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Pickup Tricks 3

Ever wondered why a humbucker bucks the hum?

If you've ever performed on stage using an electric guitar with single-coil pickups, the following scenario might
sound familiar. You've got your tone dialled in and you sound great. It's in between songs and your singer is
talking to the audience, but there's an awful hum coming from your amplifier. It sounds something akin to a giant
swarm of angry wasps. The singer shoots you a nasty look. After the show he tells you to get rid of the hum or
consider an alternate career in bee-keeping. Yikes!
This isn't anything new. Ever since the dawn of the electric guitar, players have been dealing with hum. Some
guitarists tolerate it, others detest it. But thanks to a nifty invention that changed the face of guitar pickups for all
time, playing with hum is no longer a necessary evil.
The basic design for what we now call a humbucker was created back in the 1950s by a Gibson engineer named
Seth Lover. Seth discovered that if he combined two single-coil pickups in series but reversed the hot and ground
connections of one coil, the pickups would be electrically out-of-phase and consequently cancel the hum.
Seth took the phase cancellation idea a step further by reversing the magnetic polarity of one of the coils. In other
words, one coil would have its north poles facing upwards while the other coil would have its south poles facing
upwards.
Now the two coils were out-of-phase, as it were, magnetically as well as electrically. The electrically out-of-phase
coils cancelled the hum because it was common to both coils, but the reverse polarised magnets put the opposing
signals from the strings back into electrical phase. The result was that the string vibrations passed through while
the hum was cancelled. And it was good!
Seth filed for a patent on this design with the US Patent Office in 1955 and it was finally granted in July of 1959.
During the patent application period, between 1955 and 1959, Gibson slapped a Patent Applied For (PAF) sticker
onto the bottom plate of each humbucker. These PAF pickups are now somewhat legendary and fetch prices
upwards of 750 on the vintage market. But to this day, Seth's PAF design is the basis for nearly all modern
humbuckers.

Origin of the species

Keep in mind that, because of their origin, most humbuckers use Gibson string-to-string spacing. However, if
you're dropping a humbucker into a tremolo-equipped axe or another guitar with wider string spacing at the bridge,
like a Fender Strat, for example, you should use a wider -spaced bridge pickup. If not, you'll find that the two E
strings on your Strat don't get adequate coverage by the humbucker pickup.
Several manufacturers make their more popular models available in vibrato, as well as Gibson -spaced versions.
Seymour Duncan calls its wider-spaced humbuckers Trembuckers while DiMarzio use the term F-Spacing.
Like the originals, most modern humbuckers use a bar magnet and steel slugs or screws to focus the magnetism
on the guitar's strings. Traditional humbuckers use non-adjustable steel slugs on one bobbin and adjustable
screws on the other bobbin. The bobbin with the slugs has slightly more output and the bobbin with the screws,
though slightly weaker, has the advantage of allowing the player to balance the output from string to string.
Most of the time, the screw-sides of the pickups are orientated outwards - closest to the neck in the neck position
and closest to bridge in the bridge position. That said, some humbuckers use identical bobbins. Seymour
Duncan's Parallel Axis Trembuckers, for example, use two identical non-adjustable coils with two rectangular pole
pieces on each bobbin for each string (24 pole pieces in total, per pickup). The resulting output from both coils is
perfectly balanced. This is the exception, not the rule, though.

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In addition to eliminating hum, another major effect of the humbucker design is to colour the tone. The two sideby-side pickups sense different parts of the string, and as a result, some of the higher frequency harmonics are
shifted in phase in one coil with respect to the other, and are partially cancelled. That's why most humbucker
pickups sound warm and fat compared to the brightness of a single coil. This makes them a popular choice for
jazz, blues and all kinds of rock.
Aside from the characteristic tone and quietness, the other benefits of the design compared with single -coils are
the higher output, lower string pull and increased sustain.
Because humbuckers are comprised of two coils, there are different ways those coils can be wired together to
achieve different tones. If you really want to get tricky, you can access those different wirings using a switch in
your guitar.
Next time, we'll look at those humbucker wiring options in more detail. Until then, go for the tone!
Evan Skopp
Read Pickup Tricks 1 here
Read Pickup Tricks 2 here
Visit Seymour Duncan here

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