Pickups

About

A pickup upgrade will surely be a part of almost every musician's learning process and personal tonal development. Here at The Music Zoo, we make it easy with our huge selection - we stock everything from the time-tested classics to the boutique modern day hand-wound examples. Whether you're looking for electric, bass, or acoustic pickup, humbuckers, single coils or P-90s, a set inspired by your favorite player, or a modern active pickup, we're the destination! Buy your next pickup online at The Music Zoo or visit our New York showroom to shop today - we're an authorized dealer for all your favorite pickup brands! Guitar & Bass Pickups History As you might guess, the earliest guitar pickups arrived right alongside the first electric guitars. Rickenbacker pickups first appeared in lap steel electrics in the early '30s and then in the mid '30s, the Gibson ES-150, the first mass marketed electric guitar, was loaded with a unique electromagnetic bar pickup with hexagonal edges that was eventually dubbed the Charlie Christian pickup. The highly revered Gibson P-90 pickup first appeared in 1946 - followed by the jazz-player-favorite Dearmond pickups, Danelectro Lipstick pickups, and Valco made single coils of the '50s. In the mid to late '50s, the development of the modern-day humbucker began. Seth Lover created the first so-called "PAF" or "Patent Applied For" humbucker for Gibson in 1955, under the instruction of Ted McCarty. At around the same time, Ray Butts developed a similar pickup that soon become the Gretsch Filter'Tron. Both of these early humbuckers used reverse polarity coils and reverse winds in order to filter out mostly all noise associated with earlier single coil pickups. During this era, the P-90 was less popular but still developed further and was blessed with more output, while Leo Fender created his own single coils for usage in his Stratocasters, Telecasters, and Precision and Jazz bass guitars. The tonal character of all of these pickup types to