Humbucker

History[edit]

The "humbucking coil" was invented in 1934 by Electro-Voice, an American professional audio company based in South Bend, Indiana, that Al Kahn and Lou Burroughs incorporated in 1930 for the purpose of manufacturing portable public address equipment, including microphones and loudspeakers.^[1]


The twin coiled guitar pickup invented by Arnold Lesti in 1935 is arranged as a humbucker, and the patent USRE20070^[2] describes the noise cancellation and current summation principles of such a design. This "Electric Translating Device" employed the solenoid windings of the pickup to magnetize the steel strings by means of switching on a short D.C. charge before switching over to amplification.


In 1938, A.F. Knoblaugh invented a pickup for stringed instruments involving two stacked coils described in U.S. patent 2,119,584. This pickup was to be used in pianos, since he was working for Baldwin Piano at the time.


The 1939 April edition of Radio Craft Magazine^[3] shows how to construct a guitar pickup made with two identical coils wrapped around self-magnetized iron cores, where one is then flipped over to create a reverse-wound, reverse-polarity, humbucking orientation. The iron cores of these pickups were magnetized to have their north-south poles at the opposite ends of the core, rather than the now more common top-bottom orientation.


To overcome the hum problem for guitars, a humbucking pickup was invented by Seth Lover of Gibson under instruction of then-president Ted McCarty. About the same time, Ray Butts developed a similar pickup that was taken up by Gretsch guitars. Although Gibson's patent was filed almost two years before Gretsch's, their patent was issued four weeks after Gretsch's. Both patents describe a reverse-wound and reverse-polarity pair of coils.^[4][5]


A successful early humbucking pickup was the type which is nowadays known as the "PAF" (literally "Patent Applied For") invented by Seth Lover in 1955.^[6] Because of this, and because of its use on the Gibson Les Paul guitar, popularization of the humbucker is strongly associated with Gibson, although humbuckers had been used in many different guitar designs by other manufacturers before. Rickenbacker offered dual coil pickups arranged in a humbucking pattern beginning in late 1953 but dropped the design in 1954 due to the perceived distorted sound, which had stronger mid-range presence.


The Gibson Les Paul was the first guitar to use humbuckers in large-scale production. Over the following decades, variants of practically every type of electric guitar have also been equipped with humbuckers, even types which are traditionally associated with single-coil pickups, like Fender Stratocasters and Telecasters. In particular, the replacement of the bridge pickup in a Stratocaster-type guitar with a humbucker, resulting in a pickup configuration noted as H-S-S (starting at bridge pickup: H for humbucker, S for single coil) has gained much popularity. Guitars in this configuration are sometimes referred to as "Fat Strats", because of the "fatter", "rounder" tone offered by the humbucking pickup, and are also closely related to the "Superstrat" style of guitar.