Main Description

T90s – A vintage idea for a modern tone

We’ve had the T90s in production now for about 15 years by my maths – feels like a life time to be honest – most of it spenttrying to explain why they’re different from a traditional Telecaster® pickup! I won’t sit here and claim that it’s a revelation that’s going to change the way we play the guitar – but they’re absolutely exceptional at what they do.

We think of it as a fatter tone then the traditional Tele®, less snap and twang, less chicken friend “countrification” – more your rock-a-billy, swing, jazz, soul sort of pickup. There have always been shades of a proper P90 in there somewhere, and that’s what inspired the name, and it’s a beautiful little setup. It’s still distinctly a Telecaster® tone you’d be proud of, but it’s just bigger, bolder and brasher – really lets you open up the doors to play something a little bit different then your usual fare.

Obviously, the easy route would be to churn out yet another 1950s throw back, scour the web and guitar bibles for the specs, scatter the winds and hey presto – and that’s fine if that your thing – but I can’t say I’ve heard many of the staff here at Axesrus® playing many Boom-Chicka walking lead lines in the last few years, so we’ve tried to take that inspiration and turn it into something we’d actually use! Seems all too easy to make and sell nostalgia at the minute, we’re more interested in making tone!

So we’ve gone warm on the T90s – I won’t say “hot” because it just brings up images of shredder metal and face melting solos – but you’re going to be getting a similar feel, all be it without the lashings of high gain and distortion. The trick there is to wind them pretty heavily – nothing too flash in that regard, but plenty of copper on the bobbins is bringing out those raunchy, sleazy, chubby little overtones, offers up just a little more aggression and a lot more body.

Getting into the specifics now, all of the above absolutely nails the bridge pickup, and that’s what defines the set for us – but the necks sort of its own thing. Still definitely in a similar style, and really well matched to the bridge – but that extra string movement above the poles just takes away a little of that bite. Still nice and warm, but nowhere near as muddy as a more traditional pickup – and that’s something we really did want to avoid. The Telecaster® is all about the bridge! The Strat® is all about the neck – so we wanted to bring a little bit of that to the party – more of a bell like quality, less bottom end, but without losing the overall T90 feel. Just gives those couple of extra options when it comes to style – chords are rich and textured, riffs and lead sections are chewy and full, and ultimately, it’s incredibly usable.

Ideal pickups for anyone whos looking for more body, less snap from their guitar, and perfect for Rock-a-Billy, Blues, Rock, Pop, Jazz and Soul.

Fender®, Squier®, Stratocaster®, Strat®, Telecaster® and Tele® are registered trademarks of Fender Musical Instruments Corporation and Axesrus® has no affiliation with FMIC

Sound Clips

Should be just below!

Phase and Polarity

Why does it matter?
Right – without getting bogged down on this too much (because, your buying pickups here – this is something that we, as the builders, have to worry about, not you, the guitarist!) – but having pickups that are phased and polarised correctly (or incorrectly) can drastically affect the sound of the guitar, so its worth knowing at least a little.

Phase
When we speaking about a pickups phase, we’re talking about the direction of the coils wind.
Fairly easy to get your head around really – with the coil in front of you, sitting as it would be in the guitar – you’ll be able to see the start and end of the coil (at least with single coils with eyelet terminations) – black wire will be on one side, that’ll be the start, and either white/yellow/red/blue/whatever wire will be on the other side. That’s the end of the coil.

If the start is on the left, and the end is on the right – that’s a clockwise wind – what is normally considered “Standard”
If it’s the opposite, with the start on the right, and the end on the left – that’s a counter clockwise wind. Normally called “Reversed”

Polarity

The way the magnets have been charged. Magnets have an inbuilt “orientation”, so with rod magnets, the round “top” (and bottom) are the poles – so they will either be “north” or “south”

Easy to ID – off a compass up to the pole, and the poles will attract the needle. North polarity poles will attract the south side of the needle, and visa versa. (Yes, that’s correct – North polarity attracts south, south attracts north! The earths “north” pole, is south polarity… I know it sounds like a conspiracy theory, but trust me – it’s true!)

The Problem
Pickups that are “out of phase” (and or polarity) – where both pickups are either the same polarity, or the same phase, or both -  will, usually sound “washed out” (when two of them are wired in series or parallel)  – it’s a bit of a quirk of the design of a guitar, and some are affected worse than others if you do go “out of phase” – but the general thinking nowadays, so to have a reverse wound pickup and a standard wound pickup whenever you have 2 pickups “live”.

The solution
Standardisation! The magic word in pickups!

All manufacturers try to keep their pickups phased and polarised in a way that makes them cross compatible with any other pickups they make (although there are some exceptions to that rule), and, on the whole, that standard becomes universal – so an Axesrus® pickup will work along side a Seymour Duncan® pickup will work alongside a Montys® pickup will work alongside a Wilkinson® pickup.

So, with Telecaster® pickups – the standard runs like this.

Bridge pickup – Counter Clockwise (Reverse) and North Polarity

Neck Pickup – Clockwise (Standard) and South Polarity.

And that standard, was set back in the mid to late 1950s, when Fender® finally stopped messing around with the designs! But its interesting to see that up until the late 50s, there were both standard and reverse wound bridge pickups appearing on Telecaster® and Esquire® guitars! But by 1959, right up until 1988 (and possibly after, but records are patchy at that point, purely because Fender® changed how they manufactured… everything!)

Simple right? Everyone’s working to the standard Fender® set in the fifties and you’ve nothing to worry about?... well… not quite.

Everyone, more or less, follows the standard, but there’s one weird exception.

Fender® Musical Instrument Company!

For some reason, that no one seems to have been able to figure out, Fender struggle to stick to their own standard. Some pickups follow it to the letter (62 American vintage reissue, the TexMex, anything from Fender Japan, The Yosemite set) and other sets, they don’t! (Texas Specials, Twisted Tele®, Nocasters)

It looks, on the face of it, to be split along the “Custom shop” vs. “everything else” branding to be honest with you, but this is only a rough rule of thumb. The “Pure vintage” line, seems to mix up phase and polarity from one model to the next, and Squier® pickups seem to be dependant on what the factory worker has had for breakfast that morning. Purely random.

So, its worth bearing that in mind if your planning on mixing and matching a pickup from Axesrus® (or Montys® or Seymour Duncan® or DiMarzio® or anyone whos using “The Fender standard”) with a Fender® pickup! I’ve absolutely no problem with it – especially with the Telecaster® - I appreciate very few of us are into it for the neck pickup, so I wont cry foul if your only replacing the bridge! Just do yourself a favour, and have a check on the phase and polarity!

And this, is the weird and wonderful world of pickups in a nut shell! A standard was set 70 years ago, everyone works to it, apart from the company who set it! No surprise that I don’t sleep well eh?

Either way – we offer all of our pickups in reverse wound/polarity options in the dropdown (under the “non-standard options” – so its there if you need it, and as always, if your in doubt, you can always give me a nudge on the contact form and I’ll talk you through figuring out what you need.

The Good & The Bad

Between you, me and the fence post, I'm more an engineer then i am a salesman, so to scratch that itch - I’m compelled to not only write up the unavoidable "hey, this pickup great! Play Rock or Blues?! This one’s for you!", but for the sake of balance, it’s only fair that i get to write up what they're not great at too (and because this section isn't "up front" - i get to be a bit more technical about it too! Who knows, maybe I’ll be able to explain what all those lovely buzz words actually mean eh?)

Remember too - whilst I’m writing this stuff about Axesrus pickups, its true of every pickup ever made. Even if you’re not buying ours, this stuff is handy! It’s all true! all pickups have characteristics that make them good or bad... there are no perfect pickups!

So, here we go - The T90 - "A pickup for guitar music" - if thats not set the hook, i dont know what will!

42 AWG Coils
The Good - When we speak about "vintage" pickups - the main, defining variable that we're really speaking about, is the wire gauge - and that HAS to be 42 AWG (American wire gauge) - generally speaking, you'll only see it (on a Telecaster® bridges) being wound to between 7 and 10Kohm, and, tonally, it's what makes the pickups (and pretty much every guitar we've ever heard!) sound the way they do, its whats responsible for producing that signal that’s "roomy" and "open". It allows for a very high resonant peak, with a narrower Q factor, which gives you the "snap" and "twang" and its that perception of space, with a focus on the higher frequencies makes the guitar feel uncompressed and breathy, but without feeling weak.

The Bad - Hard facts? 42 AWG wire costs an absolute fortune... but, it’s kind of essential (this has the potential to get a little off track, so I’ll try to keep it as brief as i can!)

42 AWG wire is, nowadays, almost entirely obsolete. It’s a wire gauge based in the imperial system (American, remember) - it has a diameter of 0.0635mm, and it’s what was used on nearly every pickup in the 50s and 60s, especially if they were made in the USA.

However, as the world became a smaller place, most "real world" applications for "very very thin motor wire" (which is what pickup coil wire really is), switched over to the metric system, where wire isn't sorted by gauge, its simply measured in millimetres (sometimes, incorrectly called SWG (even by myself - but there is some reason for that! More in a second) - so, if your winding, say, a tiny motor for an RC car? You might use 0.06mm wire (which would actually be 46 SWG... and its within the lower end of the tolerance of being 42 AWG too... wire gauge is confusing!) - and your little cars going to go exactly the same as if you'd used "proper" 42 AWG (0.0635mm) - it doesn't matter. (There will actually be some difference in the motors performance I imagine, but i doubt anyone’s testing for it)

So, with the rest of the world using 0.06mm wire, "true" 42 AWG, essentially, became extinct, except in one industry. Pickups! Gibson® and Fender® and a raft of US based pickup manufacturers kept the home fires burning, and stuck with what they'd always been using. (so 42 AWG is only ever available in Plain enamel and Formvar... never in "enamelled" or "Polysol" (there are even some questions regarding Gibson® T tops in the 60s with their "42 AWG Polysol", because they certainly don’t behave like 42 AWG!)

And, as oft happens when you’re dealing with, essentially, a lack of demand for a product, the price slowly, but steadily, creeps up. AWG wire, is expensive as a result, and metric wire, which is used in every other industry, has become dirt cheap! But why does that matter? Why didn't guitars switch over to the cheaper wire?

Well... they did! 99.9% of "cheap" pickups actually ARE wound with metric wire! And here’s where we hit "the problem"

If we were still dealing with little motors ("make little car go zoom!") - everyone would have switched over. They're not daft! But were dealing with audio signal generation with guitars - and, without making this sound more grandiose then I have to - we have a pretty good frame of reference as to "what a good guitar should sound like" - its every piece of music ever recorded from 1950 up to the modern day. Think about it - every famous guitarist? Every band you've got on your play list? Every one of those "genre defining musicians", has probably, been using a guitar fitted with a pickup wound using AWG (as you get into the modern day, it becomes a little murkier... but, you get the idea!) - they get to the point where they're making a record, they get a couple of quid in their back pocket? They're going out and using a top shelf guitar! They're turning up in the studio with a Fender® or a Gibson® (again, I generalise, but on the whole? Its true!)

And, as such, the characteristics you only get with 42 AWG (that head room, that brightness, that "snap", the way it hits the amp) is ingrained in our brains, probably before you ever even pick up a guitar, but certainly after you've been playing for a few years - and as soon as you change the "recipe"? As soon as you start using a wire gauge that marginally thinner? A pickup is no longer the same - its not producing the signal in the same way, and we taste it! Ultimately, to get a tone that you’re going to recognise as being exceptional? You've got to use 42 AWG.

So, 0.06mm wire? Isn't as "hot" (its not inducing as strong a signal, its normally operating at a lower resonant peak frequency (sometimes it can be higher, depends on the impedance of the coil, but usually, lower) and the Q factor is generally wider - 0.06mm wire sounds more rounded, smoother, less defined, less biting... its fine, honestly! It still sounds like a guitar - but it doesn't flick those weird switches in your brain that make you sit up and go "THAT is the tone I’ve heard coming out *famous guitarist*s fingers!"

All because of that 0.0035mm... If you've ever wondered what the difference between "good for the money" and "actually good" pickups is? Why there exists £15 pickups that sound pretty good, and £250 pickups that bring a tear to your eye? That’s it... 0.0035mm!

So, obviously, we use 42 AWG, but it comes at a cost... and that cost is, primarily, financial!

Matched Set?

I normally use this section of the write ups to “suggest” different combinations of pickups that’ll work together – but with “pickups for Telecaster®”, I’m going to be a little more in depth with this, and try and explain why we’re treating the necks and bridges as separate products.

Now, that part your probably interested in!
Compatibility

EVERY NECK PICKUP FOR TELECASTER WILL WORK WITH EVERY BRIDGE PICKUP!*
(with 2 exceptions – hot rail humbuckers and anything “silly”, like our Heavy Heart)

There, I said it! Easy as that. You want a T90 bridge to pair up with your existing Fender® neck? Or you want to use a Screw Vintage! Neck along side your boutique Nocaster® reproduction bridge? You can! There are absolutely no draw backs! Its one of the wonderful things about the Telecaster® from my point of view.

So they’re all the same?

Now, this is going to sound a little hard on a guitar we all love, but, stay with me as I try to explain why.

The Telecaster neck pickup, because of its size and shape, is enormously limited in what it can do – from a pickup winding point of view, because its so small, and everyone wants it to have a metal cover – we have to work within a very tight arena in terms of design – so, on the whole? They’re all going to be wound with 43 AWG wire, the maximum we can get away with is somewhere between 7K and 10K, and we know that the metal cover is always going to attenuate some of the “snap” out of it.

So, we have a funny situation where Tele neck pickups kind of always sound pretty similar – its not that they all sound the same, but, on the whole? Tele necks sound like Tele necks – some might be a bit more open, or give you a bit more twang, or be a little gutsier, or a little crisper, but you’ll never break away from a very recognisable “that’s a Tele® neck!” tone. You’ve only got control over the seasoning, rather then being able to hugely tone shape in the same way you can with a Humbucker.

There are, obviously, ways to break it – our Screw vintage! Is wildly over engineered to make it sound “more like a Strat®” in the neck slot, and there are noise cancelling, stacked humbuckers hiding under Tele covers, and there are open faced, FeCrCo/CuNiFe poled, mixed wire wound exercises in insanity… but we’ve got to remember the golden rule with pickups.
“We like what we recognise”

And that kind of explains why Tele® neck pickups are what they are – the engineering challenge of “making something different, that looks the same, is the same size, and sounds familiar” – is insane! So, if I can give you one piece of advice when it comes to the neck slot? Accept it for what it is – if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and tastes like a duck? It’s a Tele neck.

A historical mis-match
This section is a little self-indulgent, but it does follow on from the above, and I think its worth typing out, so here goes.

Whilst I’ll stand by my belief that “most Tele necks sound similar” – that’s most definitely not true of the bridge pickup! It’s a bigger pickup, and we’re not ham strung by a cover – so from a design point of view? The Skys the limit! (Even pushing past the “we like what we recognise” idea, and ending up with pickups where we recognise the tone from a different style of guitar! Something you can’t do with the neck pickup)

Now, this is a bit of a back handed compliment in a way, but, even if we go all the way back to the Broadcaster/Nocasters – the bridge pickups and the neck pickups, tonally, have VERY little in common. Thankfully, this is something we accept with the Telecaster® (and we don’t with other guitars, weirdly!) – the idea that the bridge is a twanging, biting, snapping, raucous, chicken fried, Nascar watching, good ol’ boy with a foul temper, and the necks this weirdly woolly, forgiving, smooth and sultry, slightly overweight counter point – would be madness to a Les Paul® or RG player, buts its perfectly normal for a Tele purist.

It does, however, put me in a weird position when doing the write ups, because I like being honest about how these things sound, and I cant really say “Hey, our T90 pickups sound like a P90! Throaty and rich and aggressive, but retaining a huge amount of head room and breathiness, which makes them absolutely idea for someone wanting a pickup to pair with a P90, or a humbucker!” – because, frankly, its not true of the neck pickup! The neck pickup, sounds like a Neck pickup with shades of Strat® - so, my thinking is “Whats true on the guitar, is true on the website” – we treat the different positions as different products, and we be as honest as we can be.

Setup

250k 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.

The T90 bridge is a bit of an anomaly in terms of "vintage" pickup too - because its wound so highly, its inducing quite high. This is, honestly, to be expected with a pickup thats aiming to give you "as much P90" as it can, without being a P90 - so one of the wonderful things about it, is that it works absolutely brilliantly along side P90s and humbuckers, and is quite at home on 500k pots too.

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).