Kim talks Vintage Guitar Parts

Woodstock 1969

The 60′s were a turbulent decade. The assassination of JFK kept us fixated on the TV for days and gave us an insecurity that other decades had not felt before.

Those of us growing into our own during the 60′s were also very much affected by the war in Vietnam. We would all watch the "war lotto" to see which of our friends and loved ones would go across the world to fight in a country that we had not even known had existed.

For me, like other teens my age,  the lotto was especially painful as I had a brother that was just 2 years older than I was and I wasn’t ready to let him or my other friends leave our safe, secure Long Island town.

The 60′s was also showing pains from the growing racial issues that faced us all. Segregation, desegregation, marches on Washington. We all needed to become equals.

Many families were separated by what has been termed the "generation gap". Parents not knowing what their children were doing and children learning not to trust anyone over 30.

There was confusion and mis-trust between the "straight" and the "heads", music was going in directions that most didn’t understand.

The world was spinning out of control and we were all angry about something.
 

Then for 3 days in 1969 the world stood still

This is a 1959 Gibson PAF (Patent Applied For) Pickup all Original with Double White coils. This is one of the finest examples of a PAF we have had in a long time.

The cover has never been removed and the lead is over 11" long.

With the cover never being removed we can only guess at the magnet length, However being a 1959 we would guess long.

I guess we should start with a little history of the Gibson PAF pickup. By the mid-1950s,

Gibson wanted to counter the latest electric guitars introduced by Fender. Leo Fender had built a company that was a sizable competitor in the solid-body guitar market place.

Gibson believed they could beat Fender with their high quality Les Paul, and by developing a low-noise pickup.       

The problem with Gibson’s P-90 and Fender’s single-coil pickups was inherent in their designs, allowing 60-cycle hum (noise) to interfer with the sound.

Seth Lover was the Gibson engineer assigned to solve the problem. Seth connected two single coil pickups in series (opposed to parallel) and connected the coils out-of-phase electrically and magnetically. Thus the signal noise of each separate coil canceled out the noise of the other coil. That is how the pickup came to be known as a "humbucker".

Seth/Gibson filed their patent for the pickup design on June 22, 1955. Gibson added the new pickups to steel guitars in 1956, and in 1957 on electric solid-body and arch-top guitars including the Les Paul Model. During late 1957, a small black decal with gold lettering was added to the underside of the pickup that read, "PATENT APPLIED FOR" (hence the PAF abbreviation).

Seth Lover received his pickup patent #2,896,491 on July 28, 1959. By mid to late 1962, Gibson changed the pickup decal to read, "PATENT NO 2,737,842". Interestingly the patent number listed on the decal was not for Seth’s pickup design but was for Les Paul’s trapeze tailpiece! Perhaps this was a research roadblock for the competition, or maybe just a mistake?

Billy Gibbons with his 1959 Gibson Les Paul (Pearly Gates):