Sheptone releases new P90 humbuckers
(Dave Molter | Posted 2010-07-27)
Sheptone, a manufacturer of guitar pickups and accessories established three years ago by Jeff Shepherd, is releasing a new line of P90H pickups for electric guitar. Each pair is handmade by company owner, Jeff Shepherd with a typical lead time of four weeks and is designed to allows guitar players with humbucker equipped guitars to achieve the highly sought after tone of the original P90 pickups. The new Sheptone P90H will be a direct replacement for most humbucker models and is available with black covers, black/gold/nickel/chrome open-faced covers and gold or nickel poles.
Shepherd established the operation after relentlessly trying to remedy the lack of tone he experienced with other guitar pickups. With his background and education in engineering and his attention to detail, R&D led him to creating a product that quickly built a following with the professional musicians in the area. Now word is beginning to spread and celebrity guitarists Sheptone has built pickups for include Keith Scott (Bryan Adams), Danny Kortchmar (James Taylor, Carole King, Don Henley), Al di Meola, Brian Kahanek, and Derek Trucks.
The standard Sheptone P90H pickup is made of vintage construction using rough-cast, degaussed Alnico 5 magnets and uses scatter wound #42 plain Enamel wire for better harmonics and overtones. A standard set will deliver 8.6k in the bridge pickup and 8.1k in the bridge pickup.
To give insight as to what drives Shepherd’s pursuit, he states “My philosophy on pickups is simple...pickups should be transparent and allow the primary tones of the wood to come through. It is a wooden instrument after all. If you really listen to those classic riffs and tones that we all know, you can hear the wood and that is the key. While some secondary tone is inherent to each pickup’s design, the job of the pickup is to respond to the players' touch (dynamics), enhance the natural harmonics and overtones that accompany each note, and transfer this "voice" to the rest of the signal chain.”
MSRP $160 USD per set
To learn more about Sheptone and the new P90H, please visit www.sheptone.com
About Sheptone
A little over seven years ago, Jeff Shepherd found himself in a local band and this is where the quest for tone began. An on-and-off recreational guitar player since the age of 12, the guitars he was playing live just didn’t sound the way he wanted. He purchased a set of 1958 Gibson PAF’s for a ridiculous $4000 to put in his EC-1000 and the difference was incredible.
Being the type that likes to tinker and take things apart to see how they work (much to his parents dismay as a child), he began to experiment with winding his own pickups and comparing them to my 1958 originals, back and forth, adjust and re-adjust for over a year until he finally was able to duplicate THAT tone. Since then he has been fortunate enough to extensively analyze over 100 of those old humbuckers, developing a consistent modern recipe as a reasonably priced substitute for over-priced vintage pickups. With a lot of work and some luck along the way, his original curiosity exploded into a full time business, now shipping to every guitar playing country in the world based on word-of-mouth alone. Sheptone has since developed several lines of pickups including Strat, Tele, P90, Bass, and others based on the same principles and procedures.
From a press release.
