The Man Who Made History with Gibson and Fender

This is Nihei from TCGAKKI!!

Are you familiar with the Gibson P-490 pickup?
The P-490 is the name of a humbucker pickup developed by Gibson in 1957.
Whether you’re familiar with Gibson or not, if you look up humbucker pickups, you’ll almost certainly come across the “P.A.F.”
“P.A.F.” is actually a nickname meaning “Patent Applied For,” and the official name is P-490.

The “P.A.F.” has become a legendary pickup, and one of the staff members involved in its development was a man named Seth Lover.

Seth Lover joined Gibson in 1945.
Prior to that, he served in the Navy as an engineer working on radar and sonar systems, so he already possessed knowledge of electronics before joining Gibson.
After joining Gibson, he worked on electrical systems—including repairs and amplifier development—and eventually began working on pickup development as well.

Prior to 1957, Gibson electric guitars were equipped with single-coil pickups such as the P-90 and P-480, but they faced the problem of generating noise when played at high volumes or when standing next to an amplifier.
So Seth Lover and his team came up with the idea of placing two coils side by side to cancel out hum and noise.
And that’s how the P-490 was developed!

Development of the P-490 began around 1955; after about six months of development, the patent was granted around 1959.
Ted McCarty, who was the president of Gibson at the time and had also been involved in the development of the Les Paul, participated in the project.
The P-490, developed in this way, became the foundation for modern electric guitars.


Hearing all this might give you the impression that Seth Lover is synonymous with Gibson, but believe it or not, Seth Lover also worked at Fender!!

After joining Fender in 1967, Seth Lover developed several pickups there as well.
The most famous of these pickups is the “Wide Range Humbucker.”
The Wide Range Humbucker is the distinctive-shaped humbucker found on models like the Telecaster Custom and Telecaster Deluxe!!
While its construction is nearly identical to Gibson’s P-490, its sound is bright and features clear high-end response similar to that of a single-coil pickup.

Seth Lover was commissioned by Fender to create a pickup that sounded like a Gibson, but he felt that the tone required for Fender electric guitars was slightly different from that of Gibson, so he developed a humbucker with a brilliant tone, such as the Wide Range Humbucker.

Seth Lover, who worked at Fender until 1975, retired in accordance with CBS’s mandatory retirement policy.


Having developed pickups for Gibson and Fender—two manufacturers indispensable to the history of the electric guitar—Seth Lover is, like Fender and Gibson themselves, one of the figures who cannot be left out of the history of the electric guitar!!