Main Description

A Vintage Pickup in a modern world

The Classic, (belatedly, the Classic 50, which was the erstwhile “Classic 50s Deluxe”) is  a humbucker, much like the Bourbon Cities and the Hot Irons, that we’ve been making for nearly 20 years at this point, and have survived the change from far eastern OEM manufacturing right through to their current form, where they’re high end, UK made, hand wound, heavily customisable little things!

The names a little bit of a hangover at this point, and, honestly, it makes me cringe a little, because, really? They’re not all that 50s… they’re certainly closer to “what was used in 1957” then some humbuckers we make, but, if you’re looking for a historic recreation? The True 50s is miles closer.

Nowadays, the Classic falls into into a funny little niche really. Its not a historic replica, and its not overly specialist, and its not massively “seasoned” to make it “ a must have” for any particular style of music. Its just a very capable, very pleasing, very well balance humbucker within in the “vintage” realm, without really trying to impose itself on your style.

Built around an alnico 3 bar magnet, and wound to a versatile at 7.7K, using 42 AWG Plain enamel, it retains plenty of headroom, a gorgeous roundness in its crystal clear, brassy highs, and a warm, rich, well behaved low end. All coming together to make an absolutely perfect combination that’s going to sing when used for Blues, Jazz and pop.

If I was being a little hard on the old girl, I’d maybe argue that the extra warmth and rounded nature of the highs, mean that if your planning on using her for “vintage rock”, shes maybe not going to have the definition in her bite that you’d maybe be looking for, and the Bourbon City would be a better choice, but, honestly? The Classic isn’t a slouch when it comes to a little gain, and it will be more then capable of rattling the windows if that’s your thing, but it wouldn’t be my first choice personally.

Where it really excels, is in the cleans, in the heart and soul, in that ragged edge just before true amp breakup. It really is a truly wonderful humbucker that’ll tick an awful lot of boxes.

Gibson®, Epiphone®, Stratocaster® and Strat® are registered trademarks of Fender Musical Instruments Corporation and Gibson Musical Instruments Corporation. Axesrus® has no affiliation with FMIC

Sound Clips

Should be just below!

Why "Wide Range" isn't all it seems

What is a "wide range humbucker"?

This might seem a bit of a stupid thing to say, but, depending where you come from in the whole Tele® Deluxe/Custom thing, it will make some sense.

A wax potted history
Without getting too bogged down in the history of it, Fender® released “The Wide range humbucker” in the 1970s, and it’s a very specific design – it’s a 10K, 42 AWG humbucker, wound onto larger bobbins, and with threaded CuNiFe Rod magnets. The bigger bobbins needed to get 10K of 0.06mm wire (one of the few Fender® pickups to use metric wire rather then AWG!) needed a bigger cover, and the bigger cover needed a bigger base plate, which in turn, needs 4 screws to stop it wobbling. That design lasted through the entire original run, until 1981, when the the guitars were discontinued. (and I don’t think many lamented it, because no one really liked them at the time!)

Roll forward to 2004, Fender® “re-issued” the Telecaster Deluxe, Custom, and I believe, the Starcaster® (which also used wide range humbuckers) – but they changed the design. They kept “the look”, with the 3x3 pole screw setup, the huge covers, the 4 screw base plates – but internally, the humbucker was much more “normal” – it was steel poles, normal sized bobbins and a bar magnet. Electrically, it was behaving much like any other humbucker.
However, the problem with the re-issue version, is that they weren’t very well thought out. Theres a few different specs nowadays, but on the whole, they’re not amazing. It’s nothing to do with the space in the cover, or the steel poles, or the bar magnet, its simply because there hadn’t been much consideration gone into the coil design, they were just cheap and cheerful humbuckers dressed up to be something they weren’t.

So we have a funny situation with wide range humbuckers – there are the originals, which are, frankly, a weird design, with a very “distinctive” sound, (very big, very brash, loads of head room, loads of body, hard to control!), and then the re-issues, which are more recognisable, more normal, but don’t sound amazing and this has led to something strange happening.

This has given rise to the belief that its some sort of sacrilege to put a “normal humbucker” into a wide range case, because, somehow, even the best humbucker in the world, will magically become terrible once there’s a generous block of wax around the coil. (which is obviously nonsense) and has driven a demand for “the original” wide range humbuckers.

Originality for the sake of it?
Now, I do understand that to a certain extent, and this maybe goes a little beyond my remit as the man charged with telling you about humbuckers, but that’s a weird idea to have. The re-issues sound bad because we recognise their tone/signal as being “a normal humbucker” and we recognise it as being a pretty poor example, but we DO RECOGNISE IT. Jumping from that, to “I must have the original with the extinct magnets and massive bobbins” – if you think about it, how many 1970s Tele Deluxes have you actually heard? How many have you been in the same room as? How many have been in the hands of players who have inspired you with their tone? I bet its not a long list right? (an honourable mention to Alex Kapranos though!)

That puts the “original” design into a funny situation (and it does begin to explain why the design didn’t catch with the initial release) – most of us have never actually heard them.

And to get into the very shallow waters of this thinking, consider this.

“Good guitar tone isn’t magic, nor is it some mad cap engineering exercise, it’s simply a case of being able to put your finger on what you’re hearing and being able to say ‘I know that! I know what it’s for!’ and being able to apply that to the music you like to play”

And before you jump down my throat and tell me I’m an idiot, consider this. You’re here, shopping for pickups because, presumably, your current pickups clearly aren’t doing what you want from them. What have you based that opinion on?

Chances are, you’ve got a tone in mind right? Maybe another guitar or a few guitarists/bands/songs where you’ve heard what you’re after and you know your guitar isn’t doing it? Do any of those players actually playing original Telecaster® Deluxes?

Basically (and I’m sorry to sound miserable in this, I promise you, I’m not! I’m just trying to keep this short!) – our taste in guitar tone is based almost entirely in “what we’ve heard before” – and because very few of us have heard a great deal of “original” wide range humbuckers (and those of us that were lucky enough to be exposed to them in the 70s, don’t exactly have fond memories!) – it’s a dangerous (and frankly, expensive!) game. Because your buying blind. The Original design might have been the best guitar tone, electrically, ever produced (not that such a thing can exist! But humour me!), but because it never caught on, it remains relatively unrecognisable, and we just don’t like it all that much as a result!

And that’s quite depressing in its own way, but, think of it like this. You either want to sound like something/someone you know and recognise and like… or you’re a free spirit, and to paraphrase John Lennon, you’ll get a tune out of a tuba! If you’re the former, you probably don’t want “real” wide range humbuckers… they’re too unfamiliar. If you’re the latter? I’d argue you don’t have to swap a pickup in your life! (who cares what came before eh? Get back to making music!)

And that’s kind of what happened back in the 70s – Fender® wanted to make a Humbucker, they employed Seth Lover to do the job, they didn’t want to copy Gibson®, but they wanted to muscle their way into the Rock scene where Gibson® had been dominating. The Tele® Deluxe turns up, its got humbuckers, but these humbuckers didn’t sound like Gibson® humbuckers, no one really fell in love with the Tele Deluxe, it never ended up defining its own niche within music, and they dropped off the radar in 1981 for 23 years!

Doing what Fender® should have done
I wouldn’t be typing this if the original wide range design caught on. If Fender had managed to get a Tele® Deluxe or a Starcaster® into the hands of Angus Young, Eric Clapton and BB Kind and have them fall madly in love with it – it would have managed to cement itself into the realm of legendary tones… but it didn’t – so they almost did the right thing when with the re-issues – everyone wanted the Wide range to be a normal humbucker, so that’s what they gave us… they just didn’t do a great job with it.

And that brings us back to our “humbuckers to fit a wide range route” – the inevitable sales pitch in all this.

This pickup is a normal humbucker, it’s a very good one at that – everything it does in a Les Paul® or a Strat® its going to do in a Telecaster® Deluxe or a Starcaster® - electrically, its identical, so tonally, its identical, and importantly, its recognisable as being a good humbucker! Its not going to give you “that original wide range humbucker tone” because that’s not what it is, but its going to do exactly what its design to do, and it’ll fit into the guitar without any mods, and it won’t ruin the look of the thing!

And that, for me, is the way to do upgrades to these guitars – I’ve nothing against revisiting the original design, if you want to a walk a mile in your dads shoes, and play the guitar he regrets selling in 1983, go do it, with my blessing, go get a set of 10K, CuNiFe poled wide rangies and see what you can get them to do! But If you want something you know your going to click with straight away? A normal humbucker in a big case might be much less of a culture shock!

So to round out yet another terrible sales pitch – that’s what we’re doing here. It’s not historic, it’s not trying to ape a 1970s wide range humbucker, it’s a Classic Humbucker in every way shape and form, that will fit into a Telecaster Deluxe, or a Custom, or a Starcaster® without any messing about – and it will sound like a Classic.

Setup

500k pots work perfectly (thats what was used on the recordings for reference) and a 0.022 or a 0.047 cap on the tone will see you absolutely fine - you can try a 300k tone pot if you like, but i've never felt it made much of a difference myself.

Warranty & Returns

In an ideal world, I wouldn’t have to write this section up, and, I really wish I didn’t have to, but, if I’m being honest and transparent about how pickups work, for better or worse, it’s probably worth being honest and open your rights as a consumer too, and maybe give a little insight into how we actually build pickups.

How we do it

Pickups, at our end of things – are “Custom made” – I cannot stress this enough. When you click the “Add To Cart” button, there is no pickup on the shelf, no bucket of pre-terminated bobbins or half complete pickups. It is made, entirely, from scratch using the parts we have available.

This means, if you order a Bourbon city, or a Hot Iron, or a Texas Blue, it is wound FOR YOU. It is being built to the specifications you have stipulated in the drop-down menus, even the most “normal” design, is still, essentially, built to order.

That entails our pickers collecting the parts from stores, delivering them to the winders, who then get the copper on there, and then the wound coils going to the techs to solder, terminate, test, polish, wax pot, clean, retest… you get the idea.

This is all done “in house” and, obviously, there is a queue, which is first in first out, so pickups will NEVER be shipped same day. Realistically, it takes about 2 weeks, but we do get busier at the beginning/end and middle of the month, so that can have a knock on effect.

And this is all being done, by hand, on a VERY small scale. At maximum, we can produce about 6 pickups a day.

It works wonderfully frankly, because we can make, pretty much, anything you can dream up, and keeping it small scale, means we have an exceptionally high attention to detail with each pickup sold.

Returns

So we have an item, when all is said and done, that didn’t exist until you purchased it, that has cost a lot of man hours to actually manufacture, and has been manufactured to your exact specifications.

As such, pickups come under the remit of “custom work” as laid out under the our terms and conditions, and as outlined in the UK governments distance selling regulations.

This means, in short, pickups are none returnable, and none refundable.
I understand, in this day and age, that may seem quite the hard-nosed approach, but, sadly, there’s no wiggle room in this. Once a pickup is wound, there’s no going back. It belongs to you. There is no “I’ll test it to see if I like it” or “I’ll return it if I don’t like the colour!”.

Warranty

All Axesrus pickups come with a “relaxed lifetime” warranty as far as I’m concerned. I’m never going to ask you to register the purchase, stop offering support 12 months after purchase or limit support to the initial customer in the case of second-hand stuff. We are incredibly proud of the pickups we produce, and I’ll help out wherever I can.

However, its worth laying out what I’d consider “realistic” expectations as to what we will cover as part of a warranty.

Repairs and replacements
Whilst we will not accept pickups as return for refund under any circumstances, we reserve the right to repair or replace any pickup that develops a manufacturing fault within a reasonable time frame.

I won’t put a scale on that time frame, but I will say, its at our discretion. If you’re lucky enough to have some of the VERY early hand wound stuff we made, and we (stupidly) thought we could do it at £20 a pickup, and the coil wires snapped after 10 years? I’m probably not in a position to repair or replace it free of charge, you know? You’ve had your fun; you’ve got your money’s worth!

On the flip side of that – if you’ve bought a £200 humbucker 2 years ago, and it’s developed a fault? You’d better believe Axes is bending over backwards to get it repaired and get you up and running again.

I’ll say this too, we won’t hang you out to dry – if that £20 pickup can be repaired, even if we’re not doing it as part of the warranty, we will offer to repair it at a reasonable price.

Damage vs. Fault
Pickups are delicate creatures I’m afraid. Nature of the beast I suppose, they were never designed, all those years ago, to be “presented” outside of a guitar, so go in knowing this, pickups can be damaged. Either in transit, whilst in storage, or during install.
It is VERY difficult to know how a pickup has developed a fault, so most of the time, we will go into all warranty claims with the mindset that “it’s a manufacturing fault”, frankly, because it keeps everyone happy, avoids any awkward conversations as to “who’s done what” and, normally, repairing damage done during install is the same work as repairing a manufacturing fault either way. Worst case, we might have a delicate email exchange about who’s covering the postage, but that’s about as bad as it gets.

However, we will take this approach only when a pickup, which is showing damage, is only showing minimal damage. I appreciate everyone makes mistakes.

Pickups that have been heavily damaged, have seen heavy wear and tear, or have been intentionally broken in an effort to raise a warranty claim, will see not be repaired, or replaced. Neither free of charge or “for a fee”

Lead times and cancellations
We do publish the lead times on all of our custom build work, and there is very little we can do to decrease the time it takes to actually manufacture this stuff I’m afraid, short of jumping you to the front of the queue (which is never fair, and we won’t do it)

Be aware that once an order is placed, work beings on your build, and as such, you’ve entered into the contract, and there is no backing out. Coils can often be wound within the hour or the order being placed, but they will sit in the work queue due to a back log at terminating/testing/cleaning.
Modifications
There are, occasionally, situations where someone buys a pickup, installs it, plays it for a while, and then might want something a little different down the line. Maybe a different magnet, or a cover fitting, or a new hookup wire fitting.

I am happy to carry out this work, and, normally, regardless of the “time since purchase”, this will be done simply for the cost of parts and postage.

However, the “depth” of these modifications, and if we’re willing/capable of carrying them out, is at the discretion of Axesrus. We’re happy to discuss this on a case-to-case basis, but go in eyes open, that its unlikely to be part of the warranty.

“Warranty with initial purchase”
I’m not a stickler when it comes to this stuff, but I will say, we do have to draw the line somewhere, so, strictly speaking, this “relaxed warranty” is, officially, limited to the original purchaser of the product.

That said, I’m not a robot, nor am I a fool. I’m aware that sometimes, a pickup is moved on relatively quickly, or is bought by a 3rd party for someone else, so, in these cases, lets just be sensible about it. I’ll carry forward a “true” warranty on a pickup for 12 months after the initial purchase, regardless of who is contacting me in regards to any issue.

However, I will need to know who the initial customer was. Even if it’s just their name and a rough date of purchase.

This goes for technical support too – I’ve no problems offering support on Axesrus products, regardless of “time since purchase”, but I will ask for some proof that they are in fact, Axesrus products.

Modifications to second hand parts, will be dealt with on a case-by-case basis too.

Changes in specification/tolerances
Over the years, we’ve had a few “interesting” conversations regarding pickup specifications, especially when it comes to returns and warranty.

The published specs of our pickups, are published with a “within tolerance” subtext, based off of the readings from our testing equipment.

There will, always, be variation between one pickup and the next, and whilst we endeavor to keep those readings within the tolerances stated, they do occasionally wander outside of the 10% we stipulate as “acceptable” – this is usually due to temperature fluctuation, or specification changes outside of our control (wire diameter, alloy composition etc.) – any resulting change in readings based on these factors, will result in an updated technical spec on the website, but, as you can imagine, the first we know about an unforeseen spec change, is when the pickups come off the winder.

We do not consider these “out of spec” accidents to be cause for a warranty claim I’m afraid, and we endeavor to keep on top of them so the information we’re giving you at point of purchase, is as accurate as possible.

Warranty postage
Repairs or replacement postage cost, outside of an initial 14 day period, is at your cost. I appreciate, in some situations, that this is prohibitive (especially when shipping outside of the UK).