UNDER THE HOOD
What’s inside this finely made innovative guitar?
When you remove the control cavity’s backplate, you can’t help but be impressed. All the pots are CTS 500kohms and the volumes are those posh CTS pull-push types with their small circuit board connections. The hook-up wire is the old-school cloth-covered type and it’s very neatly wired in vintage style. There’s a single .022 microfarads tone cap (a Cream T paper-in-oil type) and the entire cavity and coverplate are shielded with copper foil. No tricks here; it’s nicely done.
The cavities for the pickup swapping are covered with a neatly recessed black plastic plate that attaches magnetically to the guitar. You simply pull that off, pull out one or both pickups, and push in the new ones – like the back cover, they’re firmly held in place by small magnets. There’s a mounting assembly that attaches to the back of each pickup with a central Allen-keyed bolt that allows you to dial in the correct height for that specific pickup. In production, however, PJD’s Leigh Dovey tells us these pickup-swapping mounting frames, to which the pickups attach, have caused some problems on the prototype guitars, but he has the solution that will be fully sorted on the guitars we’ll get to buy.
It’s a known fact that Thomas Nilsen doesn’t disclose much of what’s inside his pickups. He certainly doesn’t chase the exact vintage-correct materials like some makers, and he uses a ‘special sauce’ to pot the pickups. However, as we comment in our sound evaluation, they actually sound unpotted, not least when you tap the covers. All three humbuckers have a similar DCR centred around 8.3kohms. The Duchess neck single coil measures 8.27k, and there’s nothing stopping you putting any pickup in any position – you just need to readjust the height and push it in.