The Gibson ES-335

With apologies to Mel Brooks (whose line I “borrowed” for this post, this has nothing to do with Star Wars, Space Balls or any other movie). This post is about Gerhard Schwarz and his line of repro parts branded St. Helens. Repro parts have had a heavy presence in my posts because it’s a really vital part of the vintage experience (and not always a good one). The biggest problem I have, as a dealer, is the “all original” guitar that is not. Often, the seller is just repeating what the seller before him said. That seller is sometimes a dealer but more often, an individual. Most sellers are honest but most sellers can’t tell certain repro parts from a correct vintage part. And, with the prices of vintage parts going through the roof, a single wrong part can change the value by thousands of dollars. I’m not just talking about PAFs here. The cost of a real vintage pickguard for a 58-60 ($1500) a tailpiece ($2500 or more) or a bridge ($1800 or more) will ruin your day. Enter St. Helen’s guitar parts made by Gerhard Schwarz of Germany. Gerhard has been around for awhile but this line of parts is relatively new. Do we need more repro parts?

Answer: Yes we do. There are some really accurate repro parts on the market but many of them share a common feature:they aren’t branded making identification somewhere between difficult and nearly impossible. I really like the Montreux stop tail. It has a fairly accurate short seam that is much smoother than the originals which makes them easy to recognize. Not as effective as putting the name of the maker on the part but better than nothing. The Gibson made Historic no wire ABR-1 is nearly dead on. On the older ones, you could tell it was a repro by the missing manufacturers brand mark. Gibson later added it making it nearly identical to the originals. There were still two ways to identify the repro: The letters on the underside weren’t as sharp as the originals but if you don’t have an original to compare it to, then it will be hard to know. The other way is foolproof. Look under either “E” string saddle. If there is a circular tooling mark, it’s a repro. If there isn’t, it’s real. But why am I going through all this when this post is supposed to be about St. Helens parts?

Gerhard’s parts come in this cute little “lunchbox” that has all kinds of uses beyond holding your stash, I mean your lunch. Thanks to Jim Weyandt..I borrowed this photo from his Facebook page. Note the branding on the stop tail.

Gerhard’s parts (the ones I’ve seen anyway) are very accurate and accurate beyond the cosmetics. He has duplicated the materials as well for a level of accuracy often missing but invisible. But he did something I appreciate even more than that. He branded his parts. The lightweight stop tail has a near perfect short seam correctly roughed up and it would be ready to fool the best trained eye except for one thing. There, in small but bold letters, is the name St. Helens. I’m told the early versions didn’t have the brand mark which would have made the problem worse, not better. Beyond branding his parts, he is also producing some very hard to find parts like the low profile ABR-1 found only on 1958 ES-335s . They almost always collapsed under the pressure of 12 gauge strings (those were the lightest you could get in 1958). The replacement was almost always a shaved full height ABR-1. Now, with much lighter gauge strings, the low pro ABR-1 should stand up to hard use. But most of them collapsed decades ago. As far as I know, there is only one other parts producer making this part and that’s Pigtail. Good for both of them. I bought a few of them.

I’m really happy that St. Helens and Pigtail put their names on their parts. It keeps the dishonest folks honest (or at least a little more honest) and they are providing a hard to find part for 58 ES-335’s

Gerhard also makes a compensated wraptail to replace the “lightning” wrap tail as well as one to replace the standard wrap tail that had no compensation at all (other than an angled installation and adjustable ends). The compensation is subtle so they appear, from a distance of about a foot, to be the original uncompensated type. There is also a low profile wrap tail that you can wrap over on a 52/53 Les Paul, another useful part although they have been around for awhile from other manufacturers. He makes a compensated and uncompensated version of the low profile one.

So, welcome to the rather crowded field of vintage parts makers. It’s nice to see more accurate parts and more makers. The branding is important to me so that everybody knows it’s a repro. There will still be sellers who try to pass off repro parts as the real thing but every repro part ever made has some “flaw”. The trick is to find it.

Guitar hardware is something most folks don’t give much thought to. Most folks accept whatever hardware is on the guitar and don’t take it any further. Yeah, every once in a while, you come across a 345 or a 355 that had its gold hardware swapped out for nickel but, in most cases folks just leave it alone. Guitar players love to mess with their gear-especially electronics-but hardware is kind of a who cares. There will always be those who will swap out hardware as soon as the slightest bit of wear shows. These are the same folks who wipe down their guitar after every set and won’t let you even pick their guitar up to check it out. You know who you are.

I really like nickel hardware. It’s elegant yet subtle. It’s not showy like gold and not gaudy like chrome. Really? Chrome is gaudy? Most folks can’t tell the difference between untarnished nickel and chrome. I think it’s time you learned the difference if only if it stops you from replacing the worn parts on your 64 ES-335 with (gasp) chrome. I’ve seen it way too often. Gibson used nickel plated hardware on the first ES-335’s rather than chrome. I don’t know what their reasoning was but I’m guessing that nickel was either cheaper at the time or the cost of the plating process was cheaper or both. The new 1958 335’s looked great. Newly plated nickel parts are very attractive and quite durable. But nickel, especially when exposed to sweat, skin oils and cleaners, will tarnish. Apparently folks didn’t like their hardware to look dull or discolored so they employed a very American consumer convention…they complained. They complained from 1958 until 1965 when Gibson threw in the towel and switched to chrome plated parts.

This is a 66 ES-335 in factory black. Chrome parts look pretty good next to a black guitar but I think nickel would look even better

It can be a little tricky to tell nickel from chrome if you don’t have examples of both in front of you, especially when the nickel is new. The simple way to tell nickel from chrome is to look at it. Nickel reflects light in the green spectrum. Chrome reflects blue. It’s not glaring. It’s fairly subtle, particularly when you’re looking at very small guitar parts like a tailpiece. Or you can determine whether the reflection is warm or cold. Chrome is a very cold look-cold like a hospital OR. Is it tarnished? A yes means it’s nickel. Chrome doesn’t tarnish. It can corrode but corrosion rarely occurs on guitar parts unless there has been some chemical reaction (like off gassing of celluloid).

I was shopping with my wife for a bathroom renovation and I was struck by how obvious the difference between chrome and nickel is on larger items. So, I took a photo. It should be glaringly obvious which faucet set is nickel and which is chrome. If you still can’t tell, ask your doctor to do a color blind test. It was a no brainer…we (she) chose the nickel.

I like nickel hardware on my guitars. Maybe that’s part of why I find Gibson guitars more attractive than some others. Fender has always used chrome and while it looks just fine, I think it might look better in nickel. There isn’t a lot of plated hardware on a Strat or a Tele but a Jaguar or Jazz Bass has quite a lot. The pickup covers on a bass (if you don’t remove them) get a lot of contact with skin and that means sweat and oil which will eventually dull out your nickel parts. So, from a practical standpoint, maybe Fender got it right. But if you value aesthetics over practicality (like I do) then nickel is your choice.

Of course, there are other choices. The very first PAF pickup covers were brushed stainless steel. They looked quite good but for some reason they didn’t make it out of 1957. Again, probably cost. There are lots of guitars with gold plated parts. I think many people find gold to be classy. I find it kind of ostentatious. If I walk into someone’s guest bathroom and it has gold fixtures (not brass), I instantly form an opinion about the taste of the homeowner. The problem with gold parts is that gold is crazy expensive these days and the thickness of the gold plating has become so thin that you can rub it off in a couple of minutes with your thumb. The vintage Gibsons have a much thicker gold plating but the gold still wears off fairly quickly. I’ve had a number of guitars that would qualify for the “dead mint” designation if not for worn (not tarnished-gold doesn’t tarnish) hardware.

A guitar with nickel plated parts won’t sound any different than one with gold or chrome plated parts. I’ve actually heard arguments that revolve around the effect of certain metals on the magnetic field of a pickup. But guitar players are, by nature, an argumentative bunch. Read any guitar forum. Put ten guitar players in a room with one guitar and you will get ten different opinions about what is wrong with the guitar (especially when there is nothing wrong). You gotta love that.

I was just nosing around Reverb.com looking for a 50’s Bigsby B7 and there are plenty of them and there are none of them. How is that possible, you ask? Because there are plenty described as 50’s and none of them actually are from the 50’s. The B7 went through some fast changes at the turn of the decade and that makes it pretty easy to tell one year from the other. So why does everybody have so much trouble dating them?

1950’s:

I don’t know everything there is to know about Bigsbys – really, I only know them as they relate to ES guitars. In 1958, the B7, which, by the way, is the only Bigsby used on ES-335’s was different than it was in subsequent years. The 58 and 59 are distinctive. This iteration can be seen in 1960 as well, usually on ES guitars with gold hardware-345’s and 355’s. First, the arm is held in place by a Phillips screw. The top plate has a subtle taper to it and is narrower than the B7 from 60 onward. Lastly, the patent number on the top plate is in a larger font than later ones and doesn’t have the “no.” abbreviation for number in front of it. Minor little details all but they are the only way to tell a 50’s B7 from a 60’s. Since you’re probably wondering, the underside is engraved “Ex Short” which refers to the hinge plate for thinline and solid body guitars and the letters LP on the backside of the top plate. Most folks think it stands for Les Paul. I think it stands for “long plate” but who knows.

1960-61

The next iteration didn’t last very long. It was the stock B7 for nickel hardware ES thinline guitars from 1960 and into 61 although I don’t really know how far into 61 it goes. Part of the difficulty in dating B7’s is because so many were installed by dealers and not at the factory and therefore we can’t possibly know how long they sat around the music store. The 60 still has the Phillips screw holding the arm in place but now there is a slightly wider, less elegant top plate and the “no.” abbreviation is in front of the now smaller font of the patent number. The Ex. Short designation and LP are still there as well.

1961-1969

The Bigsby B7 that we see most of the time on vintage guitars is not very different from the 60-61 version. The major difference is that the arm is now held in place by a stud rather than a screw. The top plate is still the same, the patent number is the same with the “no.” abbreviation in front of it and the Ex Short and LP imprints are still there. There is something worth noting that will change in the next version of the B7. Look where the strings wrap around the unit. There are six pins to which the string ends attach. The pins are held in place by tiny hex set screws. That will go away in the next version.

1970’s and Beyond

Kind of looks just like the one from the 60’s right? Nope. The string pins are no longer held in place by the hex head set screws. Now they are somehow molded into the unit. Another very small difference are the holes for the top screws. Until this version, the holes weren’t countersunk. Now they are. The Bigsby design really changed very little from its introduction until today-testament to just how good the original design was.

There are earlier versions than those outlined here but they never appeared on ES thinline guitars. The early “fixed arm” version from the early 50’s was a poor design because you couldn’t swing the arm out of the way which made playing a bit tricky. That was fixed and the “Duane Eddy” arm appeared. It’s a slightly different shape but swung away for improved playability. And, of course, there were all of the other designs from the B3 to the B16. Today, they are often aged to better match the vintage guitars onto which they are often installed but the company hasn’t, as far as I know, reissued the original designs. Ownership of the company has changed many times. Paul Bigsby owned the company until 1966. It was sold to Ted McCarty, the ex Gibson President. It was sold in 1999 to Gretsch and in 2019, it wqas sold again-this time to a company who rarely used the product…a little company called Fender.

This is a real PAF sticker (decal). Note the font, the spacing and the filled open areas in the letter A. Sometimes the P and the R are filled as well. Most fakes don’t have this feature and the spacing is wrong. It should glow solid green under black light. If it doesn’t, it’s a fake.

The real misinformation begins when Gibson decided (finally) to put the patent number on the sticker. Sidebar: It’s not even the real patent number assigned by the US Patent Office. The number on your patent number pickups (2,737,842) is actually the number for the original Les Paul trapeze tailpiece. But I digress…

I don’t know the exact date that Gibson moved from the PAF to the patent number pickup but it was a very slow transition. They used pickups with the PAF sticker, patent number sticker and no sticker at all from early 62 to 64. PAFs, especially gold cover versions, can be found in 65 and some claim they’ve seen them as late as 67. I’ve never seen any later than 65. I’ve never seen a patent number on a 61. I’ve seen pickups that are missing their stickers in every year from 58 onward. Some fall off and some were never put on. A missing sticker tells us nothing. That brings up our first bit of misinformation. Gibson did NOT change the pickup when they changed the sticker (I know, it’s a decal). An early patent is identical to a late PAF. It’s also identical to any unstickered Gibson pickup with original enamel coated windings and correct string spacing.

Enamel coated windings on a PAF or an early patent number pickup. The later patents and the T-tops will have bright orange windings. This photo is from the Throbak site.

Let’s take the no sticker version first. The first problem is that many boutique (and Gibsons own) PAF reissues are nearly identical to the original PAFs. They have gotten the tooling marks correct, the pole screws are pretty close (and easy to swap out). In fact the only feature of an original PAF that is unmistakeable is the sticker. I’m not going to go through all the things to look for to authenticate a PAF sticker here (I’ve done plenty of posts about that). The repro stickers don’t black light correctly. They should shine bright green and with a consistent, flat glow. The most recent trick is to spray a good repro sticker with invisible phosphorescent paint. But most paints of that sort glow more blue than green and tend to look uneven.

The most reliable way to tell if a PAF (or patent) sticker is real or fake is to black light it. A real sticker will glow green and flat. A fake either won’t glow at all or will glow blue and the shine will be wavy or inconsistent

The patent sticker pickup is tricky because lots of changes were made over the years but the outward appearance did not. If the pickup has a nickel cover and has never been opened, you almost certainly have an early (purple to brownish enamel coated winding) patent number pickup. Same as a PAF. If the cover is gold, it’s a lot harder to know what you have without removing the cover. I’ll cover chrome covers later. In early 65, Gibson changed to poly coated windings and the tone changed. Not by a lot but enough to notice. Also, the pickups became much more consistent due to the use of an automated stop. I’m not sure exactly when this happened but I’ve seen enough poly winding pickups to know that they are pretty inconsistent when it comes to DCR (the ohms reading everybody posts). It may have been as late as the first T-tops when the auto stop mechanism was used as T-tops are almost always in the 7.5K range.

That brings me to the big misinformation surrounding the t-top. For some reason, guitar folks have it in their collective head that t-tops were introduced in 1965. In fact, just about any time a T-top is advertised for sale, the seller calls it a 65 or a 65-69 or some variation of that. I have owned many 65-69 ES-3×5’s and the earliest t-top I’ve seen is 68. In fact most 68’s still have the enamel winding patent number. T-tops are extremely common-Gibson made a lot of guitars during that era and T-tops can show up anywhere a pickup change was made. Back in the day when nobody cared about PAFs, a humbucker was a humbucker and when your PAF crapped out, your local dealer would drop in whatever he had in stock which, if it was 1968 or later, would be a T-top. A good way to ascertain what pickup you have if the cover is chrome but you don’t know what year guitar it came out of is to look at the bobbin screws (the four on the bottom). If they are flat head, it’s likely a T-top. If Phillips, it could be either a late patent (ornage windings) or a T-top although it’s more likely to be a late patent. You can always remove the cover if you aren’t certain but that diminishes the value.

Even if there is no sticker, slotted bobbin screws like the pickup on the left, almost always indicate a T-top. It’s not 100% but it’s close.

The whole pickup thing is a bit of a futile exercise since there are great PAFs and lousy PAFs. There are also great patents and lousy patents (of all types). They seem to get more consistent as they move forward in time. T-tops are very consistent but almost everyone agrees that most PAFs sound bigger, fatter and more articulate than T-tops. I should make the point that you should use your ears and not your eyes when deciding what pickup to use. That said, use your eyes to determine what it’s worth. My personal player is a 59 ES-345 converted to 335 spec. I change pickups all the time. Currently, there is a zebra long magnet PAF with no sticker in the neck and a Throbak in the bridge. It sounds absolutely great even with a lousy player like me. It will never be a collector piece (two filled holes in the top and other issues) but I’ll put it up against just about anything. I had a white PAF in the bridge for a long time but when I needed that for another guitar, I switched to the Throbak and it sounded nearly identical.

Use your ears when assessing a pickup. This is my personal player. It’s had dozens of pickups in it over the years. I have switched the zebra to the neck and the Throbak to the bridge since the photo was taken. Most folks put the higher DCR pickup in the bridge. I tend to do the opposite. That’s another post, however.

Here’s a 57 PAF. No sticker (and no sign that there ever was one). Also note the bobbin screws (the four Phillips screws) are steel. They were brass later but went back and forth a few times so it’s not a very reliable method of dating.

I’m sure I’ve covered all of this before but I see so many errors in listings for Gibson guitars that I’m compelled to try to clarify this issue once and for all. Well, twice or three times for all. It’s about pickups. Since I deal in vintage, we’ll only cover Gibson humbuckers from 1957 until 1985. There are quite a few iterations in that time span. Everyone pretty much agrees what these different pickups are but a lot of folks don’t have the timeline right. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a t-top listed as being from 1965. I know everybody chooses the earliest possible year when listing parts and entire guitars. Like when there is a re-used serial number seen in 65, 66, 68 and 69. It always seems to be listed as a 65, right? But we’re going to talk about the timeline for pickups only here. My facts are based completely on observation. I’ve owned over 600 Gibson guitars equipped with humbuckers and while the majority of them are from 58 to 64, I’ve gone through plenty of them from 66 to 82 so i think I have more credibility than most folks.

The very first Gibson humbucker was introduced in 1956. It had no sticker (decal), enamel coated 42 gauge copper windings and it had a stainless steel cover. These early PAFs (patent applied for) pickups were used on pedal steels (and had 8 string poles). Six string PAFs were being installed on electric Spanish guitars (ES) and Les Pauls by 1957. The early 57’s had no sticker and stainless steel covers. For reasons lost to history, they switched to nickel plated covers during 57-probably fairly early in the year since I see a lot more stickered PAFs in 57 than I do unstickered. Same goes for nickel covers vs stainless. These were long magnet (2.5″ usually A2, A3 or A4 although I can’t tell the difference). Some say A5 might have been used as well-like I said, I can’t tell the difference. There were also gold plated covers for the higher end guitars but the pickups were the same. There were no changes to PAFs in 58.

In 1959, there was an apparent shortage of black plastic-the type used in the bobbins and white was substituted. You’ll find PAFs with one black bobbin and one white bobbin-the slug coil is almost always the white one. We call these zebras. There are also “reverse” zebras where the screw coil is the white one. These are really rare-I’ve seen perhaps 8 of them in the last 30 years. Then there are double whites which, of course, have two white bobbins. Double black bobbins are the most common type in 1959 as well. It seems that certain guitars are more likely to have gotten the white bobbins than others. ES-355’s seem to have a higher percentage than other guitars. Les Paul Standards seem to have gotten them frequently as well but so many were swapped in because folks love the look of exposed double whites in a LP.

Ooh baby…a 1959 ES-335 with a pair of reverse zebras. This is the only one I’ve had with a pair of reverse zebras. And yes, I left the covers off. They were way too cool to hide. Let’s see, I’ve owned somewhere around 1500 PAFs over the last 30 years. Only 8 have been reverse zebras.

1960 also saw no changes to the PAF. There are still double whites and zebras to be found throughout 1960 but they get rarer as the year goes on. By late 60, they are just about gone. I did have a 61 355 with double whites though. The magnets are still long A2 and A3. The covers are still nickel or gold. The windings are still enamel coated 42 gauge copper. In 1961, Gibson switched from a 2.5″ A2, A3 or A4 magnet to a 2.35″ A5. The A5 is a stronger magnet so to keep the level of force the same, a shorter magnet was used. Long magnets seem to be more desirable but I’m not sure why. The short magnet PAFs are incredibly consistent and almost always great sounding pickups. I’ve had some not so great sounding PAFs over the years (not many) but I’ve never had a bad sounding short magnet PAF. I always tell people that the best sounding long magnet PAF will sound better (and better is a really subjective term) that the best short magnet PAF. But the average short magnet PAF will sound as good or better than an average long magnet PAF. I’m not totally certain exactly when the change occurred. It seems to be around mid 61. I don’t crack open sealed pickups to check the magnet so it’s largely guesswork.

Short PAF magnet and long PAF magnet. Shorts were usually A5. Long was usually A2

PAFs continued unchanged until the end of their run. The last PAFs seem to have been used up by 1965 (and these would be gold ones). I hear stories about PAFs found as late as 67 but I’ve never seen one past early 1965 (on an ES-355). That brings us to what is perhaps the biggest misunderstanding of all of them…the early patent number pickup. I’ll cover these and all those that followed in the next post.

A group of Rockers surround (and probably harass) a lone Mod. It could get pretty ugly and the adults in the UK at the time were very worried.

If you are over the age of, say, 65, you might recall two British entities called Mods and Rockers. Apparently the youth of the UK split into two easily definable groups…Mods and Rockers. Both groups could be considered hipsters but neither thought the other was and thus they clashed. Sometimes with violent results. Mods wore the latest Carnaby Street fashions and rode around on little motor scooters. They were usually middle class. Rockers were leather jacketed greaser types who were mostly working class. The Rockers rode big Triumphs and BSAs. They thought Mods were effete snobs. The Mods thought the Rockers were low class and dirty thugs with no taste in anything. It was a moral dilemma in mid 60’s Britain but hardly touched us here in the USA. All this history just so I can have a clever title for this post which has nothing to do with Mods and Rockers. Ringo (yes, that Ringo) was asked (in Hard Day’s Night)…”are you a Mod or a Rocker?” His answer? “I’m a Mocker.” Clever, these Beatles.

I’m actually writing about modifications done to ES guitars. Mods for rockers…get it? Thought so. Most mods are ill advised, especially on vintage guitars as they almost always lower the value. Adding a mini switch for a coil tap or phase is a bad idea. In fact, just about anything that leaves visible holes in the guitar is going to diminish the value. Want to use an aftermarket bridge? Great. Use one that fits without modifying the bridge posts. If you want to add a Bigsby to your 64 stop tail 335, you are asking for a sizable decline in its value-as much as 25%. A better idea would be to sell the stop tail and buy a 335 with a Bigsby already installed. Adding a Bigsby is not a bad mod (if you use a Bigsby) but it’s bad economics. That leads me to my larger point. There are certain mods that are good for the guitar and/or the player. All of them will diminish the value but they are worth looking for.

The most popular is adding a stop tail to a trapeze tailpiece ES. It requires two big holes in the top of your guitar and leaves four holes at the end pin. That hurts the value. But if somebody else has already done the mod (and did it right), it’s worth seeking out. It will make the guitar better and it will lower the price. Everybody’s happy, right? Yes and no. If the tailpiece is installed in the wrong location, it is glaring. So make sure you get it right. Another useful (and common) mod is moving the bridge back slightly (toward the tailpiece). 50’s and 60’s ES guitars shipped with a wound G string (plain G strings didn’t even exist) and intonated just fine. Once plain G strings became the norm, ES guitars (and most other Gibsons) ran into an intonation problem. To get the G string to intonate properly, you had to reverse the saddle and move it all the way back in its slot. If you used 10’s or 11’s, that was fine but if you wanted to use lighter guage strings, you simply ran out of room and your G string was always sharp at the upper frets. The easy fix was to move the bridge posts back about 1/8″. Fortunately, the holes from the original posts were hidden under the thumbwheels. Intonation was no longer a problem but you just dropped the value of your guitar by perhaps $1000 to even $2000.

Modding a vintage 335 doesn’t happen much these days. Most of the mods you see were done years and years ago before 335’s were worth much. If you’re going to put a stoptail on your Bigsby 335, for the love of god, put it in the right location. Unless you’re Larry Carlton, this just looks wrong. This one is off by more than an inch. Even if it’s off by 1/8″, it will look odd.

So, if you want to use 9’s on your 335, flip the G saddle around and see where you are intonation wise. If you can’t get it right, you might consider finding a 335 (345 or 355) that has already had it done. That way, it’s priced in and you haven’t diminished the value of a collectible vintage guitar.

This 59 335, once owned by Mike Landau had its bridge moved back to improve intonation. Most times, folks just drill new holes. For some reason Mike’s luthier filled the original holes before drilling the new ones. Not usually necessary.

Do these look like a bonnet to you? Thanks to Vintage Correct Parts for the photo.

You won’t learn a whole lot from this post but it might be fun. Guitar players seem to have a soft spot for nicknames for their instruments and for certain guitar parts. When I first heard the term “whammy bar”, I knew what they were talking about. Well, the guitar community never met a knob that it didn’t have a descriptive nickname for. Gibson seems to have the most knob nicknames but Fender and Epiphone have a few as well. Some are descriptive and some maybe not so much.

For example, the simple numbered knob that was found on nearly every Gibson guitar from the mid 50’s until the early 60’s is called a “bonnet” knob. It doesn’t resemble a bonnet to my eye. It looks more like a derby but nobody calls it a “derby” knob. Earlier, there was the “speed” knob which mostly just stays still but I guess the idea was that it was somehow faster at turning. Speed knobs were largely used in the late 40’s and 50’s. More descriptive is the Gibson “top hat” knob. It looks like a top hat. It’s also, for obvious reasons, called a “reflector” knob as it had gold or silver foil on the top with the function printed on the reflector part…either “volume” or “tone”. Continuing the descriptive slant is the ubiquitous “chicken head” knob. With a little imagination, this knob, found mostly on Fender tweed amps and Gibson guitars with a Varitone, looks like a cartoon chicken head. Clever bunch, these guitar players.

Top hats. Or reflectors. They look a little like top hats. There were a few versions of these-short knurl, long knurl, tall, gold and black. They all look like little top hats.

The always popular “chicken head”. So named because it sort of resembles the head of a, you guessed it, chicken.

My favorite is the “cupcake” knob. It looks like a cupcake. OK, more like a cupcake liner than a cupcake but it leaves no doubt what knob it describes. Look at a Fender brownface or white Tolex amp built from 1960 until around 1963. There are white ones and brown ones but they are apparently all the same flavor. Two knobs-one Fender and one Gibson-are very similar. The numbered “skirt” knob is the knob of choice for the Fender blackface and silverface amps. The Gibson version is called a “witch hat” because, uh, it looks like a witches hat. They showed up in late on ES guitars and later on Les Pauls and SG’s.

The very illustrative “cupcake” knob. Comes in vanilla and chocolate and it does, indeed, look like an upside down cupcake. Or a Reese cup.

There are knobs that don’t seem to have been given descriptive names and, frankly, if they were all like that, I wouldn’t be writing this post. The black knobs on a Fender Jazz Bass and Jaguar don’t have a name (that I know of). Strats and Jazzmasters have versions of the “skirt” knob including a “short skirt” found on early Strats (well before short skirts on women became popular in the 60’s). Telecaster knobs are called “knurled” knobs because, well, they are knurled. Not terribly creative. I’ve seen them referred to as “barrel” knobs as well but they don’t look a whole lot like barrels. Epiphone has a real imaginative one that appeared on 50’s Epiphones. It looks kind of like a circus tent and most folks call them “carousel” knobs or “big top” knobs. This from the company that brought us the “bikini logo” Guess what it looks like.

The “carousel” knob looks something like a circus tent. This pair is a little dirty but so are most circus tents.

“My neck pickup is muddy.”

“My bridge pickup is too bright.”

“My pickups are poorly balanced.”

All are legitimate complaints about the tone of your 335, 345 or 355. All have fairly easy solutions so before you start swapping out your pickups, there are some really simple things you can do to improve the tone of your guitar. I’ve written in some detail about saddles and the nut and how they are two of the most important elements in getting the best tone out of your guitar. After all, the vibration of the strings are the source of your tone. The pickups main job is to get that tone from the strings to the amp. Sustain is important and that’s a function of good strings, a well cut nut and properly notched saddles. The strings need to vibrate freely without interference. Too deep saddle notches will choke your sustain as will a poorly cut (to tight or too loose) nut. Uneven frets will also affect the string vibration. You’ll need a good luthier to get these aspects of your guitar optimally set up. Once this is done, your guitar should play beautifully unplugged up and down the fingerboard and on the open strings. Then it’s time to address the issues that led off this post.

It makes perfect sense that raising or lowering the pole screws is a great way to adjust the volume/output of each individual string. Except it doesn’t work very well. Seth Lover’s original design didn’t even have pole screws but the brass at Gibson thought that players would feel that they had lost some control over their tone, so pole screws were added. Unlike the poles in a lot of pickups, the poles in a Gibson humbucker aren’t magnets. They pick up a very small magnetic charge from being next to the magnet but they sure don’t do much when you raise them or lower them. That’s because the magnet is still in the same place no matter where the pole screws are and the amount of magnetic charge on the screws isn’t enough to affect the magnetic field very much. I’m no engineer but I have ears. Do you hear a difference? Good for you if you do…adjust away-I don’t hear it. That said, when you raise or lower the pickup itself, the difference can be massive. The best method for adjusting your pickup height is good old trial and error. I start off with the pickups as close to the strings as possible (without the strings hitting the pickup).

My next step is to listen to the neck pickup. If it’s muddy, I lower only the bass side until I’m happy with the low end frequency response. Then I switch between the pickups to get a sense of the balance. If the neck pickup is louder, I first lower the treble side. If it’s still louder than the bridge pickup I lower both sides until the balance is good. I generally leave the bridge pickup as high as I can get it because I want it to overdrive the amp-that’s a personal preference. If you want the bridge pickup to be a bit more “musical”, lower it equally on both sides. Once you like the tone, you can raise or lower either side to get the strings balanced with each other. Check the balance between the pickups again. If your adjustments of the bridge pickup have made the two pickups out of balance again, your next step should be to lower the neck pickup until they are balanced to your ears.

There is one other adjustment that can make a difference. Often, the neck pickup sits at an angle to the strings usually with the lower edge closer to the strings than the upper (closest to the neck) edge. In that situation, I reverse the pickup ring so the tall side is toward the neck rather than the lower side. That will usually flatten out the pickup. Once the pickup is sitting flat, it will often be a bit louder than it was before. Lower accordingly until the pickups are balanced.

And keep this in mind when choosing pickups…DCR is not a measure of output. It is related to output but the relationship between DCR and volume is not a direct one. a 6.9K pickup can be as loud as an 8.8K. There are too many factors other than DCR that affect loudness (including pickup height). So, don’t assume something is wrong when your 7.6K neck pickup is louder than your 8.8K bridge pickup. Start adjusting the heights and don’t quit until you are happy.

You can clearly see that the neck pickup is sitting at an angle to the strings. That may or may not affect the output or the tone of your pickup. The fix is to reverse the pickup ring so the tall side is toward the neck