mike@geminipickups.co.uk
Gemini pickups started because I didn't like the tapped sounds of most humbuckers. Most of them are too thin and have too little output. I was certain that there had to be a better design that would provide good single coil sounds. In particular, I wanted to achieve this with vintage style humbuckers. I believed that adding in a small amount of the second coil would give me the sounds I wanted and it did. Now I can make humbuckers that sound just as good tapped as full. They don't all sound the same. Some of them sound like strats, some like tele's (or tele bridge pickups transferred to the neck) and some sound like P-90's. The tapped sound depends on both the size of the primary coil and the amount of the second coil included. I also wanted to make a humbucker with 5 sounds. I realised that by combining boh of the other ideas, that this was possible too. Once I had made the first Chameleon prototype, I discovered that 5 conductor cable is very hard to find, so I bought 6 conductor cable and connected the sixth conductor in the conventional centre tap position. The only problem was that I still hated the sound of a centre tap. So I either had to leave a conductor unused or accept a lousy sound. I adjusted the design to have two asymmetric coil taps. This provided a sixth sound that was different enough from the others to be worthwhile and still satisfied my desire to avoid thin and wimpy. If people buy two guitars just to get the sound of a smooth vintage humbucker in one and a raw edgy sound in the other, why shouldn't I build a single pickup that had all of the possible humbucker sounds. All of the sounds meant to me, modern and vintage, smooth and edgy, and as I had already developed contoured sounds, I included both deep and shallow contours as well. This became the Cerberus. The multimode designs are not cheap but they take a lot longer to make than conventional humbuckers. Based on a price per usable sound, they offer much better value for money. The question is whether you want a guitar with two pickups and 48 sound combinations, covering the entire range from sweet and stratty to monstrously loud ultra-fat humbucker. Since then, I've tackled the problem of tele pickups. The difference in brightness between bridge and neck pickups is often extreme and neck pickups can be weak or muddy. Many tele players rarely use the neck pickups at all. Gemini offers several different approaches to resolve these issues. As well as making some conventional strat pickups, Gemini offers one (The Spirit) with a sound that belongs in the pre-Strat era and at the other end of the spectrum the Kraken, an out and out power pickup. Being a small business has one key advantage. I can design and make the pickups I dream of, exactly how I want to, with no compromise. I hope that you will find Gemini pickups offer you something you want, even if you didn't know until now that you wanted it. Mike Rose