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*From Andrew about TONERIDERS*
We ain't in the USA that's for sure - try China. I was born in sunny Scotland and started playing the guitar as teenager in England. I now live in China, running Tonerider with my wife, who is from Beijing, and Martin Liang - a local bass player and pickup maker. As far as I know we are only one of a handful of guitar companies based in China that are run by expatriates - most people just use OEM makers, and find quality goes south very, very fast. Contrary to internet rumor we don't make for anyone else, or have our pickup made by a ghost builder - if you want Tonerider tone and features, they are only available on Tonerider-branded products.
All Tonerider pickups are wound in our workshop 40km north of Hong Kong that we set up in 2005, and we have a small sales office in Shanghai. We import the vast majority of our materials, including vintage braid wire and Fibreboard from the USA, enamel wire from Japan, and Nickel-Silver from Taiwan. I believe we are currently the only pickup manufacturer that is making its own covers from 18% nickel-silver and plating in nickel. We spent months getting our neck covers right, and all the angles and curves seem to be working just right, judging by your photo.
For the other pickup models we also make everything ourselves - including our own J-Bass covers and humbucker baseplates, P90 bobbins and strat covers. All the mold work has been a huge investment, but we are doing this for the long-term and being able to control our own quality is hugely important. I know some of my pickup making friends in the US seem to be at the mercy of Allparts and other suppliers which they find enormously frustrating. The only part we bring in now is our P90 covers, which we buy from Sound Garage/Gotoh in Japan.
As to the overall clean look of our pickups this comes from a few factors. Each of the bobbins is laser-cut and then hand-bevelled, resulting in a far cleaner look and tighter tolerances than stamped bobbins. We developed a wax potting system that leaves the pickups looking nice and clean, rather than covered in thick wax. It's a very different vibe than some other lines, such as the Duncan Antiquities. The aim is for a "pristine" vintage look. For a more reliced look our pickups are also a great starting point, but you will have to do all the relicing yourself, or contact someone like Luke Whitfield at Rebel Relic guitars, who does a great job with this.
Unlike some hand-winders we aim for consistency - we don't want each pickup to have a unique tonality, but rather want to create perfect consistency. In this way players and custom shops know that they can rely on our products to deliver the same tones, day-in day-out. Having played the guitar for more than 20 years, a lack of consistency and reliability in the music industry has always been my biggest gripe. Guitars with switches that fail, amps that crackle and hum after a few months - none of this would be tolerated in the consumer products industry (which the exception of the iPod perhaps!), so I don't know why guitarists should have to put up with it.
Apart from design and cosmetics, electrical and mechanical reliability are VERY important goals for any pickup manufacturer. To this end we go out of the way to ensure that each coil gets the full treatment - a lot of this is unseen to the end user. Our telecaster coils have magnets that are first lacquer and then covered in electrical tape to ensure that there is no chance of coil shorts. The fine magnet wire to the eyelet is glued down with CA glue, removing a further chance of damage during installation. Finally we wax-pot and tape each coil to ensure that it can't be damaged during shipping or when changing covers.
And the designs? Sometimes inspiration strikes and we get it right first time, such as with our Hybrid 90 pickups. The first few winds had such a compelling original tone that we didn't need to run to other players to get a second opinion. Our telecaster pickups took far, far longer and we sent a couple of dozen samples to players around the world over a six month period before finally settling on the Vintage Plus and Hot Classics designs. A few different iterations were on the market for a couple of months and we got some angry emails from players saying "the DC resistance is wrong on my pickup! It doesn't match the info on your site!". Everything has settled down now and both models are gaining quite a following. It's really satisfying to have a product that you have devoted so much time to getting some respect on forums such as tdpri. I really want to chime in sometimes, especially when misinformation is around (nothing malicious but just rumors or old news) but so far have managed to hold back!
Some of our designs are "customer-led". One of the UK's largest custom builders asked us to build an Alnico II humbucker that he had "imagined" but didn't have the skills or tooling to make a reality. After a few months of expensive DHL packages back and forth we finalised the specs of his pickups, and they eventually came (with his permission) to release the Rocksong TRH1 Alnico II humbucker.
Andrew Cunningham
General Manager
Tonerider Musical Products Ltd.
