Guitarists are usually terribly conservative creatures (in spite of seeing themselves as creative wild men). As a result of this they can be terribly suspicious of anything new. And even those who try out the new thing and are blown away will often end up buying the established or well-known product.
Tim at BKP faces the same uphill struggle that I sometimes do with Feline in this respect - players try out our product and say that it is the best thing they have tried and the next thing you know they have bought the
big brand on advice from their mates who didn’t test out the product (and they cant lose face in front of their mates :roll: )
Recently I was surprised at a guitar repairer friend of mine saying to a customer that BKPs were just a flash in the pan and that he should buy Seymour Duncans (am I the only one who spells this right). Although it may just be that he is a Duncan stockist and not a BKP stockist.
I get around that by being a Duncan, EMG and BKP stockist.
My personal preference is for the BKPs - for tonal and clarity reasons but because I have the other brands in stock too it is not perceived as simply trying to push the brand that I keep as opposed to the one that the customer is interested in.
To also put a fair perspective on this (and to seem slightly at odds with some of the partisan opinions stated on these boards) I know Seymour personally - (as I do Tim) and he is a great bloke with a huge amount of knowledge.
If Seymour or one of his hand winding team wound me a pickup then I would expect it to have the same quality as a hand wound UK coil.
Seymour maintains that all Gibson pickups were machine wound and featured symmetrical coils so that is what he does for those pickups.
I have his pickups in several of my personal guitars as well as some EMGs and lots of BKPs. The guitars that have the SDs in sound great with them in as I chose carefully what I wanted and they are older pickups too.
When a make becomes more and more sucessful it becomes harder to have the same personal involvement with each batch of product that goes out. Tim trains his guys well so that is good news and i am sure he will continue to think ahead for when his product gains wider use.
However I have been alarmed to hear that some USA pickup makers are having the coils made in the Far East and assembling them in the USA and still calling the product USA made. I have had no concrete proof as yet but it does concern me- not so much from quality control but from the honesty factor.
But I like what Tim does with the hand wound coils and the slightly differently wound coils in a humbucker and the way it increases clarity and the frequency range-and I tell people that and let them decide for themselves with their ears- we keep a lot of guitars in stock with BKPs so that players can try them out.I guess I get tired of hearing blanket statements like "SD are cr@p - use BKPs" rather than statements like "I prefer BKPs to SDs and i think that you would do too". especially when the players saying the first statement have NEVER tried SDs in the first place
The BKP forum is usually very good because it is full of informed opinion, and hopefully it will stay that way rather than spouting what others have said.
I hope I havent ruffled anyones feathers here but I dont like seeing knee jerk reactions and comments clouding good discussion
In answer to the original post - BKPs will do what you want but the Nailbomb may not give the cleanest of clean tones as it is pretty high output.
