of six-string applications but be able to handle other tunings as well.”
Fortunately, Tim has developed a system for working with artists that helps him target exactly the performance they want from pickups – a process that is informed by his knowledge of what makes guitar players tick.
“Once I had the list of qualities that Rabea wanted, I went away to start working out how I could voice a set of pickups to reproduce those tones,” Tim explains. “Rabea was quite strict with his brief in that he wanted the pickups to be
what we call a twin screw-coil design. Humbuckers traditionally have one coil with adjustable poles – screws, if you like – and one that has slugs that are non-adjustable. But there is another way to design humbuckers, where both coils have adjustable poles. These alter the way that the pickup performs quite a lot as a general rule, and typically reproduce more bottom-end.”
With this distinctive design feature as a starting point, Tim took the first steps towards crafting a sound and feel that Rabea would click with.
“The trick I’ve found with artists is that the first thing you’ve got to do is get the output range right: you’ve got to put them in their comfort zone. It’s no good trying to take them way off leftfield with something that they’re immediately going to be uneasy with. So the output range has to be the first thing. Then you can start looking at what tonal colours and flavours you can put in and around that.
“After that, it’s about sitting down and working out what wire gauges I’m going to use and deciding which magnets will put me in the kind of output range that Rabea will be comfortable with. Because, if he’s comfortable, he’ll sit and he’ll play naturally – and then we can start to focus in on actual tones. But if I put him in an uncomfortable area, where he’s digging around for drive or snap or what have you, he isn’t going to be able to focus on the tone.”
Tim duly worked up some prototypes and soon had a feeling that one in particular was going to be a standout. However, he says it was important to set up a blind test that removed the possibility of preconceived ideas muddying the selection process.
“What I like to do is to force the artist to only use their ears,” Tim explains. “This is a little game that I’ve evolved over the years with all the signature artists. We’ll get together with the artist in a recording studio and they’ll bring along their guitars. Bear in mind I’ve used my own prototyping guitars up to this point, so I’ve got a very good idea of what to expect from the pickups in a range of different instruments, with different tonewoods and so on.
“I generally bring along maybe about five or six sets of prototype pickups and they’re labelled with numbers or colours, rather than written descriptions. So the artist has no idea what is inside each of
“What I like to do is to force the artist to only use their ears. This is a little game that I’ve evolved over the years”
the prototype pickups and this is actually helpful, because over the years I found that if you start telling an artist the spec beforehand, it starts to colour their judgement. They can get so absorbed with the spec that they’re not actually listening any more, when in fact this test should be 100 per cent about tone.”
Tim then enlisted the help of Periphery bassist and producer Adam ‘Nolly’ Getgood to set up the perfect environment for sonic evaluation.
“We got together with Adam ‘Nolly’ Getgood at his studio just outside Bristol. Adam is a fantastic adjudicator to sit in on these sessions, because a) he’s an amazing guitar player, and b) he’s got an incredible set of ears. He’s an incredible mix engineer and producer, and he’s also somebody that’s well known to Rabea and myself, so everybody’s comfortable. I set up my workshop in a room at the studio and basically gutted one of Rabea’s guitars and loaded the first set of pickups.
Rabea then went and sat with Adam and they started recording some test pieces of music while I prepped up the next guitar for the next set.
“We went through this process all day. Basically, all Rabea knew about the pickups was a colour: that’s a gray one, that’s a blue one, that’s a red one… He had no idea of what the magnets were. I also played another little game with Adam. He and I have worked together for at least 10 years now and he knows quite a bit about pickups, so I got him to write down what he thought was inside the pickup, making notes as to whether he thought it was an Alnico or a ceramic. What sort of wire gauge was used? And had I used offset coils or symmetrical coils?
“During this process, Rabea started to score the pickups and, actually, a favourite emerged relatively quickly: one set was head and shoulders above the rest for him. And, invariably, I know which pickup it is that is ‘the one’. But
I often say to the artist, ‘If I just came along here with one pickup, put it on the table and said, ‘There it is,’ it’s almost a bit of a damp squib.’ They have to find it themselves, if that makes any sense. At the end of the day, I’ll normally reveal what it is they’ve chosen and quite often it’s a bit of an eye opener.”
The pickup choice that was a clear winner for both Rabea and ‘tone umpire’ Adam ‘Nolly’ Getgood was conventional in some respects – but unusual in others. The finished pickups were built with the required twin screw-coils housing Alnico V magnets but wound with 42-gauge wire for the neck and finer 44 AWG wire for the bridge. This yielded a measured DC resistance of 7.18kohms for the neck and 15.7k for the bridge, though it’s important to note that pickups wound with finer wire can be deceptive, as the extra number of turns increases the measured resistance without necessarily making them blunt-instrument gain monsters.
“What Rabea wanted from the bridge was very, very different from what he wanted from the neck,” Tim recalls.
“So it was quite a challenge getting two pickups that were tonally so different to sit together as a pair. Rabea is a very dynamic player and likes to use a lot of split[-coil] tones up on the neck – so
I had to make sure we were leaving headroom there, because he wanted a bright, open, clear sound. The neck pickup was obviously going to have a moderate output. Meanwhile, for the bridge, he wanted depth in the midrange and a very full high-end, so that single notes didn’t sound thin. Again, I had to do that without soaking up all the headroom, so that when he backed off, notes would bloom naturally. It was a tough remit, but it was a lot of fun,” Tim reflects.
Rabea was very happy with the result, but Tim says it was still necessary to test the pickups in the live environment before they hit the button and put the pickups into production – as ever, live performance reveals weak points in gear with unforgiving clarity, which helps ensure the finished product is absolutely fit for purpose.
“We loaded up some of Rabea’s live guitars and he did a little festival run to test them under fire,” Tim says. “Because that’s always a very good way of telling it if you’re in the right zone with something. Sometimes in the studio you can tweak gain levels and so on and so forth and get comfortable. But when you’re actually stood in front of a crowd, if your gear is not working for you, you soon know it, because your playing goes completely out the window and notes are dying under your fingers. That always has to be the definitive test. After a couple of months of play testing and putting them on some other guitars that he owns, Rabea came back and signed off on them.”
The last aspect of the design process, though unrelated to performance, was the important step of giving Rabea’s new pickups a name. Rabea was clear from the start that he didn’t want to make a set of niche ‘metal’ pickups but something that a wide range of players could take inspiration from.
“Rabea said, ‘I want these pickups to have a really broad appeal. It’s got to work for me – but I want for it to be able to work for lots of other players, too…’ Right. Okay. No biggie, then!” Tim laughs, recalling how this turned the thumbscrews on the
“Sometimes you can get comfortable in the studio, but stood in front of a crowd… That’s the definitive test”
project’s difficulty a bit more – and was possibly the most tricky aspect of the brief.
“When you’re given a remit that is quite wide there’s a danger you can get lost in that and end up with a jack of… nothing,” Tim laughs. “If that happens you end up with a very generic-sounding pickup.”
Fortunately, both artist and designer rose to the occasion and came up with a set of contemporary humbuckers that is at once distinctive yet accessible – and offers flexible performance characteristics for guitarists who bring a lot of light and shade to their playing.
“We came up with this idea of a ‘silo’,” Tim says of the name they finally chose for their creation. “It just seemed to embrace the contemporary nature of his playing, I suppose. It also gave us a couple of good marketing angles, because silos are where rockets and things come from – so these pickups are where we keep the tone bombs,” he laughs. www.bareknucklepickups.co.uk