Pearly King
Cream T’s Thomas Nilsen has made pickup winding a science of his own
Cream T’s unique scanning tech has yielded some scarily good and authentic pickups. We join Thomas Nilsen to find out more
For the past 30-odd years, Thomas Nilsen has been hard at work creating some of the most authentic-sounding humbuckers around. “It all started in the late 90s when I bought some Custom Shop guitars,” Thomas tells us. “They were nicely built, but I wasn’t happy with the sound. I was after the kind of tone from the 50s and 60s when people mostly plugged straight into the amp – that authentic rounded tone with no sharp edges on the high frequencies. It’s not harsh; it has a softer treble. When I realised this was missing from my Custom Shop guitars, I set up my own workshop in the basement of my house, specifically to make pickups.”
“I built a scanner so I could record across the frequency range of the Pearly Gates [pickups]”
Labouring away in his basement in search of that elusive sound, Thomas finally emerged with what he thought was a more accurate representation of those classic ’Burst tones. He was keen to get some feedback so immediately went straight to the Top and reached out to Billy Gibbons’ guitar tech, Elwood Francis.
“Billy tried them out backstage at a gig and he loved them immediately,” recalls Thomas. “He said, ‘Can I have five sets please, mister?’ And that started the ball rolling. Since then, Billy has brought a lot of ideas to the table. He’s very into the details of guitar tone and he wanted to recreate the specific sound of his 1959 Les Paul, famously known as the Pearly Gates guitar. That had never been done before.”
While researching the Pearly Gates’ famous tone, Thomas designed and built a frequency spectrum recorder with the aim of plotting out the humbuckers’ unique sonic characteristics.
“I built a scanner so I could record across the frequency range of the Pearly Gates,” continues Thomas. “We read the decibels at various points across a range of frequencies from 70Hz up to 95kHz and discovered the pickups in the Pearly Gates Les Paul are very different from others. The readings were very special. So that informed me about the coil winding pattern.
“I have various templates in my head that tell me how to put the wire on the coil to reach certain frequencies. For example, with the WhiskerBucker, I start in the middle of the coil and do 48 turns, go to the left side and do 132 turns, go over to the right side and do 64 turns, then I go back and add some more. After, I repeat that movement before doing 2,700 turns with a completely different winding pattern, then another with 1,000 turns, and then I finish it off in a certain way. It’s very deep. There’s a very specific way of doing it. I have about 1,300 different coil winding patterns.”
Thomas decided against aiming to produce yet another PAF-alike with the same old Gibson-style materials, instead opting for a different approach by focusing purely on sound.
“I use 0.061mm enamel-insulated copper wire,” he reveals. “It’s not the regular type of wire people use to make PAF replicas. You have to do a completely different number of turns using a different wire, and I spent over a year just AB testing different winding patterns with the same magnets and the same output (same number of turns). It’s a far more scientific approach than people may realise. I had all these different windings and scanned the whole frequency range to get to where we wanted. It was very time-consuming and extremely focused. It’s all about the route the signal travels in the coil. If you create a different path – a different way for that signal to go – you will have completely different decibel readings across the frequencies.
“The magnets are a special unoriented type and are not 100 per cent charged; they are degaussed a bit. I measured the [Pearly Gates] pickups when I scanned them and found the gauss readings in Billy’s guitar are unique, so the WhiskerBuckers sound how the Pearly Gates guitar sounds on the ZZ Top albums, not when it was brand-new in 1959. If people want that authentic Pearly Gates guitar tone, the WhiskerBucker is definitely the way to go.”