217 – 130820 ZLP13 – Zachary Handcrafted Guitars | Bass| Pedals | Strings

Inspiration

My inspiration here was to build another Les Paul Special. Remember, the reason I got into this is to build and create with my hands and my soul. Its not about business or manufacturing. Those are called businessmen or financial investors. They are NOT guitar builders, even if the constantly masquerade as such. The toddlers fall for the deception. Instead, its all about working with the hands and a visceral need to do be creative.

Regarding this guitar, I wanted to use this Pearl White paint I had, match it with gold hardware, which I thought would look really cool and make it with Humbucking pickups. However I was not inspired by making traditional humbuckers. I thought that was too boring, way too common and I have done it before. This was an opportunity to try something totally different, totally new and build a new guitar on which I can experiment in terms of pickups.

My wish has always been to invent humbuckers which could also function as single coils but also to give as authentic of a Fender-tone as possible. I realized that many modern humbuckers can be coil-cut to only activate one of the coils. However, they don't sound quite like Fender pickups. The architecture of the coils in a humbucker is different from that of a Fender pickup, in that the magnets in a humbucker are placed below the coils and the pole pieces, being studs or screws, are not actual magnets. Conversely in a Fender pickup the polepieces themselves are the magnets.

Therefore I knew that to get a more authentic Fender single coil tone, I had to make one of the coils of the humbucker with Fender architecture. The way to do this is to make these special humbuckers with one side like a Gibson stud coil and the other side as a Fender-style coil replacing the steel screws with actual Fender bar magnet pole pieces. This way one side functions as a traditional Gibson coil and the other side functions as a Fender coil and when both coils are activated the pickup functions as a Humbucker, with the traditional thicker, louder humbucking tone. The result is a more authentic Fender tone when the Fender inside coils are activated in single coil mode. The tone pot is also a push/pull switch, which when pulled, puts both pickups in single coil mode, activating the two inside coils, which are the Fender coils, with the Magnetic Polepieces, hence the name MagPole-Bucker.

Other than the unique new pickups, this is a lightweight Les Paul Special inspired guitar, with the same body dimensions as the vintage Gibson Les Paul Special. Other than the body and original pickguard shape, these guitars are totally Zachary.

I call these types of guitars which are reliced "Rat Rods". They have the vibe and the general feel of the original vintage version but all the benefits and improvements that a Zachary design and build has to offer.

Click each image to enlarge and use the back arrow to return to page