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Axesrus "Yorkshire Jack"
Axesrus "Yorkshire Jack" Single Coils


 
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Pickup Cover Colour*:


Pole Style:


Magnet Type*:


Screw Colour*:

Extra Options

Polarity:


Focusing Plate:


Winding Direction (Phase):


"Low E" Pole:


"A" Pole:


"D" Pole:


"G" Pole:


"B" Pole:


"High E" Pole:


Top Board Colour:


Bottom Board Colour:


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Description Technical Specs
 

Main Description

Yokshire Jack - He's not soft!


Our Yorkshire Jack single coil is an absolutely fantastic little pickup. In brief, it’s a higher output, straight shooting single coil aimed as a replacement for anyone who wants more power and less top end snap from their bridge pickup.

The back story (and we do love a back story!) is, honestly, bordering on the embarrassing! This pickup actually came about by happy accident during the development of a pickup set for the Telecaster®. (at that point, it was intended as a re-working/re-imagining of a pickup designed for the Stratocaster® - our Texas Blues). Its not so much designed as a Single coil that’s going to turn your Strat® into a Tele® - its more we loved what the Tele® version did so much, that we thought it’d be a fantastic to bring some of those characteristics over to a single coil too.

But back to Yorkshire Jack - Now, normally, we don’t talk about single coils in terms of high/medium/vintage output like we do with humbuckers - purely because, strictly speaking, 95% of the offerings on the market are pretty firmly planted in the low output/vintage camp! That’s where we've got to think differently withthis rascal – he’s got to definitely come under medium output! There’s just more about it - warmer then something traditional, they're fuller in the lower mid range, there’s much more responsiveness, giving you this throaty purr, bordering on a growl, not so much with unbridled aggression like some "hot singles" do, but with a comforting confidence that anything you can throw at them, they're going to smile up at you, give you the knowing nod, and chuck it straight out of the speaker. Sort of feels like you’re in safe hands really - you try a fast hammer-on lick, or a big bend - there’s no need to strangle the life out of the neck to get every last ounce of the note - here, the pickups are doing the heavy lifting.

One of the important things with this pickup is actually something a little innocuous – we’ve fitted a brass “focusing plate” to the base. This has a few jobs to do in the design, but they’re worth noting.

Primarily, we’re using brass to really suck out a lot of the top end that’s being produced in the bridge position. It’s all well and good making an over wound single coil, but if it’s going in the bridge slot, you’re still going to capture a lot of twang – and that’s the frequencies we really wanted to avoid.

A nice little secondary trick, the brass plate also helps tame the fizzy “noise” you get with a hotter single coil (I think we’ve all played singles that had plenty of power, but were far too lively for their own good.) In all likelihood, its probably that the “fizz” is just inside the frequencies that the bass plate is attenuating (rather than the base plate acting as a Faraday cage), so it sort of two advantages in one really.

Fender®, Squier®, Stratocaster® and Strat® are registered trademarks of Fender Musical Instruments Corporation and Axesrus® has no affiliation with FMIC

Sound Clips

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Sound Clips - Explained

Right then - the sound clips! What are we doing with them? What are they good for?! Let’s see if I can get this explained without it turning into a complete wall of text eh?

What it used to be!

Basically - way back when, we used to record the all the pickups we make, doing "something fun" - we know what they're good at, so the original clips were simply a way of us showing them at their best - easy! Late 50s single coil is going to knock a bit of doo wop tinged Rock'N'Roll out of the park all day long, the Texas blues are going to do…well…Texas Blues pretty well!

And, honestly – it was pretty fun! It let us indulge our inner rock stars, we got to put pickups through their paces, and it always felt like the natural end point in the R&D – proof, in the flesh, that a pickup did exactly what we thought it did. Lovely stuff right?!

BUT – there’s a few little problems with making this wonderful, finished recording of a pickup!

Firstly, they’re useless for making comparisons between different models (How do the Late 50s do Texas Blues? How do the Texas Blues do Reggae funk fusion?!(… I’ve been asked that before, I’m not joking!)

Secondly – and anyone who’s ever been in a studio for a few days will know this – a guitar on a record and a guitar in real life are very different beasts! And obviously, we were trying to make the pickups sound as good as they possibly could – so there was a fair bit of mixing and tweaking and tidying up to really translate “how good these pickups are” – and whilst we didn’t take liberties, I’ll concede that there’s shades of dishonesty about it. Those recorded tones are studio tones – not live tones.

And Thirdly (maybe two-and-a-halfly) – there wasn’t a great deal of standardisation on the recordings either – we might have recorded the Bourbon Cities in a Les Paul® through a Marshal® JCM800 to give all those lovely chewy rock tones, but then the next “rock” pickup, was recorded in an Ibanez® RG and a dialled back Messa® Dual Rec… So obviously, they’re going to sound wildly different… and that’s not fair either.

And obviously, we’re all for fairness with this stuff – so we figured it was time for a change!

Time for a change
So – the master plan ran something like this!
“We write 4 tracks* - Clean, Rock, Blues and Metal – and each pickup gets recorded doing each one**. Always using the same amps, the same guitars*** and there will be absolutely no mixing on any of the guitars! Let’s get a true capture of the pickup on record!****”

Now – the problems with 2016 Craig’s genius idea (easy with hind-sight eh?)

* It wasn’t originally 4 tracks! I can only dream of being so concise – I think at one point there was 10 different tracks – Country, Brit Rock, US Rock, Classic Metal, Funk, Modern Metal… that’d have been fun! Eventually it boiled down to the 4 big ones!

**We figured out pretty quickly that not every pickup needed to showcase every track – we settled on 3 of 4… no one needed to hear a Telecaster® make a fool of itself fighting a metal track (unless it can… so do!).

***… it ended up that it wasn’t always the same guitar – tuning issues with some meant a shift to other guitars, not all pickups fit all guitars (P90s!) – we’ve tried to stay fair with it, but there’s been some chopping and changing (we’ve recorded them all in the track player if it bothers anyone)

**** IT turns out that when you record a guitar as part of a “band” – you can’t escape a bit of mixing weirdly – when you start including bass and drums, the cross talk between all the instruments means you can’t pick out the detail of the guitar with its full frequency spectrum – so we did have the apply a bit of an EQ – but because this is all about fairness – the EQ is always the same. It’s just there to tidy up the guitars and get them “clear” of the other instruments. So yeah – recorded guitars don’t sound like live guitars without a bit of a tidy up.

Do we did it!

Each pickup now has 3 recordings that best suit its style, and allows you to listen to each one playing the same track as the next! So you can hear exactly how the pickups differ.

Just a few things to remember with it though – the difference between pickups can be subtle! So you’ll want to be listening to these things through a decent set of speakers or a pair of headphones. What we’re showcasing here boils down to differences in frequencies – if you’re listening through a phone speaker, chances are it isn’t going to be capable of showing the finer details. (my PC speakers cant even make the bass frequencies on the tracks!)

And remember too, that these tracks haven’t been written to blow your socks off. They’re about as generic as they come. They’re nothing ground breaking musically, and you will, if your using the clips as intended, get pig sick of hearing the same song over and over again…but that’s kind of the point. Listen to the tone, not the track. Best advice I can give.

The Player

The players my little baby in all this – it’s a bit clunky at times (because we’re having to store and load the tracks as you call for them, so there can be a delay here or there – just, you know? Go gentle with her!) its got a few nice little features in it that make it really useful.

First thing is the “bookmark” button – find a pickup/position you like, click the little bookmark, and it’ll store it – go to another pickup and right at the bottom of the list, you can recall that bookmarked pickup.

Now, that’s great, because it means you can very quickly A/B pickups – and that’s one of the problems when pickup shopping. A humans audio memory is about 4 seconds – its much longer for something you’re familiar with (where you’ve committed a sound to “true” memory – your own guitar for example, but short term audio memory is amazingly short) – so the less time between hearing one pickup and the next, the better! Use it! It’s a great tool to base your decisions on.

The other “gem” – you can switch between the full band and the isolated guitar track – and that’s about as honest as it gets! They’ve not had any of the “tidy up” EQ applied to them, so what your hearing is the full frequency spectrum, as its been recorded, no messing about with it – just pure guitar. It’s amazingly unimpressive again, but if it’s the final piece of the A/B testing puzzle, it’s pretty helpful!

What about my Legacy?!

So – full disclosure? It aint half boring listening to the same 4 tracks over and over and over again – it’s great for making comparisons between pickups, but it aint exactly entertaining – and it’s not exactly a great sales pitch (is honesty ever?!) – so – we’ve kept the old tracks too – they’re under the heading of “Legacy” in the player – those tracks show the pickup doing their thing as well as they possibly can – Texas blues cranking some Texas Blue, Late 50s doing Rock and Roll, Bourbon cities pushing a bit of hard rock.

Its fun, it’s a nice listen, it gives a bit of a better idea of what a pickup wants to be doing (even if it can do other stuff) – they’re worth a listen, but go in eyes open, they’re “the pickups at their best” – mixed/EQed/Mastered and polished as if they were being recorded “proper” (*well… as much as a solo guitar track can be)

In Closing.
And that about covers it – 3 tracks on each pickup, allowing you to compare one pickup to the next. Bookmark button to make A/B swapping quick and easy, and isolated guitars if you want them. Minimal mixing, minimal tinkering and “little white lies” – just a straight representation of what the guitars going to sound like doing some of the more common musical styles.

And you get the Legacy tracks too – which are useless for making comparisons, but they do show the pickup doing what it does as well as possible.

More Tech stuff!

So - a lot of us think about pickups in the simplest terms when it comes to the technical side of things - and, honestly, for most people, that’s absolutely fine - few of us are actually all that concerned about how pickups are constructed, and how that process effects the sound of the things, and a lot of the time, it’s just easier to trust in the marketing hype surrounding stuff (and I’m not knocking that mentality at all – we all do it in some aspect of life or other don’t we? You can’t be an expert in everything!)

BUT – pickups? I’m very much on the engineering side of things before I buy into the marketing spiel myself, so, it scratch that particular itch for myself, and for anyone else who’s interested in this side of things – I figured I’d publish the more “in depth” specs of these pickups, and, hopefully, maybe bust a few myths along the way too.

So – whilst its fine to think of pickups in terms of “Its XXX Point XXX Kohms and its Alnico YYY!”… That’s fine! (it actually tells you more then you’d think too!), but its only part of the picture – so lets get stuck in to this set, and see what really makes them tick!

And the best way of doing that, is with a bode plot!

Swap Graphs?

 

Customisation options

All the bumf about customisation

Strat with Focusing Plate Fitted

Focusing Plates

We offer all of our single coils with the option of a “focusing” plate if you want them – the theory behind this is that different materials effect the eddy currents of the magnets – and whilst the jury is still out If it’s all that noticeable, its something to bare in mind.

We’ve actually run bode plots on the base plates (as we have done under the “More Tech stuff” section) and it doesn’t seem to make that much of a difference, however this doesn’t quite prove everything “in the real world” – so, considering the price? Its sort of the Father Christmas paradox if you ask me – if you believe it, then brilliant, you’ll have a great time, if not? That’s fine too!

The theory is as follows.
Brass bases attenuate the top end (by flattening out the Q factor, making the pickup a little smoother, a little more forgiving)

Steel (either copper or zinc plated) help increase the ferrous mass of the poles, and make the pickup “hotter” by increasing the inductance (this is actually true!) – this in turn makes the pickup more aggressive, slightly darker, and more “capable”

Nickel – honestly? I cant taste the difference, if sounds the same as an “unfocused” pickup to me (which corresponds with most peoples thinking when it comes to nickel bases on humbuckers) – if anything, it looks nice eh?

The base plates also seem to help reduce external interference, so the pickup is slightly less prone to picking up noise from lights and electrical gear in the vicinity.

Non-Staggered Single Coil Pickup

Pole Staggering

Traditionally, single coils come with staggered poles – and the logic behind this, is sort of two fold.

Primarily, it’s to account for the radius of the guitars neck, but also, they’re built to accommodate for different “strengths” of the strings – and this is where things get a bit weird, because the staggering we’re all familiar with (where the G pole is much taller then the B) is actually to accommodate a wound G string… and wound G strings don’t really exist any more (they were very wimpy… hence the taller pole)

So – traditional staggering is… well… a bit obsolete if you ask me, however, there is always the chance that there’s something in it that gives you a chance of getting all those classic tones – and, frankly? The idea doesn’t exactly break when you don’t have a wound G string, so its survived – as standard, most all single coils will come staggered.

However – it can cause you a pain in the neck if your start getting away from the “vintage correct” thing – if you end up with a guitar with a very flat fret boat? That staggering starts to get too close to the things/too far away – so in those instances? Worth avoiding a stagger – go non-staggered.

And Lefty staggering is as you imagine – it’s the same as right hand staggering, but in reverse, so the poles match up to the strings “in reverse”

Side Loading single Coil

Fibre Boards

Right –Fibre board’s aren’t the most exciting part of a pickup, let’s be honest – but there’s a few nice little tricks you can do with them.

The first, and most obvious, is that they’re actually available in different colours – so you can do Grey or black (or a mix and match, which is actually quite traditional) –its not going to change your tone, its not going to make you a better person, but, you know? Nice to be able to get the colours you want eh?

BUT – with fibre boards, we also do side loading versions of all our single coils – they’re a great little idea, because they take up less space in the routing – so if your surfacing mounting pickups without a pickguard, the routes smaller and tidier. They’re also quite common as a bridge pickup (where the pickup sometimes fouls against the guitars routing)

Close up of termiantions on Single Coil pickups

Phase/Polarity

An explanation of how and when you'd want to alter the phase/polarity of a single coil

Suggested Parts

This is just a load of links out to products that either pair with these pickups, or are compatible with them (Covers and Screws etc)

6/32 UNC Height Bolts for Strat

Screws

And Screws (or bolts, depending on your prefference for naming little threaded metal sticks!) - 6 -32 UNC - again, very much the USA standard - we do a few different lengths, and a few different head options incase your doing something weird.

 

Wiring kit for a Fender Stratocaster

Wiring kit

And if your a complete glutton for punishment - we do wiring kits too - its a very standard setup - 250k audio taper pots, 5 way switch, 0.022 cap - all as you'd expect!

52mm Spaced Single Coil Covers

Covers

Replacement covers for our single coil pickups, as discus earlier, 52mm spaced, centre to centre on the E poles - very much standard fare, but we carry a really wide range of colours.

Sound Clips
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Average Rating: Average Rating: 5 of 5 5 of 5 Total Reviews: 4 Write a review »

  1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
 
5 of 5 Beefy but Articulate December 31, 2019
Reviewer: guitartwonk from Swindon, United Kingdom  
This is a beast of a pickup at 11 k ohms, but it's a well-behaved and articulate beast. I put mine in neck position on a Tele. It sounds like a Strat bridge pickup but without that horrid shrillness you sometimes get. It's powerful, and with a lot of bite. Back off the volume slightly though and it cleans up nicely. I would say it's very similar to having a P90 in the neck position but with more character and versatility. The build quality too is second to none. All solid and we'll constructed.

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  1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
 
5 of 5 Far more versatile than you might think! September 10, 2019
Reviewer: Steve Harris from Heathfield, United Kingdom  
I have a customer who wanted an 'airy' acoustic sound from his Strat. I thought that was kind of a tall order at first, but studying the description of the Yorkshire Jacks I thought they might fit the bill, so I ordered a set and matched them with my Neck/Bridge Blend setup. He sent me a couple of sound clips later on, and I have to say I was amazed at the delicate sounds he coaxed out of them! So yes, ideal for un Strat-like balls out aggression, but equally at home with something that almost sounded like an orchestral arrangement! Amazing pickups...☆☆☆☆☆

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  1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
 
5 of 5 Just what I was after June 2, 2019
Reviewer: Chris from Bristol , United Kingdom  
I was intending to put a humbucker with coil split in the bridge of my strat but was worried about phase issues as I have the 7 sound mod. A few emails with Craig confirmed my fears and I asked if he could recommend an affordable single coil with the balls of a telecaster bridge but in strat format. This is when I heard of the Yorkshire jack!
I’ve had it in for a couple of days and I’m in love!
Clean wise it’s close enough to a Tele to do the chicken picking thing. It’s not as twangy as a Tele but it would be hard to tell the difference  on record. When blended in with the neck pickup it really gives off that chimey Tele mid position.
With some overdrive this pickup just sings! It has excellent presence, is really thick sounding and not thin and shrill like many strat bridge pickups.
For the band that I’m it’s perfect. I have some solo’s where my strat was falling a bit flat but now I’m excited to get back in the rehearsal room and blow the band away

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  1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
 
5 of 5 Awesomesingle coil goes great with humbuckers January 12, 2018
Reviewer: Vinny Irvine from Nottingham, .United Kingdom  
I have an HSH strat with modern output humbuckers voiced like original fender wide range humbuckers, wound to 12k bridge and 11k neck so needed a higher output single coil.

The Yorkshire Jack is a great middle pickup in this combo. Switching between pickups theres no sudden drop in volume. It blends in beautifully for a fatter quack in positions 2 and 4.

For a single coil hum is surprisingly low which I guess is down to the brass baseplate which also seems to be doing what you'd expect on a telecaster pickup - fattening up the tone while retaining the twang. Theres also a singing flute like quality not unlike a mini humbucker.

This is a great pickup for more dirty blues and rock,

I find itâ„¢s perfect in a circuit with 500k pots all round. This is a nice full tone, no need to worry about thin ice pick with these. In an HDS set up 500k pots it all balances perfectly.

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