Back in April, Bare Knuckle launched a limited edition run of 20 Unity humbucker sets, each individually wound by the company’s founder, Tim Mills, and featuring custom covers and numbered baseplates, to support the humanitarian aid effort in Ukraine.
The Unity ‘buckers where a huge success, selling out in eight hours, raising £10,000 in the process, with a further £3,000 raised via a T-shirt sale; so much so, that Bare Knuckle has added them to their standard lineup of electric guitar pickups, with the proceeds going to support the Disasters Emergency Committee’s aid efforts worldwide.
The Unity pickups run hot, with a high-output custom ceramic humbucker for the bridge complemented by an Alnico neck ‘bucker. They are voiced as an aftermarket option for any electric guitar to be modded into a rock or metal guitar.
The ceramic bridge humbucker has a DCR reading of 15.9k, while the isotropic Alnico V neck pickup is rated at 9.3k. Bare Knuckle says both pickups split nicely, and describes the ceramic bridge pickup as having "masses of power" while the neck pickup is no slouch either, with tones that "are fat and chewy but still retain enough dynamic headroom to be really expressive under heavy gain".
The Unity humbuckers are offered as a set or individually via the Bare Knuckle site, with many of the same custom finish options, plus standard and wide spacing, six, seven, and eight-string configurations.
And with Bare Knuckle, there are options aplenty, including a new faux wood effect finish for open-coil bobbins that has been launched concurrently with the Unity range. Other finish options might include Battleworn, Burnt Chrome and Camo covers, plus a range of colors to help match the pickups to your electric guitar.
The Unity humbuckers are priced from £131 per pickup, or from £252 for a set.
For more information on the range, head over to Bare Knuckle.
“Even those who couldn’t afford carved tops, fancy inlays or binding weren’t expected to compromise on their tone”: The tonal mysteries of Gibson’s P-90 dog-ear pickups, which got their due in the Les Paul Junior
“This pickup could have come out of a late-’50s Gibson. If you had a guitar from that era with these pickups, everyone would be like, ‘Wow. That’s a badass-sounding Les Paul’”: How Adam “Nolly” Getgood and Bare Knuckle reinvented the P.A.F. for a new era
