Shadoweclipse13 wrote: ↑Thu Jul 18, 2019 3:24 am
Interesting. I'd assumed that Tri-Sonics were an original design, the way that Burns markets them. Very cool.
You've done it now...I'm a huuuuuge nerd for the early UK guitar stuff.
Initially there was a company called Burns-Weill, with Burns doing the woodwork and Weill supplying the electronics, which were the pickups shown on the Fenton Weill above, or variations of. Really quite massive, fabric tape wrapped coils, wound on a former, huge metal covers and baseplates
When Burns and Weill split, Weill continued with those pickups, whilst Burns 'designed his own' that are basically the same thing, only with holes in the covers, sometimes to allow individual magnets to poke through, and sometimes just with bar magnets (the latter are the type on Brian May's guitar, the multi magnet ones, as with weill, turned up on the fancier models, including the double six 12 string, for which they were REALLY unsuitable...the examples on the one I had were 14k, and as you'd imagine, not anywhere near bright enough to give you the sparkle you want from a 12)
In those days there was a *lot* of outsourcing, and suppliers changed frequently depending on who would give the best price, so when it comes to the coils, sometimes early on, Mrs Weill would wind them on a converted sewing machine, and other times they were bought in. Ultimately it's very likely that the coils used on Tri Sonics and Weill pickups were often made by exactly the same supplier, and just put together at the respective factories.
To make things even more incestuous, Vox also had pickups which were basically the same thing- any metal covered UK Vox pickup has the same fabric covered coils and bar magnets!
Aside from this there are anomalies- the very earliest 'Burns' guitars used a version of the tri sonic with no engraving on the plates, and these are absolutely tiny. Where the normal tri sonic is both wider and deeper than say a strat pickup, and the weill ones bigger still, the very early Tri's are narrower and shallower than even a strat p'up. I've got a set on a project one of these
http://blackguitars.com/burns-artistes-models.html that I'm working on at the moment, really interested to hear what they sound like.
Not much of this^ is that well documented in one place...because of the Brian May connection, tri sonics are a very talked about, famous pickup, but you barely even see reference to the fact there are two types of tri sonic, let alone the early type, or the fact that under the hood 90% of UK made pickups from 1960-62 are exactly the same thing!
*edit* Btw, as of sometime next week, I'll have loose examples of almost all of these, so I can do a group shot showing the differences which is probably more useful than ^ that