Zebra pickup conventions

noisepolluter

By which I don’t mean several thousand shreddists in the Excel Centre…

Is there any established layout to zebra pickups in a 2x HB guitar? Does it vary between manufacturers?

I’m considering getting a zebra set in a black sparkle Charvel, but I’m actually leaning towards black/pink rather than black/cream. 

Would tradition dictate pink bobbins for the outer coils?

Jonathangus

I think by the time you get to a black sparkle Charvel with black and pink pickups, tradition has gone out of the window.

webrthomson

Here you go:

https://www.giggear.co.uk/blog/articles/zebra-vs-reverse-zebra-pickups.htm 

I tend to prefer reverse zebra

bertie

there are zebra and reverse zebra,  dictating the positioning of the black cover

Zebra = "colour" on the screw bobbin

Reverse Zebra = Black on the screw bobbin

I prefer zebra for black/cream combo,   not sure what would be best for black/pink...................

noisepolluter

Couple of extremely ham fisted mock-ups - ignore the knobs, I doubt I’d find Fender style ones which are an exact match so will probably keep the black knurled metallic ones. 

Zebra:
https://flic.kr/p/2pyCZFq

Reverse zebra:
 https://flic.kr/p/2pyEBuW

I note for black/cream, Charvel usually do zebra, Musicman do reverse. I think I may be leaning towards reverse. May not help that I’ve painted over the pole pieces on one of them. 

Jonathangus said:

I think by the time you get to a black sparkle Charvel with black and pink pickups, tradition has gone out of the window.

I think you may have a strong point…

Kittyfrisk

revsorg

I think you should position the bright coloured bobbins to align with the harmonics you feel you will most likely want to play on a darkened stage.  They will then have a functional as well as aesthetic value.

OilCityPickups

I was going to call my transparent bobbin pickups 'invisible zebra' 

noisepolluter

OilCityPickups said:

I was going to call my transparent bobbin pickups 'invisible zebra' 

@OilCityPickups my chat with you yesterday (thanks again) has got me very seriously thinking about your Airship Trooper bridge pickup, and the more I read about it the more I want to give one a go!

I was going to check back in next week and ask if you could do a black/pink zebra… like a really lairy almost fuschia hot pink… as much as I like the current seethrough bobbins I’ve also always fancied pink/black zebra since seeing it on the Dimarzio website. 

(Edit: I’ve just been educating myself about shades of pink - I’m probably referring to hot pink, but neon pink may also work?)

To hijack my own thread, assuming the above was doable, would a Nightfighter A4 in the neck be a good match with the Airship? 

OilCityPickups

noisepolluter said:

OilCityPickups said:

I was going to call my transparent bobbin pickups 'invisible zebra' 

@OilCityPickups my chat with you yesterday (thanks again) has got me very seriously thinking about your Airship Trooper bridge pickup, and the more I read about it the more I want to give one a go!

I was going to check back in next week and ask if you could do a black/pink zebra… like a really lairy almost fuschia hot pink… as much as I like the current seethrough bobbins I’ve also always fancied pink/black zebra since seeing it on the Dimarzio website. 

(Edit: I’ve just been educating myself about shades of pink - I’m probably referring to hot pink, but neon pink may also work?)

To hijack my own thread, assuming the above was doable, would a Nightfighter A4 in the neck be a good match with the Airship? 

I do indeed have hot pink bobbins (that sounded bad)
And yep a NF would work well ...

Funkfingers

I'm not certain that there really is any convention.

Cream (raw/unpigmented butyrate) bobbins were originally a short term production glitch at Hughes Plastics during the Fifties. Since the humbuckers were destined to be covered, Gibson did not care and used the bobbins randomly until the cream ones ran out.

During the Sixties, there was a fashion for removing the metal covers. (Probably, to cure microphonic squeal at high sound pressure levels.) Thus, the bobbin colours were revealed. Some permutations looked nicer with sunburst tops than others. Gibson eventually responded by using cream bobbins for some humbuckers.


Having said that there is no convention, I have to admit that some guitar brands only look right with cream screw coils (Gibson, PRS) and others only with cream stud coils (Musicman, anything associated with DiMarzio).

When I briefly had all-black pickups in a Sterling AX40, it just looked dull and sad. Double cream bobbins would have been preferable but still not as cool as reverse zebra. The fact that my bridge pickup is a Crunch Lab does not spoil the looks at all.

noisepolluter

OilCityPickups said:

noisepolluter said:

OilCityPickups said:

I was going to call my transparent bobbin pickups 'invisible zebra' 

@OilCityPickups my chat with you yesterday (thanks again) has got me very seriously thinking about your Airship Trooper bridge pickup, and the more I read about it the more I want to give one a go!

I was going to check back in next week and ask if you could do a black/pink zebra… like a really lairy almost fuschia hot pink… as much as I like the current seethrough bobbins I’ve also always fancied pink/black zebra since seeing it on the Dimarzio website. 

(Edit: I’ve just been educating myself about shades of pink - I’m probably referring to hot pink, but neon pink may also work?)

To hijack my own thread, assuming the above was doable, would a Nightfighter A4 in the neck be a good match with the Airship? 

I do indeed have hot pink bobbins (that sounded bad)
And yep a NF would work well ...

Roger Roger - checking flap and undercarriage indicators and testing fuel booster pump… 

Philly_Q

webrthomson said:

Here you go:

https://www.giggear.co.uk/blog/articles/zebra-vs-reverse-zebra-pickups.htm 

I tend to prefer reverse zebra

That's Seymour Duncan, but DiMarzio's standard is what Duncan would call reverse - i.e. black screw coil, cream slug coil.  If you want it the other way round on a DiMarzio, it's a special order.

Visually, the cream coils appear "bigger" than the black coils, so I think it usually looks better with the cream coils on the outside and the black coils on the inside.  But I also liked the old Hamer approach of a single-colour bridge pickup and a zebra neck.

barnstorm

Pink inner coils would look better to me, especially with matching knobs – then there's a nice line of your accent colour through the knobs and bridge pickup.

OilCityPickups

barnstorm said:

Pink inner coils would look better to me, especially with matching knobs – then there's a nice line of your accent colour through the knobs and bridge pickup.

Nowt like a matching pink knob 

skullfunkerry

I think from those mockups, I prefer the look of the reverse zebra.

RandallFlagg

I've learned something from this post, it appears my new Les Paul has ‘reverse’ zebras:

OilCityPickups

The whole reason for the cream bobbin in the first place was an accident. Bobbins were ordered in black but the company making them ran out of black dye. So Gibson had to accept a batch of 'no colour' ones or stop production.  Butyrate is naturally white, but when exposed to air for a while becomes cream. Butyrate is very soft and winding tension easily makes the end of the bobbin 'splay out', it also won't take the new fangled 'potting' that a lot of musicians wanted, so eventually Gibson introduced a new bobbin type that was made of harder plastic - the T-Top. Actually the T top still has softer bobbins than modern pickups, so quite a lot of care has to be taken in re-winding and potting them.

A rarity that one comes across now and then are Gibson P90s with transparent bobbins - this seems to have been a 70s thing while Gibson were trying out new materials ... I've also found a few 70s and 80s Gibson covered humbuckers with one transparent screw bobbin!  Vanishing Zebra? 

ICBM

Oddly enough for someone with such strong opinions on many things, I’m not very fussed about which way round the coils are - they all look OK. I didn’t know there was a ‘definition’ of zebra or reverse zebra.

I don’t like double-cream bobbins on Gibsons though, because I associate them too much with DiMarzios and late-70s/early-80s Japanese guitars, where they are the correct pickups - they look wrong with zebras, although usually OK with double-black.

PLOP

I like zebras on some guitars. I’ve got a matte black on black on black les Paul that I’ve got a zebra in the bridge on and it looks great. I’m going to get a zebra in the neck too at some point soon. I would like the cream side to be on the outside on both pickups, so looking at it from bridge to neck it goes white-black-black-white. I think it makes the guitar look longer, which is good because I think LPs tend to look a bit dumpy. (Slight tangent: you a get all sorts of combinations of guitar but the 25.5” LP is almost nonexistent. It’s basically a tele but more sculpted, and surely there’s a market for people who like LPs for the rock and metal pedigree but want a longer scale for low tunings?) 

Funkfingers

e.g. Ron "Bumblefoot" Thal.