The Pickup You String Through, and the Lawyer Who Blinked

A hundred and eight guitar stories on the wire this week, which is more than synths, plugins, mics and drums put together, and the one I keep coming back to is about a pickup from a company that went bankrupt decades ago. Ultimate Guitar dug up Valco's string-through pickup: it does not sit under the strings, the strings run through its body. A humbucker disguised as a lap-steel part, the piece says, that outlived the company that built it. TopGuitar in Poland ran the same story two days later, which is how you know a story is good: two desks in two languages, nobody paid, same object.

One mechanism, once. A pickup is a magnet with a coil; a moving steel string disturbs the magnetic field and the coil turns that into a tiny voltage. Where you put the coil relative to the string decides what you hear, because a string vibrates in a different shape at every point along its length. Threading the strings through the pickup puts the coil around the string instead of under it. Whether that sounds better is a question for the room. Whether it is a real idea is not in question, and the fact that a bankrupt company had it in the 1960s is the best argument I know against the theory that everything has been tried.

Which brings me to Fender, who spent a year arguing the opposite in court. Guitar World reported that CEO Bud Cole says the company is no longer going after boutique builders in its Stratocaster copyright campaign, and that we could have done this better, while the piece notes agreements were already signed. TopGuitar's headline is blunter: Fender triumphs, other makers must change their S-style designs. Both are true. A small builder who signed before the pivot is still bound by it. I have mixed records made on Strats and on the copies, and I could not tell you which was which from the tape, and neither could the lawyer. The headstock is the trademark. The sound never was.

The week's other big maker did the opposite of litigating. Martin shook up its 16 Series with five new guitars, and the quote Guitar Player pulled is we're going to get weird with it, brother. Jake Bugg calls Martin the songwriter's guitar. I would put it differently: it is the guitar that records well with one microphone, which is the only test that matters in a small room.

Then the money. Johnny Marr's guitars fetched more than 3.6 million pounds at auction, and Guitar Player used the occasion to remember that he once said Yngwie Malmsteen should be forgotten as soon as possible. I am not here to referee that. I will say that the guitars that sell for millions are the ones that were played on records people still play, and that is a different list from the ones that were played fastest.

Gibson had two stories, from two directions. Indie Hoy in Buenos Aires reported a guitar in homage to Gustavo Cerati, based on the 1965 ES-335 that was with him for his best years; that is a Spanish-language story about an Argentine musician and an American maker, and it belongs on this wire because Cerati's records are in every Latin studio I have worked in. And Guitar World covered a limited collection inspired by the one-off guitars the former CEO built himself. A chief executive who learned to build guitars is a rarer object than a Cerati signature. I would like to hear both.

Signatures were the week's weather. Reverend released Billy Corgan's Infinite Sadness models in time for the tour marking thirty years of Mellon Collie, and Guitar World's weekly round-up says Fractal blinked first, Tim Henson got more signature gear, and Joan Jett's Epiphone is back. Signature gear is a decision about time: you are buying somebody else's ten years of finding a sound so you can skip them. Sometimes that is exactly right. Sometimes the ten years were the point.

Two more, for the people who do not play guitar. AMAZONA.de tested the Walrus Audio Lüm, a texture engine that does granular synthesis, glitches and long reverbs in a pedal, and the review opens by saying it is not for anyone who just wants a bit of hall. I have a wall of pedals I do not need and I want this one, which is the problem with pedals. And No Treble reports that Ashdown bass amps are coming to 300 Guitar Center stores. That is a British bass amp in an American chain, and the bass players I know will care more about that than about anything Fender's lawyers do.

So: a dead company's pickup that was ahead of everyone, a living company's lawyers who blinked, and in between, five Martins, one Cerati, and a pedal I should not buy. Guitars are not the most interesting instrument. They are the one with the most stories, and this week the wire carried a hundred and eight of them.