A special guitar needs special pickups! At our request, Harry Häussel designed and built custom pickups for the T-Ultimate Neolithic. On this page, you can find background information about the design and technical details. Harry is a renowned pickup-builder from Germany, and delivers excellent hand made pickups. He puts a lot of careful effort and attention to detail into the making of his pickups. All his pickups are subjected to constant quality control procedures to assure the quality is ever consistent.

PICKUP COVERS

For the T-Ultimate Neolithic we decided to go for open pick covers. We chose open pickup covers to keep the sound as clear as possible. We finished them with the same old wood we used for this guitar. Generally, open covers are considered to give a brighter and (obviously) more open sound and feel more dynamic compared to closed covers.

The Design

Harry has built Double-TE ST-A5 pickups for both neck and bridge positions with original strat classic wire and alnico 5 magnets. This combination results in a very full, round and clear sound. The basis of this pickup is a Telecaster neck pickup coil. Around this, wire is wound that is normally used for Stratocasters, the windings of a Telecaster have a thinner wire. All the pickups are beeswax-potted in a gentle vacuum environment - this avoids feedback and other undesirable noise.

Since we have extremely little tolerance allowance, the pickups need to fit perfectly. Therefore, Harry made new base plates. In this way we can also keep the pickup rings modest and slim.

The pickups are fitted with 4-conductor shielded wiring, enabling all switching variations. By placing two special T-Style coils with strat-wire and Alnico 5 magnets next to each other, we have many more switching possibilities with the push/push tone control combined with the Free-Way 3x3-05 Switch.

FREE WAY 6-position switch

The T-Ultimate Neolithic is equipped with a Free-Way 3x3-05 six-position toggle switch and a Push/Push tone pot. In position 1, 2 and 3 the pot switches between series and parallel. In the position 4, 5 and 6 it switches between inner and outer single coils. In the ‘down’ position in series, and in the ‘up’ position in parallel. In this way, you’ll have many sound options at your disposal (all in one guitar!) without the need for extra buttons on the guitar. Below you can find an overview of all the possibilities with the six-position Free-Way Switch.