Rabea Massaad gives us his take on the design process…
Why did you want to design a signature set of humbuckers?
“I started using Bare Knuckle in 2007, when Tim used to answer sales calls himself – it was that long ago [laughs]. He put me onto his Warpig humbuckers back then, and I tried other ones out, but that was the one that, for some reason, was best for what I was trying to do. It had great dynamic range, even though it’s really high-output. That might sound silly to say, but for some reason I could get quite a lot out of them for the kind of thing I was trying to do.
“But then when it came to doing the Silo and the opportunity to actually design something from scratch, I think it was that I wanted the Warpig to be the foundation but actually to try to clean it up. That was my thought process – because it was really good for aggressive tones, you know? The Warpig has really good string definition and it was just a very angry-sounding pickup in the context I was using it. But [these days] I like to use similar tones but play lighter and get more of a clean tone from the guitar. I like Les Pauls and Strats and the more old-school tones you get from them – so I wanted to incorporate some of that lighter, more classic character into the pickup that I used but at the same time have it be really aggressive, which was what was missing from traditional humbuckers, for me.
“The way I run my rig, I very much use the amplifier for my drive and only use fuzzes to make things very intense. But where I need the pickups to do the most work is the main rhythm sounds and all the kind of ambient crisp, clean stuff. Particularly if I’m playing more dynamically, the Warpig did have quite a honky midrange. And although I needed that for the heavy stuff, we tried to [tame that in the new pickups] so they could do justice to the dynamic, ambient stuff as well.”
When Tim revealed the spec of the prototypes you liked best, did it surprise you? “To be honest, no. I’ve always preferred Alnico from when I was playing with the Warpigs [which come in Alnico and ceramic versions], and even though I started using ceramic pickups in more recent guitars, just something about it wasn’t the same – I think it was the edginess of it. Me and Nolly were talking about it before we actually tried the prototypes that became the Silo, in fact. He was showing me one of his guitars, a PRS Modern Eagle, and I can’t remember what the pickups were, but I think they were an Italian brand. But anyway, we were commenting on how wide and defined the whole guitar was sonically in terms of the low-end, top-end and midrange being smooth but it being very clear, even with a lot of gain. It was funny, because the next pickup Tim brought up was the ‘blue’ coloured prototype and we just put them in and it was like, ‘That’s exactly the quality that we were talking about,’ and we sort of looked at each other and went, ‘Wow, definitely that’s the one!’” www.rabeamassaad.com