Bareknuckle Pickups - likes and dislikes???

karaterick said:

I’ve had a set of Mules in an SE McCarty single cut and Black Dogs in an EC-1000. The Mules are phenomenal imo. Maybe the best pickups I have ever had in an LP style guitar. I didn’t love the Black Dogs but they may have been the wrong pickup for the EC-1000. I never could bond with that guitar anythough.

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BluesDudeAK said:

Tried out a Bare Knuckles HSS set with a Crawler in the bridge and and Mothers Milk in the neck and middle. The only time I was ever happy with a HSS Strat. But decided to stick with SSS.
Compared the Irish Tour set with a set called Irish Sheep on Tour by Evil Sheep pickups (also made in the U.K.). I liked the Evil Sheep ones a lot better, still have them in a guitar actually.
Gave the Blackguard Tele Series Flat 50's a try in a guitar I was trying to like. The bridge pickup sounded amazing. The neck just okay. But I'm real picky about tele neck pickups and really go through a lot to find ones I like. Anyway I still hated the guitar but it practically sold itself with those pickups.
I'm a huge fan of U.K. wound pickups in general and BK makes some dandy ones in my experience.

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slowjammerukdog said:

I bought an Epiphone Riviera Custom P93 off Reverb a couple of years ago. The seller had fitted three BK P90s – two Blue Notes and a Mississippi Queen, I think. The guitar is basically a wine-red 335 copy with a gold-plated Bigsby and hardware, made in China. It looks sensational, plays great, and the pickups are superb. I'd wanted a P90-loaded guitar for ages, and this one covers so many of those gorgeous sounds.

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octavedoctor said:

I have my own story about these people.

I've been a professional guitar tech for about forty-five years. I'm a fully trained maker of flamenco guitars, although I've focused on repairs more than making. I've worked in distribution and retail. I'm also, by training an engineer with multiple qualifications in science subjects. i'm only saying this as background detail so you know I'm not just some kid out of school. 68 now, and I've been around a while...

I've fitted a few Bareknuckle pickups and I find the product to be sound. Well made and presented although not so dramatically better than other pickups that they are worth the inflated price. They seem to be popular with a certain type of musician who gets off on having a pickup with a name like "Nail Bomb" or "War Pig". So, great on the marketing.

A few years ago a client brought me a set of Telecaster pickus by Bareknuckle which he'd bought as a package along with a four ay switch. Could I fit them with the four way switch please?

Easy peasy. first order of business, check the polarity to see if they are a noise cancelling pair, as the 4 way switch is intended to put the pickups in series in one position to give not only a fatter, fuller sound but suppress the mains hum as well. I checked and they were not a rw/rp pair.

So I explained to the guy that I could fit the pickups but that he was likely to run into noise issues as he had a non-rw/rp pair of pickups and that he was likely to experience an increase in noise in the series position with these pickups. I explained in detail how noise cancellation works and that with these pickups he woud not experience hum cancellation in either of the in between positions, of which there were two; one parallel and one series, an that the hum in the series position was likely to be worse particularly if he planned to use that series position with a bit of overdrive, as many Tele players do.

"I don't want that" he said "what should I do?"

"well they seem to be a pretty reputable company" I said "There may have been a mistake; why don't you drop them a line or give them a call, see if they can provide you with an rw/rp version of one of the pickups. Problem solved!"

He came back the following week. "I emailed Bareknuckle" he said "and this is their reply"

What follows is the opening line of their email, which I quote verbatim:

"Your guy doesn't know what he's talking about. If you have a reverse wound and reverse polarity pair you'll have a very thin, unusable sound in the middle position...'

I was pretty astonished by this, not just by the rudeness and disrespect, but more by the fact that someone involved in pickup manufacture, didn't understand something as fundamental to the business they are in as the principle of hum cancellation. This, as i'm sure most people on here know, is what happens if you flip the electrical polarity of one pickup while maintaining the same magnetic polarity in each coil.

So I fitted the pickups and the switch and, of course, he had an increase in noise. I don't remember what happened in the end; he may have swapped them out for a set of Seymour Duncans or Toneriders. It was a good few years ago, pre-Covid I think

I'm prepared to be charitable and assume that it was some rogue smoothbrained employee that crafted that email rather than Tim Mills himself, as it doesn't seem to be a good business strategy to p!ss off the people who are in a position to promote your product by insulting their intelligence and competence.

Suffice to say, I no longer recommend Bareknuckle Pickups.

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coffeecupman said:

I put in a set of their PG blues for my first ever pickup change.

I didn't want to use a standard signal wire, I wanted to use audiophile wiring and crimp directly to the pickup wire, so I asked if they'd make me a set that had no normal leads but just the magnet wire ends hanging out so I could direct connect them.

They said they wouldn't, for health and safety reasons.

That's their call, and this may be more about me than them, but when anyone says they can't do something that they really could do for health and safety reasons, that turns me off.

A super high output humbucker generates 500mV. I'd like to see someone make that unsafe, unless their concern was improper grounding.

I opened the pickups and crimped directly to the magnet wires myself.

At the end of the day, they sound good.

Also in their defense I had another pickup winder who when I asked if they would just add extra winding wire for me to use as direct leads tell me it wasn't workable because the wire is too thin. Yeah I know it's thin, let me worry about that. I like to try experiments fucking around and hot rodding stuff.

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Mojotone Pickup Winding Machine - StewMac

Heavy-duty production winder with gauss meter from Mojotone for building, repairing and customizing guitar pickups

www.stewmac.com

GilmourD said:

I mean... If that's your goal:

Mojotone Pickup Winding Machine - StewMac

Heavy-duty production winder with gauss meter from Mojotone for building, repairing and customizing guitar pickups

www.stewmac.com

‍View attachment 872357

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coffeecupman said:

I came pretty close once to crossing over into doing my own winds. After seeing what the true greats have put into it, including the custom metallurgy and the wire hunting and small batch plastics etc and that's before you turn a single pickup, I decided that was a bridge too far.

It's far more my speed to open one up and do what I want to them than to create them from the bottom up.

It's like refretting. I think you'd have to do it a lot to get to the level that I'd want it done the first time.

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coffeecupman said:

Oh I would in no way want to be a retailer these last 5yrs and counting.

The customer has become truly obnoxious. I don't know how they deal with it.

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VictorB said:

Here's my issue. Not really an issue, but if you actually had JP's #1 on hand to extensively examine it in it's current condition (which he did) and measure the pickups in every detail, the best you can come up with is to recommend two of your existing production pickups?

Bare Knuckle Pickups, Jimmy Page Sound

Hi, I have just bought a 89 Orville By Gibson and will be upgrading the PUPS, I already have a LP with a set of Bare Knuckle callibrated "The Mules" in it and they are awesome, I'm after Jimmy Page sound so I wrote to Tim at Bare Knuckles and asked him what he would recommend, his response was...

www.mylespaul.com

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DrGhoul said:

I’ve been using Bare Knuckle pickups since 2006. Even back then they had a dedicated following and probably did a lot of business.
This was still when the owner Tim answered the emails and would do certain mods (magnet swaps) if the customer really couldn’t get the sound they wanted from a stock offering.

Since then Bare Knuckle has gotten even bigger and I imagine it’s a choice to not cater to individual requests beyond the aesthetic ones on the website.

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Banned said:

Used to love Black Dogs, but gravitated to Mules !

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GilmourD said:

Most of the time it's alright, fortunately... Sometimes people aren't very educated about what they're buying, so I'm glad when people ask me questions first, but sometimes the questions come after the order is shipped.

But then you get the guy that bought something that I have listed which is very clearly described as being made in China. He finished the purchase and immediately started messaging me about how glad he was that he found something American made to upgrade his Squier Classic Vibe and how Chinese stuff is garbage and all sorts of racist stuff. I had to explicitly tell him three times that what he bought is made in China before he got it. I just refunded him.

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BlondieMcFilthy said:

I was a really big fan of the Black Dog bridge for a while; through my old rig it had this fat, nasty, snarling voice that still cleaned up pretty well - I always likened it to being somewhere between a PAF and a Super Distortion kinda sound ("Slash, if he used Alnico 5 pickups" wasn't really far off either). That pickup sounded awful when I got the Marshall Studio Vintage* though - it just sounded really bright and painfully shrill, like it lost all of its body with that amp. Oddly enough, despite being pegged as being a darker pickup than the Riff Raff bridge, the RR actually sounded drastically less shrill and harsh sounding than the BD bridge did. That's when I had the PG Blues set put into my 60s Standard and I haven't really looked back since. Goes to show ya that the whole signal chain matters in your rig, not just one or two things.

I've been kicking around the idea of getting covers put onto my Mule set; as much as I love the open coil double cream look, I think the bridge in particular kinda suffers from not being "full" enough in the highs, if that makes sense. That PU always sounded great when it came to rhythm playing on the wound strings, but it just never had quite enough to my ears for the highs. I dunno if it's just my ears (most likely) but I never felt like it had quite "enough" in the highs - I like the compression of A5 PAFs there and ceramic PUs like the Super D, so it might just be a matter of different tastes/perspectives. I do wanna give the Mule bridge one more shot in my #1 at some point after it gets refitted, though.

*I will also grant that it had a lot to do with the speaker in that combo. Marshall ships them with a 10" V-type speaker, which is... not what that amp sounds best with by a long shot. I replaced it with a 10" Greenback and that made a world of difference with that amp.

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