Gibson Guitars · Wednesday, Nov. 11, 2026
Patent applied for, four vintages later
Gibson's Pickup Shop now builds its P.A.F. humbucker reissue as four separate sets, one each for 1957, 1958, 1959 and 1960. Each year gets its own magnet grade, wind and bobbin color.
- 4year-specific sets
- $799street, per pair
- 42AWG enamel wire
Pick a year, not just a pickup
The original P.A.F.s were never uniform. Gibson's new reissues lean into that and split the late-1950s pickup into four sets.
Gibson's Pickup Shop announced the 1957, 1958, 1959 and 1960 P.A.F. Reissue Sets in early November (Premier Guitar's report ran Nov. 4). Each is a matched treble and rhythm pair. Gibson says the sets were developed from 3D scans and analysis of vintage pickups, reverse engineering and its own archive specifications, and are wound on vintage Gibson coil winders.
The four sets share one recipe and differ in three places: the grade of the Alnico bar magnet, the number of turns on each coil (which shows up as DC resistance), and, for one year only, the color of the bobbins. Pickup product manager Jared Brandon said in Gibson's announcement that the originals "respond to the player," and called the sets four voices from the era.
The sets are sold through authorized Gibson dealers, at the Gibson Garage stores in Nashville, London and Miami, and on Gibson's website. MusicRadar lists the UK price as £699.
Turn the dial, read the meter
- Magnet
- Alnico III
- Bobbins
- Double vintage white
Gibson's description: open, woody and rich in harmonics, with softer bass, sweet, airy highs, a pronounced midrange and a looser, touch-sensitive feel. This is the voice it ties to the classic sunburst Les Paul sound.
The original cream bobbins began turning up in early 1959 because of a supply problem, and pickups with two of them, the "double whites," are now the rarest and most collected P.A.F.s. Seth Lover's patent was granted on July 28 that year.
Resistance figures are Gibson's published averages for each set, as reported by Premier Guitar and Music Times. The tone descriptions are Gibson's, paraphrased; this page did not listen to the pickups.
Why it is called a humbucker
A single-coil pickup is a magnet wrapped in thousands of turns of fine wire. It hears the vibrating steel string, but it also acts as an antenna for the 60-cycle hum given off by amplifiers, transformers and lighting. Seth Lover's fix used two coils side by side.
- Opposite wind. The two coils are wound in opposite directions, so electrical noise reaching both shows up in each with opposite polarity.
- Opposite magnets. One bar magnet under the coils makes the screw poles one magnetic pole and the slugs the other.
- Wired in series. The hum in the two coils cancels out, while the string's signal, flipped twice, adds together.
Seven years with "patent applied for"
Hum-cancelling coils are not new: Guitar World notes a stacked design for Baldwin electric pianos in 1938 and a 1939 double-coil patent, and Les Paul experimented with dummy coils.
Gibson president Ted McCarty gives amplifier engineer Seth Lover the go-ahead to build a hum-cancelling pickup.
Lover files his patent application, the start of the "patent applied for" years.
The first Gibson humbuckers go on steel guitars. Vintage Guitar dates the Consolette steel to late 1955; Gibson's announcement this month says late 1956.
A Gibson ledger entry beside an ES-175 reads, in effect, humbucker starts here. Les Paul models follow that year.
Gibson's P.A.F. and Gretsch's rival Filter'Tron, by Ray Butts, both launch at that summer's NAMM show.
Cream bobbins appear because of a supply issue, creating "zebra" (one of each) and "double white" pickups.
U.S. Patent 2,896,491 is granted to Lover. Gibson keeps applying the old decal anyway.
Shorter magnets (Gibson's M-56) arrive, and cream bobbins stop by late 1960.
The "Patent Applied For" decal finally gives way to a patent-number decal, which cited No. 2,737,842: the patent for Les Paul's trapeze tailpiece, not the humbucker.
Wound until the bobbin looked full
No auto-stop
Early winding machines had no automatic stop or turn counter, so coils were wound by eye to roughly 5,000 turns and resistance drifted from pickup to pickup.
Mixed magnets
Gibson used several Alnico grades (II, III and V among them) and charged magnets in-house, which left some unevenly charged.
Random pairs
Screw and slug coils were paired at random, coils were taped rather than wax-potted, and different winders (Geo-Stevens, Meteor, Leesona) shaped coils differently.
Gray circles: rhythm pickups. Copper diamonds: treble pickups (the 1957 and 1959 trebles share 8.1 kΩ). All eight reissues fall inside the spread of the originals.
Michigan
Seth Lover, amplifier man
Lover was born in Kalamazoo, Gibson's hometown, on Jan. 1, 1910, and split his early career between Gibson and the U.S. military. He developed the humbucker in the mid-1950s while designing amplifiers at Gibson, where he worked as a design engineer until 1967.
He then moved to Fender, where as a project engineer from 1967 to 1975 he designed the Wide Range humbucker used on three Telecaster models (the Thinline, Custom and Deluxe) and on the Starcaster. He died in Garden Grove, California, on Jan. 31, 1997. Vintage Guitar notes the humbucker was a lab effort with Walter Fuller, with the patent in Lover's name.
Where this came from
- Gibson Pickup Shop introduces year-specific 1957–1960 P.A.F. Reissue humbuckers (Premier Guitar)
- Gibson's year-specific PAF replicas (MusicRadar)
- Gibson launches four year-specific P.A.F. pickup sets (Music Times)
- Gibson Gazette news
- Why Gibson P.A.F. humbuckers remain the most revered of all pickups (Guitar World)
- The Gibson Humbucker (Vintage Guitar)
- Seth Lover (Wikipedia)