RAISING THE TONE
Many years ago, in one of the first issues of Guitarist magazine I ever read, there was a report from a vintage guitar show. Among the pics of Paisley Telecasters and ’Bursts was a shot of a black Les Paul Custom fitted with what, to my inexperienced eyes, appeared to be an unusual neck pickup. It had chunky rectangular polepieces and looked like a relic from an earlier era. This, I later discovered, was Gibson’s Alnico V pickup, also known as the ‘Staple’ pickup because of those evenly spaced rectangular polepieces.
It was not all that surprising that I didn’t know what it was, however, because it had a short life in Gibson’s guitars. Introduced in 1954, it was designed to take the warm tone of the P-90 pickups fitted to most Gibson electrics at that point and add a little more
