Electric Guitar Trends

Fender has been using plastic pickup covers since the beginning, and hasn’t strayed much from their approach to pickup covers of the years.

The early Gibson humbucker pickup covers served another purpose, to reduce the hum and other unwanted noise that could get picked up and amplified.  These pickup covers were made of nickel.

Unfortunately, nickel is a non-ferrous metal and has limited ability to block out any stray rays.  They also add a few extra ounces of weight to the guitar. I like nickel pickup covers though, they look cool.

Sometime in the 1970’s somebody was futzing with his humbucking pickups, and left the nickel pickup covers off.  The resulting sound was slightly more aggressive sounding and today many humbucking pickups are available with nickel covers or plastic pickup covers.

Around this time, their arose a market for after market pickups.  DiMarzio, Seymour Duncan, and EMG led the charge.  EMG pickups can be identified by solid block of black plastic covering the pickup which looks okay and is lightweight, but it is always black.

Pickup technology has improved tremendously over the years, and nowadays even the noisiest pickup has far less hum and noise than the single coil pickups manufactured in say, the 1960’s.

I see that Gibson has used anodized graphite pickup covers on their new Limited Edition Eye Guitar (Red covers), and on the 2008 Guitar of The Month Reverse Explorer (Copper covers).  These not only look cool, but are sturdy, lightweight, and won’t impede any of the signal emanating from your guitar.  I hope we see more of this in the future.