Joe Barden

Danny Gatton is one of the greatest guitar players to ever walk this planet. This pickup was designed for him, with massive input for him, and it delivers with fantastic tone, just as one would expect. The pickup is designed for Telecaster guitars, and is fashioned around an idea that Danny Gatton had - he wanted an old Charlie Christian pickup sound in his Telecaster, but without having to rout it out. Joe Barden came up with many designs until Danny was happy, and this pickup is the result of that partnership. The pickup is actually a humbucker, with two very small coils, wound around a blade. The original prototypes actually used a stop sign that was cut into small strips to use as the blade design! The blades help impart a smooth evenness in the pickups, while the dual coils ensure maximum noise-cancelling, to keep everything dead quiet. I really feel that this is honestly the best pickup I have ever used. Tone here is the name of the game, folks, as well as responsiveness! These pickups were meant to deliver absolutely every small nuance of Danny's playing, and boy, did he ever nuance. This pickup will not cover up mistakes - it will shine a big spotlight on them, and that, to me, is a fantastic pickup. I want my guitars to sound exactly like what I am doing to them, so I need them to be accurate, and this literally helps me become a better player. The pickup itself has a very high-fidelity quality, which sounds great for that accuracy I was talking about, but for someone that likes their pickup to flatter them instead, all they'd need do is roll off the tone knob about 30%. This makes the pickup take on a more vintage quality, as opposed to the sheer unadulterated evenness of wide open tone control tone.