High Life
Fender’s Tim Shaw discusses the Wide Range pickup and its unique Cunife magnets in detail
The Wide Range has a reputation as being a ‘hot’ humbucker because of its DC resistance, not its sound. Why?
“Basically, an Alnico magnet – irrespective of the grade – is about half iron. Cunife is 60 per cent copper, 20 per nickel and 20 per cent iron. There’s not enough inductance, so unless you have a lot of wire, or a lot of something, there’s no low-end to them. I mean, the fidelity is lovely and there’s really quite an interesting tone to them, but I have since tried to make a variety of pickups with these magnets, some that Seth – probably – never tried, and I felt it exactly. Cunife definitely has its own set of rules and it’s a really stern taskmaster in that sense. Left to its own devices, the magnet has a lot of fidelity but no low-end at all.”
When we spoke earlier this year at the NAMM Show, you said that the Wide Range is “internally the most manufacturable pickup pre the modern age”. Can you expand on that?
“So, with this pickup you’ve got these two nylon bobbins with solder terminals on them, so it’s even faster to make than eyelets. It’s got a steel underplate, it’s got a cover and a backplate with four screws holding it in place and 12 magnets. It’s a lot simpler and more manufacturable than Seth Lover’s Gibson humbucking design.You can’t put solder terminals into butyrate – like Gibson used [for the bobbins] – because it melts too fast. It’s not a potted pickup, although we wax the coils but not the cover. I’m not sure if I said earlier, but we found the original tool, so we’re actually running the bobbins from that.”
So, this new pickup is exactly the same as those from the 70s?
“As close as could be rationally made, yes. Which is to say those original pickups were probably not made at the factory in Fullerton, more likely a side company that they used. George Blanda, before he retired, and myself had long talks about these pickups, but unlike almost every other metal working tool we have, we never had the tools for these pickups, so we had to reverse-engineer the tooling from the original parts of the pickups. The only difference – and only guys who assemble pickups would know this – is the original height screws were #4-40 and the new ones are #3-48, because that’s what everyone now uses. But apart from that it’s pretty much as close as we could get. We did have a lot of the original drawings and a tremendous amount – although not all – of the data. And whatever you think of CBS they did document, so we have a lot, but not all, of the documentation.”
You had to come up with a bridge single coil that matched up with the Wide Range, didn’t you?
“Again, this is probably another cost-saving thing at CBS, but a lot of these pickups from this time are relatively under-wound. They’re flat polepieces, too, which means you don’t have to keep up as big an inventory if all the polepieces are the same length. If you play a ‘Micawber’-style Tele, the humbucker just crushes the bridge pickup. So I had the new Wide Range and put it with a stock pickup and thought,‘Let’s talk about this a bit!’The bridge pickup ended up being more of a 60s wind [with staggered magnets] and is slightly to the hotter end of the 60s variance. But it plays nicer with that neck pickup.”
You’ve retained the original circuit here with 1meg pots. Why?
“Well, I’m copying the original sonic signature as much as anything.You see, at that time Fender had 250k and 1meg-ohm pots: the Jazzmaster and Jaguars used 1meg, then everything else, the P-Bass, Teles, Strats, Jazz basses, used 250k. Seth came from Gibson where everything was 500k. If you look at the inductance of the pickup – which, of course, Seth would have done, as he was an engineer – it’s nominally five henrys. This is a little higher than an original Gibson PAF, which would be about four henrys. But, like I said, that comes from the extra wire not the magnet. Seth’s instincts would have been 500k, but they didn’t have them. 250k would have sounded like hell and backed the high-end way off, so he had no choice but to go 1meg.
“I believe the Custom Shop are using 500k with these pickups because Mike [Lewis] doesn’t have to be a slave to anything. I prefer the taper of 500k pots to 1megs because taper change is always a percentage of resistance, so there’s a lot more variation in a 1meg. Late-60s Teles, of course, were 1meg as well, and that’s like the classic fingernails-on-a-chalkboard high-end. So, again, at the time, using 1megs would have been perfectly normal.”
the original 184mm (7.25 inches), but in combination with the neck shape and the smooth, slinky feel of the fingerboard face and frets, it works extremely well.
For many, a Telecaster is simply about its bridge pickup, and this supplies the cut with a little extra heat. It’s got that steely bite in spades and with a little added compression it has you practising your country licks for days – a different sound from the rawer and beefier clout of a typical early 50s ride. Switching to the neck humbucker, surprisingly perhaps, it doesn’t overpower the bridge as its ‘hot’ DCR might suggest, yet it fills in the lows especially and smoothens the midrange while retaining the snap of the guitar itself. Compared to our ’69’s single coil, it’s a sort of halfway house between that and a PAF-style Les Paul, for example.
But it’s the pickup mix where the money lies. The typical single-coil mix’s funky sparkle sounds enhanced. There’s more depth but still plenty of cut and, of course, you can tame the bridge’s high-end simply by rolling off its own tone. The volumes provide less subtlety than you might think. A slight roll-off of either in the mix position quickly reverts to the solo pickup sound – but sit the Custom in a band mix, not least one with a little Stones-y swagger, and the classic bite of a Tele is simply supported with a little more meat and depth, while never losing that snap and bite. It’s a different experience from the current American Professional Tele Deluxe, which moves closer to a thicker Les Paul voice. This Wide Range, as we said, sounds a little lower powered but with that additional clarity. It’s far from a one-trick pony, though: from beautifully clear cleans to notable definition with some overdrive and dense effects, it has huge potential on this platform.
Verdict
While 2020 is all about the 70th anniversary of the original Fender Broadcaster, the return of this humbucker is certainly worth getting the bunting out for. At this American Original level, it’s also celebration of classic 70s style and an excellent chance to reevaluate some Fender design details that were buried in the mire of the CBS era. A faultless guitar with a wide-ranging voice that feels far from a reissue and very much now.
If Fenders from the 70s felt like this, their reputation might not be so sullied… This piece feels more like it’s come from the Custom Shop