Review : Bare Knuckle Pickups

I think that we all know that one can replace pickups in a guitar or bass if we want to. For me, a pickup change has frequently changed a guitar from play maybe to play frequently. While I have used pickups from Seymour Duncan, Jason Lollar, Suhr and Lindy Fralin, all excellent, I find myself going first these days to Tim Mills, founder of Bare Knuckle Pickups.

Bare Knuckle Pickups is based in the UK. While there are some online shops that carry some models in stock, for the most part you are going to be ordering through the Bare Knuckle Pickups online store. My experience here has always been simple with very quick delivery to Canada.

As I make no claim to know what is best in terms of a pickup for a particular guitar and my playing style, I tried reaching out for some guidance. While both Lollar and Lindy Fralin were helpful companies, on my first reach out to Bare Knuckle Pickups, I got a very rapid response from Tim Mills who runs the company. I had first heard of Bare Knuckle Pickups on That Pedal Show and thought they might be worth trying out. I was blown away that Tim responded directly and he was actually interested in what I wanted to achieve and what I did not like in the pickups that were in that specific guitar now.

My first purchase was to replace the pickups in a PRS Custom 22 that I had bought used some twenty years ago. It’s a deep raspberry 10 top with a great feel, but always sounded too thick to me. It is an old one as it has the old PRS rotary pickup selector. When I reached out, what was recommended based on the emails back and forth was a set of PG Blues, designed to sound like Peter Green’s old Les Paul where the two pickups were out of phase with each other. When my preferred technician pulled the old pickups, we discovered that the original owner had replaced the factory pickups with a pair of PRS original Dragon pickups. I was surprised because I do own a later Dragon instrument and have never found it to be too thick. The PG Blues changed the guitar completely. There was still the ability to push hard, but there was also a top end that the Dragons did not have. For my uses and to my ears, the change was transformative.

I was and remain very impressed.

Thus when I decided that I did not like the tonality of the Gibson Memphis Historical Series (MHS) pickups in my 1960 reissue ES-355, I contacted Tim for his thoughts. I could have gone with Lollar Imperials again as I had done in my ES-335, but wanted to get Tim’s thoughts. He respects the Lollars but thought that I might prefer the Bare Knuckle Pickups Stormy Monday humbucker that is a lower output PAF style pickup. I found them completely better than the MHS pickups. No loss in bass, but a definite reduction in mud with a nice crisp but not ice picky high end. I personally really enjoy semi-hollow body guitars and the Stormy Monday pickups were again transformative. I was also able to get them with nice gold covers to stay in alignment with the rest of the guitar fixtures.

My next foray was my Micawber. I looked around until I found a Squier Classic Vibe that felt great. I wanted a Squier because I knew that the guts would be coming out. I bought two sets of Bare Knuckle Pickups Boot Camp series. One is a Telecaster set from which I took the bridge pickup and the other is a Humbucker set from which I took the neck pickup. Along with changes to the saddles and a switch to Broadcaster wiring (that has not worked out, so it is getting changed back to classic Telecaster wiring) I was able to create my own version of Keith Richards’ famous Micawber Telecaster, with only five strings tuned to Keith’s default open tuning. It’s perfect for Stones tracks, and also pretty cool for slide.

I own another Strat whose pickups I did not like. It’s a very early Eric Clapton Signature, that came from the factory with Fender Gold Lace Sensor pickups and a TBX tone control / boost. I reached out to Tim and he sold me a complete pickguard prewired with a set of his Pat Pend ‘63 Veneer Board Strat pickups. When I put them in, I also removed the TBX circuit entirely. That guitar now sounds as beautiful as it plays. It’s currently with my preferred technician to reinstall the TBX circuit now that I know that I have pickups that I love the sound of.

My most recent effort was a bit of an outlier. I bought in November of 2022 a .strandberg Boden 6 with a vibrato arm. If you have never played one of Ola Strandberg’s instruments you owe it to yourself to do so. It’s my second .strandberg as my first is an eight string Boden with a fixed bridge. The eight string came with Fishman Fluence pickups which are decent enough. The six string is a version old and came with .strandberg factory pickups, whereas the current model comes with pickups from Suhr. I could have gone with Suhr and probably been happy but again, I reached out to Tim for his thoughts. We chatted about the guitar and what I felt was missing from it. I felt the single coils were very out of balance with the bridge humbucker. It is an HSS layout and I could not get a decent combination of bridge and middle. The bridge pickup was pretty hot and I had to lower it a lot to relieve excessive boominess. In position four, I wasn’t getting want I liked best out of mixing neck and middle, although either on their own were quite nice. It’s a chambered mahogany body with a maple cap. Being headless, it is thus incredibly light and the body has terrific resonance. Tim thought about things and came back with a custom setup based around a neck and a middle pickup from his Trilogy Suite and the Polymath humbucker for the bridge that was designed in conjunction with Adam “Nolly” Getgood. You may know Nolly from his recordings or from his outstanding Impulse Response development work. I just got the guitar back as my preferred technician had been off with some health issues and we are both completely blown away by how awesome that guitar sounds now. Kevin, the technician that I work with most, has been exposed to hundreds of different pickups but this was the first time he had ever worked with a Polymath and he was so enthused we talked about that one thing for twenty minutes.

During the holidays, I was able to acquire a Tone King Gremlin through a local shop’s Dutch Auction. I already own a Tone King Imperial Mark II and was pretty sure that I was going to like the Gremlin. It is a five watt all tube combo with a custom Celestion speaker. Tone King build incredible amplifiers and this little five watt critter is really loud and so the built in Ironman Attenuator is hugely valuable. It has an on switch, a volume knob and a tone knob and that is it. It’s the closest that I can get to short signal path out of anything that I own and so has become my testing platform for guitars, pickups etc, as well as my go to amp in my room. It has two channels. One is clean until it isn’t and the other channel called Lead, is never really clean. There is no channel switching, so to change channels you move the cable. The first time I played the .strandberg when I got it back was through this amp. I like the Trilogy single coils better than the factory pickups to be sure, but that Polymath is incredible! Tim also sold me a new tone control so I could coil tap the Polymath and when doing so I can get a real Strat bridge sound, but no ice pick in the earhole pain. So far I’ve only played the .strandberg through the Gremlin but it will go into some other amps in short order.

The simple fact is that after multiple purchases from Bare Knuckle Pickups, always of a different option, I have never been dissatisfied. Moreover, the direct engagement of the founder in my transactions tells me that this company is genuinely interested in their customers. Moreover, they are very quick. I had an experience with a different company, when trying to buy a very specific pickup for a very specific project. They took my money and when I followed up to check on delivery, they then told me six weeks. If this kind of thing comes up again, (unlikely but one never knows), I will just be smarter and reach out to Tim. Let’s face facts. Customer service combined with superlative quality is a winning combination. You owe it to yourself to try Bare Knuckle Pickups.

Thanks for reading, and until next time peace.