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Today’s mad science experiment involves me tearing apart a vintage Guild AntiHum pickup from the mid-1960s. This rare item is pretty valuable, so if you’re sensitive about gore, best to look away.
You and I both know that you’re not going to look away.
Like with the vintage Guild HB1 I dismantled, I tore this pickup apart in the name of science. Well, that and pure raw curiosity; I like to see how things work. So, without further ado, let’s dig in and tear this puppy open! (more…)
One of my most popular articles is Guild Full-Sized HB1 and SD1 Pickup Variations where I put into writing all the nitpicky details about those pickups that I’ve learned over the years. I often get people asking me about the Guild “mini humbuckers” from the 1960s and thanks to a recent project that involved them, I have now gathered enough information to describe them in nitpicky detail, so that’s exactly what I’m going to do. (more…)
When Guild reissued the iconic HB1 pickup, they made them look exactly like the vintage models. They’re supposed to be made exactly the same way in order to get the same sound, too, but the jury is still out on that. The problem is that since they look very similar, I’ve been afraid that someone would use that fact to try and pass of new ones as vintage. Why? Because a vintage pair of HB1s can sell for $300 or more and the Newark Street HB1s are less than half that new (and even less on the used market).
Well, I’m sorry to say that it’s happened. Let’s look at how I immediately spotted these as fakes and how you can too. (more…)
Having written a fair number of guitar reviews, I figured I would document my steps in case anyone out there was curious. Additionally, I figured having a fair bit of transparency into the process would somehow had credibility to the entire affair. Really, though, I felt like writing this so I did. The end. Well, not really. I discovered that I was writing things like “The Beesly Book” and figured that I should specify what stuff like that means instead of writing an explanation in each review.
If you’re at all interested, here’s what its like for me to write a guitar review.
Don’t worry, this pic of a pure unmolested ’70s Guild HB-1 in mint condition with its unused ring, perfect springs and screws is not the pickup I dismantled. Doing that would make me a monster. (more…)
One of the questions I see on the guitar forums quite a bit is, “What kind of pickups does this Guild guitar have?” Since I’ve posted in many of these threads, I seem to get a lot of emails with the same question. I thought that I might write up a quick summary of the differences as I know them. I originally wrote this article in 2011, and have updated it in 2014.
For Guild AntiHum and LB1 Little Bucker mini-humbucker pickup information, check out my article on them here.
First, let me say that I am by no means the expert on Guild guitars. That honor goes to Hans Moust, author of the excellent book entitled The Guild Guitar Book. Much of what I’ve learned about Guild pickups, I attribute to Hans helping me via email and through forum posts. If you’d like to learn more about Guild guitars, I heartily recommend that you pick up a copy of his book.
To the best of my knowledge, there are two types of Guild HB1 pickups – the mini humbuckers (affectionately called “mini-hums”), and the full-sized humbuckers. This article focuses on the full-sized pickups, which, for reasons that should soon be clear, are often confused. We’ll be looking at three different pickups, all of which look very similar from a distance, and some of which look identical from the front. I’m not entirely sure of the correct names, but for the sake of this article, I will call them Guild HB1s, Seymour Duncan SD1s, and Fender HB1s. There are some others in there as well. Read on to learn more.