Ushered in on Gibson’s 1963 reverse Firebird, this fully covered minihumbucker was just one of the raft of changes that the ’bird brought to the table. But overshadowed by car designer Ray Dietrich who’d conceived the design, its pickup seems more of an afterthought: Gibson needed something “different while keeping costs under control”, writes Andre Duchossoir in Gibson Electrics: The Classic Years. “Gibson’s reluctance to invest in the development of an entirely new pickup design quickly narrowed down the choice to the mini-humbucker devised by Seth Lover in the late 50s.”
Yup, that’s the mini-humbucker Seth designed for Epiphone, and which most of us became aware of on the Les Paul Deluxe launched later in the decade. There was another variant of the mini-humbucker (codenamed the ‘PU-120’, apparently) that graced the 1961 jazz archtop Johnny Smith Model, making it technically the first Gibson guitar that used the mini design. So, despite being seen as the ‘first’ mini-humbucker Gibson had used, the Firebird version (codenamed ‘PU-720’ with a nickel-plated cover and ‘PU-740’ with a gold-plated cover) was actually the last to the party.