Opinion RAISING THE TONE …
Some Neck
Editor Jamie Dickson gets a latter-day Alnico V staple pickup fitted to his Telecaster, with a little help from his friends
Regular readers will recall that, last issue, I decided to beef up the neck-pickup sound of my ’52 Tele reissue by fitting another 50s design to it – an Alnico V ‘staple’ pickup, albeit a latter-day version made by Sunbear Pickups. While I don’t dislike traditional Tele neck pickups as some do, I absolutely fell in love with the huge, rounded clean tone of the staple pickups I’d tried in the past. Fully committed, I ordered a humbucker-size Sunbear SB-Staple Vpickup and, not long later, received the finished item in a beautifully presented box. Opening it, I found the pickup nestling in a bed of dark-blue paper straw, and was soon admiring the subtle ageing Sunbear founder Stuart Robson had applied to the tortoiseshell cover and elsewhere.