The text below is adapted from Interactive Gibson Bible, published August 2008 on Jaw Bone Press and distributed by Hal Leonard.
At the urging of company president Ted McCarty, Gibson technicians Seth Lover and Walt Fuller began working on the idea of a hum-rejecting guitar pickup in 1955. Lover, a radio and electronics expert, had worked for Gibson on and off in the 1940s. After rejoining the company in 1952, he developed the single-coil Alnico pickup, which was used briefly—and most famously—in the neck position of the Les Paul Custom, as well as on a few archtop models. Gibson’s main pickup of the day, the P-90, had a full, fat, distinctive tone, but like all single-coil pickups was prone to picking up unwanted hum and noise from external electrical sources. Being familiar with tube amplifiers, Lover was well aware of how a ‘choke’ (a coil or small transformer) could help filter out hum induced by an amp’s power supply, and began working toward applying the same logic to guitar pickups.
His solution took the form of a double-coil pickup, in which the two coils were placed side by side, wired together out of phase with each other, and given opposite magnetic polarities. As a result, this configuration rejected much of the hum that single-coil pickups reproduce—which is eliminated when two like but reverse-phase signals are summed together—but passed along all of the guitar tone. Lover also added a thin nickel cover to the pickups, to further reject electrostatic interference. In addition to the benefits regarding noise rejection, the double-coil pickup’s side-by-side coil alignment produced a warm, rich sound that came across as bigger and rounder than that of the average single-coil pickup.
Gibson dubbed Lover’s new creation the ‘humbucker’ for its ability to ‘buck’ electrical hum and, aware that it was a unique device in the fledgling industry, applied for a U.S. patent to protect the design. The first humbucker used by Gibson in production was a triple-coil version that appeared on lap steel guitars in 1956. When the now-familiar double-coil humbuckers arrived in 1957 on the Goldtop and Custom Les Paul models and on archtop electrics like the ES-175, they carried stickers that read “Patent Applied For,” to ward off would-be copyists while the company awaited the patent. Pickups of the era, therefore, are given the nickname ‘PAF,’ which applies to any pickup carrying the “Patent Applied For” sticker that all Gibson humbuckers wore between 1957 and late 1962 …
PAFs are not really much hotter, in electrical terms, than the average P-90, and the two different pickup types from the same era generally show similar DC resistance readings in the 7.5k to 8.5k ohms range. But the humbucker’s broader sonic window sends a meatier spread of frequencies to the amp, which creates a fatter, warmer sound, and can also drive an amp more easily into distortion when desired. Nevertheless, a good PAF still has a lot of sweetness, good treble response, and excellent definition.
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