The Seymour Duncan SH-1N 59 Neck Electric Guitar Pickup, Black is a warm, versatile humbucker with a big PAF sound that is great for playing both big, rich chords and fat sounding leads.
The ’59 Model neck pickup is one of Seymour Duncan’s most popular pickups because it’s so versatile. It’s designed in the spirit of the original PAF humbuckers of the 1950s, which means you get sweet sustain, full-sounding chords and clear, bright attack, but we’ve made a few refinements to slightly modernize the design and make it more adaptable to different styles. This pickup started with a pair of coils wound with 42AWG plain enamel mag wire, wound on Seymour’s Leesona 102 pickup winding machine – the very one that was used in the Gibson factory in Kalamazoo, MI in the 1950s. (Seymour likes to make sure that our vintage-style pickups are as accurate as possible, so we use the Leesona for all of our PAF-style pickups).
The ’59 has a full low end which is great for adding character to your clean sounds and sustain to your leads. The high end is slightly boosted for improved pick-attack clarity, and the mids are slightly scooped for open, smooth sound that’s great for preserving the clarity of the individual notes in a chord. Play softly and the mids and highs seem to fade back, but pick hard and the note will be confident and clear. Combined with the ’59’s moderate output and slightly compressed feel, you can virtually ‘play’ the pickup, intuitively combining different picking and fretting techniques to bring out a range of tones that are suitable for blues, rock, metal, jazz and alternative styles. It pairs nicely with a high output bridge humbucker like the JB or Custom, but is equally at home with more moderate pickups like the ’59 bridge. And it’s a popular choice for those with humbucker-routed Telecasters as well. It partners nicely with the Jason Becker Perpetual Burn when you lower the ’59 to tighten the low end while raising the adjustable pole pieces to maintain the highs. And if you order a four-conductor version for coil splitting, its single coil mode is crystal clear.
The ’59 Model neck pickup comes standard with a long-legged nickel silver bottom plate, vintage single conductor braided push back lead wire and no logo, although you can change these options as a Shop Floor Custom; four-conductor wire, short-legged bottom plate, cover, logo, different colour coils… the ’59’s look can be tailored to your guitar in the same way its sound can adapt to your style.
The main features of the Seymour Duncan SH-1N 59 Neck Electric Guitar Pickup, Black include: