Bluesbucker?

[BlackhawkRise]

Anyone have any information about the Bluesbucker? It's supposed to be a P90 in a humbucker shape. Is it versatile enough to be the new bridge in my Single Humbucker Squier Strat? My ideal high gain sound is kind of like NIB Black Sabbath, but I want to be able to adjust my picking and use my volume knob to get a fatter more mellow pseudo-neck sound.

Can the Bluesbucker deliver?

 

[eclecticsynergy]

I don't think the Bluesbucker is a P90 under a humbucker cover. AFAIK it's a humbucker that sounds somewhat like a P90.
Never used one myself so I can't speak to its personality in performance.

FWIW, 25½" scale guitars generally tend to be brighter and slightly thinner sounding than Gibsons.

 

[freefrog]

I don't know if the Bluesbucker would deliver but I understand this model as an attempt to obtain the same inductance than a P90 from a humbucker whose slugs coil is magnetically inert...

Smart idea. Just not sure the narrow screws coil of a HB with a single magnet can give the same thing than the wide flat coil of a P90 above two magnets. If I had one at disposal, I'd induce its resonant peak and I wouldn't be surprised to notice a different Q factor.

DIY a Bluesbucker should be possible, by pulling off the slugs of a high inductance humbucker - a JB, a Custom or something like that. ;-)

 

[Chistopher]

I took one apart once. It's not just a regular humbucker with one coil being wound twice as hot as the other. Instead of having one humbucker magnet, it has two P90 magnets flanking the big coil, the little coil is mostly just along for hum-canceling purposes and to thicken things up a little bit.

 

[freefrog]

Thx for sharing.

The depiction reminds me Dual-Resonance models: the P90 sized DiMarzio DLX+ also hosts a coil twice more resistive than the other (more than 12k for the first vs the 2d under 6k) , thx to the use of vastly different wire gauges. But they have the same measured inductance, which suggests they host the same number of turns...

In the case of the Bluesbucker as I understand it (or not ), DiMarzio probably did that to minimize the effects of Dual-Resonance, as it's the case with the DLX, precisely (while other Dual-Resonance models are designed to increase this effect and its tonal consequences)....

Is the 2d magnet really a magnetized bar or is it just a magnetic spacer/helper? I wonder.

While I'm rambling: there was a patent announcing the Bluesbucker with a theoretical model hosting an actually "small" coil (a one pole cylinder) next to a full sized signal coil... It's somewhere in my archives. I'll try to find it...

EDIT - Found the patent: it's the US5530199A, from 1995.

 

[Chistopher]

I'll have to take a look at that when I get the chance