The Last Bass Outpost
Gear Discussion Forums => Gibson Basses => Topic started by: godofthunder on March 02, 2012, 05:21:58 PM
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I have long heard that early Gibson lap steel pickups were the precursor to the Thunderbird pickup. I stopped by a local shop today and they had a 1960 Gibson pedal steel with a pickup that looks just like a Thunderbird pup but with two rows of pole pieces. A first for me! I have heard of this connection but never seen it in person. I took pics with my cell phone, never posted pics from it, I will try and post them, If not I'll go back tomorrow with my camera.
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Try sending the pics from your phone to your email. Then, go from there.
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I thought they were built like two Melody Maker guitar coils. Carlo and Steve (ThunderBucker) should know more.
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opps it's a pedal steel, the unit is on legs not a lap steel.
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I thought they were built like two Melody Maker guitar coils. Carlo and Steve (ThunderBucker) should know more.
Steve's on his way to Florida, should be checking in soon.
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opps it's a pedal steel, the unit is on legs not a lap steel.
Steel guitars do have legs sometimes but they have to have pedals & levers to be an actual pedal steel ....... :mrgreen:
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hmmmmmmmmmm I didn't see pedals and levers but to be honest I was looking at the pickup!
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hmmmmmmmmmm I didn't see pedals and levers but to be honest I was looking at the pickup!
Hahaha, makes me think of a girl in a movie I saw when she said to some guy staring at her boobs, "Uh, my eyes are up here!"
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A non-pedal steel on legs used to be called a table steel. Herb Remington is still making them in Houston, although he just calls them non-pedal steels.
In the 50s Gibson made a table steel called the Consolette. Maybe that's what you saw. They also made pedal steels.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXcZOf3qTBQ
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Hahaha, makes me think of a girl in a movie I saw when she said to some guy staring at her boobs, "Uh, my eyes are up here!"
There's a perfectly good response (http://www.explosm.net/comics/2102/) to that. :)
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I hadn't heard of this before now, A.R. Duchossoir published a book on Gibson steels in 2009. Here's an excerpt (http://www.gibson.com/en-us/Lifestyle/Features/gibson-electric-steel-406/), it mentions 8-pole humbuckers. Lowest price new on Amazon Marketplace is $29 shipped, I'll pass for now.
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I've also heard this for a long time - at least 20-25 years - first time may have been from Paul Chandler when I worked at Gary Brawer Stringed Instrument Repair in San Francisco (not certain on that but heard the same quite a few other times). Mike Lull and Jeff Ament spoke about this recently with Bass Player mag (I had mentioned that to Jeff years ago as well)
ML I was a Thunderbird fanatic back in the ’70s, and I’ve owned a bunch of them. But I found them to always be a little unwieldy—they played kinda funny and sounded tremendous. And what says “rock” more than a Thunderbird bass? I hated the ergonomics, but loved the sound. So I put my mind to making a bass that balanced well, and sounded like the originals. It was more of a task than I thought. We designed a new bridge and tailpiece. I took a set of original ’64 Thunderbird pickups apart and found out exactly why they sounded the way they did. I started making pickup covers out of a nickel-silver alloy, magnets out of alnico 4. A typical humbucker has two coils and a magnet down below. This one has two coils with the magnet standing vertically between them. The result is a thin, very high-output humbucker. The neck pickup measures 8k [resonant frequency], and the neck pickup is 9k. The steel base plate becomes part of the magnet structure. I had to have all these pieces made from scratch. In the process of researching this project, I found the company that made pickup covers for Gibson back in the ’60s.
JA Those original pickups were for lap steel guitar, right?
ML Gibson had discontinued an 8-string lap steel in 1962, and they had a ton of these pickup coils laying around. They took two of those coils, stuck them to a steel base plate, and put a nickel-silver alloy cover on it, and suddenly they had a new bass pickup. So I made them just like that. The T-Bass pickup sounds exactly like the original ‘60s Thunderbird pickup, but they’re more consistent.
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Here are the pictures! It is a pedal steel, man the thing is beautiful I wish I could buy it. Sure looks like a Thunderbird pickup to me.(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v102/godofthunder59/1960Gibsonpedalsteel004.jpg)(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v102/godofthunder59/1960Gibsonpedalsteel006.jpg)
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Way cool. (and pedals, too) Sure does look similar - deluxe version with adjustable polepieces rather than the bar magnets.
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I am just thrilled to be able to confirm this for myself. When I started at the House of Guitars in '76 they literally had piles of lap/pedal steels (really I mean piles) and I don't remember any with a Thunderbird like pup, they all had P90 looking units. I may have to go back and buy this thing, why I don't know. But with the Thunderbird connection and besides it is just so beautiful.
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Now we know where they got the tooling for the TBird pup! The magnets in a 60s TBird are the same as in Steve's '60 Melody Maker but the coils are different. I'd love to see what the inside of that one looks like. Looks like it's a completely different magnet and coil set up from a TBird. You can see what a TBird coil looks like here:
http://thunderbuckerranch.com/
Lap steels used the P-90, that's all they needed for 6 strings.
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I may have to go back and buy this thing, why I don't know. But with the Thunderbird connection and besides it is just so beautiful.
I agree. I have this just because (I think) it's so beautiful:
(http://i253.photobucket.com/albums/hh80/dpdp/IMG_6287.jpg)
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Way cool. (and pedals, too) Sure does look similar - deluxe version with adjustable polepieces rather than the bar magnets.
No, that pickup is not similar. It's the conventional humbucker design, as mentioned in the excerpt from Duchossoir's book.
I am just thrilled to be able to confirm this for myself. When I started at the House of Guitars in '76 they literally had piles of lap/pedal steels (really I mean piles) and I don't remember any with a Thunderbird like pup, they all had P90 looking units. I may have to go back and buy this thing, why I don't know. But with the Thunderbird connection and besides it is just so beautiful.
I agree that this one is beautiful but it doesn't have a Thunderbird connection.
Keep in mind that what Lull is talking about is a pickup from an 8-string lap steel that was discontinued in 1962. This is a pedal steel that used the original PAF design. I'd love to own it too but its pickup is not the basis for the Thunderbird pickup.
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No, that pickup is not similar. It's the conventional humbucker design, as mentioned in the excerpt from Duchossoir's book.
I expect the internals are not similar - I do wonder about the cover, however, as it looks like it could be from the same die (curious if the size is the same - it looks close).
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As a piece of art, the Gibson steel is way cool...I have always wanted to play steel...I loved those old Ernest Tubb records...
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I am just thrilled to be able to confirm this for myself. When I started at the House of Guitars in '76 they literally had piles of lap/pedal steels (really I mean piles) and I don't remember any with a Thunderbird like pup, they all had P90 looking units. I may have to go back and buy this thing, why I don't know. But with the Thunderbird connection and besides it is just so beautiful.
Buy it and learn to play it - even in upstate NY there's demand for country music and damn few steel players. Plus, when you get too old to stand you can drive your Rascal right up to this thing and gig away ;)
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That's why I'm learning the mandolin, I figure once i am no longer able to wield the mighty bass I should at least be able to lift a mandolin!
Buy it and learn to play it - even in upstate NY there's demand for country music and damn few steel players. Plus, when you get too old to stand you can drive your Rascal right up to this thing and gig away ;)
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I've long had half a mind to pick up a cheap lap steel and try to learn to play it - no real good reason why but maybe it's David Lindley's old stuff. I could drive the cat insane ;D
Let me know how the mandolin thing works out - I was interested enough as a kid to ask for one and lessons, after I had been playing bass for about two years, my mom told me to buy the mandolin and she would pay for lessons. I never had the cash to buy even a cheap one but the interest is still there.
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I'd love to learn to play a pedal steel, takes a lot of study though. And you really have to know what you're buying. Vintage Gibsons and Fenders are rarely used by pros. They just don't have features that are commonly used today.