Kay-Bars are a P90 in-a-bucker-housing that were inspired by the old Kay Kleenex box-type pickups. Those old Kay pickups are highly prized for great tone and resulted in two products that both have unique tone you won't find anywhere else.

The Vintage style is a hot wind more like the Zephyr X set, but has its own signature sound, which is unique, with a bit more compression. The set is wound slightly hotter in the bridge but it is not intentionally a matched, balanced set. This is how vintage pickups were made and these follow suit.

The Modern set is more classic, with the brighter, more transparent tone that some prefer, closer to a real P90 sound. It is a balanced set with the bridge wound hotter to balance the neck pickup.

Kay-Bars are completely hand-built and hand-wound and will drop right in to your existing humbucker slot. They use Alnico bar magnets and Forbon bobbin construction. Mounting screws and springs are included. Pickup housing is an attractive black matte plastic or for $25 extra you can have nickel silver covers for longer life and durability as well as classic looks. The Vintage set can be made with fancy pin strip pickguard tops, as shown at the top of the page, for $30 extra. This option is not available for the Modern set because of bobbin height considerations.

Following are sound clips for both sets, but before listening to the amplified sound clips, PLEASE listen to this first sound clip of the guitar unplugged. The test guitar is an Ibanez® Artcore archtop, very bright plucky sound. Hearing it unplugged will help you make sense of the following pickup clips.

Ibanez archtop unplugged.

Below are the sound clips for the Vintage set. These pickups have a very unique tone; listen for yourself:

Kay-Bar Vintage played clean.
Kay-Bar Vintage played cranked.

Below are the Modern sound clips. Note their modern transparent, less compressed tone.

Kay-Bar Modern set played clean.
Kay-Bar Modern set played cranked.

NEW! DIRTY HARRY SINGLES

Harry DeArmond is a hero of mine. His pickups were well thought-out and ingenious marvels. Many of them hold up to today's music and garner high prices on Ebay.

My Dirty Harry set is based on many of his designs that used a shallow coil and broad flat Alnico magnet in several types of covers and clip-on arch top configurations. The combination of a shallow coil and broad, flat magnet, senses a wider area of the strings and gives a unique tone unlike anything else. Tinges of P90 tone, but different. Dirty.

This set turns heads whenever I play it at a gig. If you're looking for an older style vintage tone, Stu Kenzel, of Kenzel & Hyde, recently said of this set that they give my "cheap guitar some CHARACTER." Good choices of words.

The pickups are flat top, undrilled humbucker covers available in black matte plastic or for $25 extra, nickel silver covers. They drop right into your humbucker-equipped guitar and use the same pots.

Here are sound clips, clean and dirty, middle position is out of phase, which I highly recommend for this set.

Dirty Harrys Clean.
Dirty Harrys Dirty.