Hot Rods, Harleys, Humbuckers and Hanky Panky - a glimpse into the world of Lindy Fralin

Virtual Woodshed recently caught up with legendary electric guitar pickup winder Lindy Fralin on the phone from his home in Richmond, VA. If you dig serious guitar tone, you already know that Lindy is one of the last great experimenters and innovators in electric guitar pickup design. And while he’s too modest to brag, Fralin’s client list reads like a who’s who in contemporary electric guitar. Players like Keith Richards, Brad Paisley, Eric Johnson and Lee Roy Parnell have all used Fralin’s services at some point to help achieve their trademark tones. His work echoes some of the greatest designs of the past while simultaneously lending a creative vision toward what is possible today. For example, the new Fralin hum canceling P-90’s and hum canceling Strat pickups prove that you can still retain great traditional tone while taking advantage of modern technology. But what’s even cooler is to hear first hand how Lindy arrived at his trade and to hear him describe in detail the kind of tone that really fires him up. So get a nice hot (or cold) beverage and settle in for a lesson in tone, taste and all things electric guitar!

Virtual Woodshed: So how did you actually get into building guitar pickups?

Lindy Fralin: Well it was very slow process because I was trying to be a musician and I taught myself to work on guitars out of necessity. I learned how to fix all the orphans and Frankensteins I would find at thrift stores and places like that. I’d buy something at a pawn shop because it was really cheap, and then figure out what was wrong with it and fix it up. I just somehow got into pickups… actually, yeah that’s a worthwhile story… a friend named Keith Gress, who still plays guitar around town with people [ed note: Richmond, VA] , had a winder, and somehow he told me about it. So I went to his house and wound a couple pickups and thought, “wow this is really fun”, and I went out and just bought the stuff I needed to make my own. It was nothing but a sewing machine motor and an electric train VARIAC just bolted to a board. [ed note: a VARIAC is a bench tool used to alter the voltage of Alternating Current. It's name literally means VARIable AC. VARIACs have been widely used by builders and players alike to tweak voltage in minute increments.] You held the wire with your fingers and put the roll between your legs, and just wound with your fingers. Those early days, I did it that way for years. If I ever did five pickups in the same day, my elbow and wrists would hurt from holding them so still. So it was not an effecient way to do much! [laughs]

VirtualWoodshed: What year was that?

Lindy Fralin: Gosh it was so long ago, I’m gonna guess ‘87, ‘88?

Lindy rocking out on his vintage Gibson ES-225 with Paul Hammond and Steve Hudgins in the Richmond VA based Bopcats

VirtualWoodshed: When did you start playing guitar?

Lindy Fralin: Man, that was a long time ago. That’s a funny story too. My cousin Gary and I were restricted to the house for climbing around on the roof in the middle of the night at my grandparent’s house. We woke somebody up climbing around on the metal roof. And anyway, we were on restriction the whole next day and we found two guitars up in the attic, and played ‘em all day. That’s all we did, played guitars. And my uncle sent me home with it so I started playing guitar in fifth grade. And it turned out to be a nice guitar. It was a 40’s Gibson, that little acoustic that Elvis used to play. It was a little tiny sunburst Gibson with a big soundhole.

VirtualWoodshed: Yeah, was that an L-00?

Lindy Fralin: Maybe it was an LGO or something like that. It didn’t have a truss rod because it was made during the war. And I kept that thing for twenty five years, and one day [my uncle] called me up and said his daughter wanted to play guitar and what should he buy her, and I said, ‘hell, I’m sending yours back!’ So I borrowed it for like twenty five years and then sent it back to him! [laughs] Man, I used to take that thing to recess in the fifth grade. Me and another guy, instead of goofing off, we’d sit around and teach each other “Hanky Panky” and “Gloria”, you know whatever we could learn. A lot of Creedence songs…

VirtualWoodshed: So when did your first electric guitar come into play?

Lindy Fralin: Not much longer. I’d be hard pressed to remember, but I’d say I was in eighth grade. My dad was into jazz, so we pooled our money and got a Silvertone amp and a Hagstrom guitar from the same guy. And for a while I thought it was great. I was in a band with that guitar, but I didn’t know there was such a thing as light strings. So the guitar had heavy gauge flatwounds on it. And I thought that Hendrix and Clapton were doing all their magic with the whammy bar. And of course I wasn’t very good with the whammy bar on the Hagstrom yet. So anyway, I joined a band with a guy who had this Dan Armstrong lucite guitar with eights on it. [ed note: lucite is a patented type of plexi glass] And the difference between a .013 and a .008 was ludicrous! [laughs] But he knew every Stones song there was, so that’s when I went out and bought a Mustang [ed note: the Mustang was a student model Fender guitar that debuted in the early 60's] It was a sad guitar. I could never keep it in tune. It never sounded all that great either so it was very frustrating. But I liked it anyway. It was the first year they made it, so it didn’t have a contoured body. It was just cream white with a tortoise shell pickguard and white pickups. And that’s the first guitar I bought with my own money. I remember leaning it in the corner of my bedroom and staring at it as I went to bed at night and thinking how cool it was! [laughs] It was the coolest thing ever!

VirtualWoodshed: So who were your first guitar heroes at that point? Was that the Clapton era?

Lindy Fralin: Well, I was just playing all the junk I heard on the radio until I heard Hendrix, and that’s when I wanted an electric. I can remember just mostly caring about cars and motorcycles and dreaming of going fast when I was 13 or 14. And then I heard Hendrix and it all just instantly changed. That was powerful music. That music had something so powerful about it, and it still affects me that way. I also loved Johnny Winter, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and a lot of Stevie Winwood. I loved Jethro Tull and Steppenwolf a whole lot too.

VirtualWoodshed: Did you have any concept of the types of guitars those guys were playing at that point?

Lindy Fralin: No not really. I was so young and the idea of getting different guitars was completely out of reach. Although I lived four or five blocks from a pawn shop and I think I walked in it every day during my whole childhood, just to see what was hanging from the ceiling. But most of it was out of reach for me. Things like the Mustang, I got lucky because somebody knew that thing was for sale for $100 or something like that. I remember going to that pawn shop all the time but almost never buying anything.

VirtualWoodshed: When did you pick up your first professional guitar like say a Strat?

Lindy Fralin: Well after the Mustang I had a Tele. And it was also a piece of junk. It was one of those ones with the F holes and it had the polyeurathane up to the frets. You could barely even feel the frets there was so much polyeurathane on the fingerboard. And it had the same problem lots of them do, and that was the neck joint was so loose that if you ever banged it or leaned on it, it would go out of tune.

VirtualWoodshed: That sounds like an early 70’s thinline Tele.

Lindy Fralin: Or late 60’s. But it had the F holes so it was definitely the earliest of the Thinlines. It didn’t have the humbuckers. And the pickups were so microphonic that even through the Silvertone amp it would squeal onstage at band jobs. And so, it was basically a miserable guitar too. But I think I finally got my first good guitar from a neighbor, a white Strat. It still had that polyeurathane on the fingerboard, but I scraped it off so the frets felt taller. But in hindsight, it didn’t do what I wanted it to do because I had the action too close. And I still feel that a lot of people have their action too close. I play their guitars and you just can’t get anything out of them: acoustic or electric. You hit the string hard and nothing comes out.

VirtualWoodshed: There’s not enough resistance, not enough fight.

Lindy Fralin: Yeah, and when the action is too low, energy is lost by the string hitting the frets up the neck. A pickup can only pickup what the string is doing. And I probably did the other amateur mistake, thinking that if you raise the pickups as close as they’ll go, then it will be louder! [laughs] So you’re almost always out of tune a little bit.

VirtualWoodshed: Well it sounds like you favored the Fenders early on, and even today, most people probably think of you as a Fender guy.

Lindy Fralin: That’s probably Hendrix’s fault. But I was always, even on an acoustic guitar or anything, I was always attracted to that bright wound string. [ed note: Fralin pickups are highly regarded by tone purists for their remarkable clarity on the bass strings] I can remember the first guitar I noticed [that on] was “Hanky Panky”. And what I liked about it was not the singing or anything else, it was when he went “duh duh duh duh” [sings the main guitar riff], how it started at a verse you know? And it was low guitar, but you could hear clarity on it, it was a single coil pickup sound. I liked that sound! My dad had a classical guitar, before I ever owned anything of my own. And it had real bright wound strings on it and I would just sit around and noodle on it and think how cool they sounded. I’ve always liked that to this day. I’m a big fan of single coil pickups. I like distortion too, but I like to hear where I’m playing. Especially playing rhythm, I like to hear that really bright wound string.

VirtualWoodshed: Well your pickups are certainly known for that. What else would you say goes into making a good single coil pickup?

Lindy Fralin: You know, different people like different things and I guess that’s a big part of the process I do every day. How much power do you want? Some people want a real clear pickup so they can hit four note chords and not have distortion, whereas some people want one note to distort the amp, and there’s everything in between. And, so many guitarists play dirty all the time, that they don’t even know what I’m talking about when I say “bright wound strings”. Whereas people like myself, I love clean sounds, players like Deke Dickerson. Just all the people who played Strats, including Stevie Winwood. He’s so underrated, as a songwriter and a guitarist. He always played clean, just about. I mean, early Led Zeppelin is mostly clean if you really listen to it.

VirtualWoodshed: Let’s talk about amps for a minute. What’s your favorite amp of all time and why?

Lindy Fralin: I think it’s probably a [Fender] Blackface Vibrolux Reverb. There’s just something about that amp. I’ve owned four or five of them, but one in particular [that I had] just always sounded thick with Teles but it could hang in there with P-90s without getting overly muddy. And you know, something like a Princeton will like a certain guitar or pickup, but it doesn’t like others. I had a [Fender] Super Reverb that was a great amp, but it didn’t sound good until it was really loud. But the Vibrolux I could turn down to two and do a gig with. And now my white amp does everything I want. It sounds every bit that good to me. I can play it on one and a half or five and anything in between and it sounds incredible. [ed note: Lindy is referring to the Lindy Fralin model amp manufactured by VVT amps. You can learn more about this amp here.]

VirtualWoodshed: I’ve always found that a Tele bridge pickup is pretty reminiscent of some early [Gibson] P-90’s that I’ve heard. Would you call that a fair statement?

Lindy Fralin: Oh yeah. Some of the early P-90’s had a clarity when they were underwound. You’ll find that the ones between 7k and 8k are quite a bit cleaner than the ones above 8k. Well, actually Ohm readings are always just an approximation. I think Gibson intended them to have ten thousand turns but many of them had between eight and nine thousand turns. ‘Cause that’s how you’d get a reading of under 7k. And those always sounded the best to me. I liked them better than the real muddy ones. I’ve had some [Les Paul] Juniors that must have been over 9k because they were just pure mud! Even on the low E string, all you got out of it was just distortion when you hit it. Around ‘62 Gibson started using winding machines with accurate turn counters. Before that they were very inconsistent. The real good ones just have a clarity to ‘em. I’m not much on that super dark, aggressive sound.

Fralin's new hum canceling P-90's look right at home on this vintage Gibson hollowbody.

VirtualWoodshed: Yeah, I knew a guy who had a ‘56 [Les Paul Junior] and it must have had an overwound pickup ’cause it would distort as soon as you would turn the amp on!

Lindy Fralin: I love distortion as much as anybody, I just want it when I want it. And I want control. I want to know how to get it clean when I need it clean.

VirtualWoodshed: So do you ever play Gibsons at all?

Lindy Fralin: I’ve got a [ES] 225 that I love and I’d love to get another one. If I could find a good neck and body that someone had stripped all the electronics out of, I’d build one with all my stuff in it. The one I’ve got is set up with a wound G. And I’d love to have another one so I could put a plain G on it, you know a set with say .011 through .050. I just love my 225 for what it is; all kinds of jazz, blues, 50’s music, but you just can’t bend that G effectively. I can bend a .015 and a .012 just fine on a Gibson scale . But I wouldn’t put those same strings on a Fender scale, unless I went down a 1/2 step like Stevie Ray Vaughan. [ed note: the 24.75" scale length on most Gibson guitars is a little more forgiving to bend on than Fender's 25.5" scale]

VirualWoodshed: So the 225 has two P-90’s on it right?

Lindy Fralin: Yeah. That guitar’s been quite a project. In fact, the tear down and rebuild is completely documented on my website. You know another thing I wanted to mention is good wood. You can never discount how important the wood is. I always give it equal importance to the pickups. You just can’t have a good guitar when the wood is absorbing certain frequencies off the strings. It’s not gonna happen. Guitar wood has to be resonant. And it’s not that the wood adds sound, that’s what people need to understand. The wood does not add any sound to the instrument. It’s what frequencies the wood absorbs that makes it bad or good. That’s why the neck is so important. It’s so much thinner than the body and it has the ability to absorb a lot more energy off the strings. Everything the guitar neck does, it does in a passive way. They don’t add sound, they just take certain sounds away. Say you had a guitar with a massive neck like a square neck dobro or a lap steel, you’ll get so much more volume out of it. One time I borrowed a friend’s lap steel guitar that had a Tele looking pickup in it. We put [that pickup] in my tele and [the tone of the Tele] didn’t change. We put [the pickup] back in the lap steel and it was twice as loud! ‘Cause, you know, the Tele had that thin neck that was covered with polyeurathane and there just wasn’t much there. The real solid big necks of lap steels and big neck guitars are always gonna make ‘em sound stonger. It’s just because they’re losing less energy!

VirtualWoodshed: That’s an interesting rationale. I’ve never thought about it that way before.

Lindy Fralin: Yeah. And you can’t just have super heavy [wood] either. That’s not good. That can make ‘em sound harsh. But you certainly don’t want them to absorb energy and, you know, suck it up. So the guitars themselves just matter so much. And pickups then, just have to be whatever that particular person is looking for.

VirtualWoodshed: So it sounds like you almost need to voice the pickup to a given piece of wood.

Lindy Fralin: Well, yeah if you have that luxury. But even when you build a custom guitar of all choice parts you won’t know for sure what it’s going to sound like until you string it up. If a person plays a guitar and it’s not doing what they want, then they might need my help. Because if they’ve got Tele with mediocre wood and the thing is real bright, and the treble strings are just so thin and harsh, then I’d say he needs a more powerful pickup, at the risk of having dull wound strings of course! You know another guy could have a dull guitar with an E string that always sounds dead. He needs a brighter pickup. Every piece of wood is different and every person’s ears are different.

VirtualWoodshed: So even the best pickups in the world can’t save a dead piece of wood?

Lindy Fralin: Well, they can improve it. But no, it will never sound as good as a really great guitar.

VirtualWoodshed: That makes sense. I’ve got one of the first Squire Strats that is made out of a piece of alder that to my ear sounds as good as something that comes out of Fender’s Custom Shop these days. And I’ve heard some brand new American Standard Fenders, right off the assembly line that were just total dogs.

Lindy Frlalin: That’s right. Most of my test guitars at work are Korean and Mexican. Oh, and I’ve got a Chinese Squire that is a fine guitar. We’ve got the vintage output split blades in it and it sounds great! The neck is straight…[pauses] You know, they’re just not making junk anymore. Everyone is smart enough to know that you can’t sell the public junk anymore. [People] are just too smart. There was a time when you could get a import guitar for $69 and within a week it would have a warped neck. They just don’t sell stuff like that anymore.

VirtualWoodshed: Now you guys still sell quite a bit of humbuckers too right?

Lindy Fralin: Oh yeah, and you know, humbucker people are all over the place too. Some people like the weakest clearest ones, and some people like ‘em super strong. One guy wants it to be versatile so he can coil tap it and have one guitar do everything and another guy only wants to use it one way. Cause he has this sound in his head that is his favorite humbucker sound and he’d never use that guitar with a coil tap.

VirtualWoodshed: You mean they want to sound like Dickey Betts?

Lindy Fralin: Or Peter Green, or all the names you hear all the time. Oh yeah, the Allman Brothers really did have some of the greatest humbucker tones, but I was a big fan of Peter Green too because it was so clean and bright. He didn’t mind turning that treble up!

VirtualWoodshed: Yeah, talk about that. What was the deal with his setup? Because he really did have a much cleaner tone than most of the other humbucker guys of his era.

Lindy Fralin: Well, his pickups were out of phase, so when he chose to blend them he could get a scooped mid out of it. Out of phase works really well when you have control over the relative pickup volume.

VirtualWoodshed: I’ve heard that his pickups were magnetically out of phase instead of electronically out of phase.

Lindy Fralin: I have no idea and I don’t think it really matters as long as they’re out of phase. But whether he got his guitar stock like that or whether he had someone mod it, I just don’t know. You know T Bone Walker used that out of phase sound. I mean, almost any blues guy back then, his biggest influence was T Bone Walker. Albert King had out of phase pickups, and my guess is both these guys went to some tech and said “I want to sound like T Bone Walker”! [laughs] And the guy probably took the humbucker apart, flipped the magnet and gave it back to them!

This Fralin P-92 is one of Lindy's innovative original designs. All the clarity and spank of a P-90 that fits conveniently in a humbcuker slot.

VirtualWoodshed: Now that’s interesting! T Bone would have played what, an ES-175 or some big jazz box?

Lindy Fralin: Early on he played things like a one pickup guitar, like a [Gibson] Charlie Christian model or a later [ES] 150. But his real trademark sound was that old ES-5. And they were factory with out of phase pickups. At least, only when you had the neck and middle on. They were going for that funky “in between” sound long before the five way switch on the Fenders. [GIbson] did that on purpose in like ‘52 or something. I guess they thought the three pickup guitar with the neck and middle on was too woofy, so they made ‘em out of phase on purpose. They didn’t even give you the option. Even some of the three pickup Les Pauls were that way weren’t they?

VirtualWoodshed: I have no idea!

Lindy Fralin: I’ve never owned one. A Les Paul is a guitar I’ve never wanted because to me they’re just heavy and got sharp corners! [laughs] It just doesn’t make sense. But I love Gibson archtops. The 50’s Gibsons had the greatest feeling necks and the highest quality builds. I own a bunch of 50’s Gibsons and on every one of ‘em the neck is still just absolutely perfect. And they always chose the right plastic, the binding isn’t falling apart, and they air dried their wood really well.

VirtualWoodshed: Now that ES-5 you were talking about, was that the “Switchmaster”?

Lindy Fralin: I think so. It was a single cut, 3″ deep, 17″ body. A big guitar.

VirtualWoodshed: You mentioned Albert King a minute ago, and I’ve always associated him with the Flying V.

Lindy Fralin: Yeah, that’s why I think his guitar had to have been modded because I don’t think any Flying V’s ever came factory with out of phase pickups.

VirtualWoodshed: Surely not. He must have played a real 50’s V right?

Lindy Fralin: Oh yeah, his is famous. You know after I went through all my early influences which I mentioned earlier, I discovered BB King, Albert King, Freddie King, Albert Collins and Howlin’ Wolf. Man I loved those guys so much!

VirtualWoodshed: What about Chuck Berry? Was he in that group?

Lindy Fralin: Oh, well Chuck Berry was in there from the very beginning, you’re right. ‘Cause the first band I was ever in, all we did was Stones and Chuck Berry. But, I’m really talking about the guys who just drove me wild as guitarists. Chuck Berry is still one of my favorite songwriters and everyone has copied a bunch of guitar stuff from him. But the guys who just had that insane power, Hendrix, Winter, Clapton, Albert, BB… oh man. Yeah, if you had to pick just one or two songs, Albert could be the greatest bluesman who ever lived. But BB King would have to be it for his whole body of work. But like I said, I also just worshipped Freddie King. Albert Collins was a nutcase! His stuff is great! And there’s a bunch more. Buddy Guy is another one. There’s just so many great guys in the blues that I used to listen to. Have you ever heard Albert King’s version of “I’ll Be Doggoned”?

VirtualWoodshed: No.

Lindy Fralin: Oh, you gotta hear that! It’s my favorite Albert King song. It’s just a cover of some cool old soul song. And he’s got a funky band, with a guy behind him doing wah wah. But his playing and his tone, is like no one else. Even Hendrix never got quite that wild a sound.

Another Fralin innovation, the split blade, hum canceling Strat pickups. We tried these out and they are the real deal!

VirtualWoodshed: He played funky amps too didn’t he?

Lindy Fralin: In all the pictures I’ve ever seen it was an Acoustic, a transistor Acoustic 150 with two 15’s.

VirtualWoodshed: Yeah, that’s a bizarre rig alright.

Lindy Fralin: Yep. It was loud! [laughs] And he was getting great tone out of it. Hell, you know, Fogerty, I mean I’ve loved Creedence since day one too, and Fogerty played through transistor Kustom amps there for a while. And he got a great sound out of ‘em. He knew what to do!

VirtualWoodshed: Has he ever bought any Fralin pickups?!

Lindy Fralin: No, I think he can afford any real guitar he wants! [chuckles] He doesn’t have to modify anything. [pauses] But yeah, he’s always been one of my heroes. Not just for his guitar playing but also for his singing and songwriting. He always kept things so clean and pure. There are no extra, unnecessary notes in his songs.

VirtualWoodshed: What are your favorite effects to use live? And what are some effects that people can use that don’t overly color the tone that comes out of the guitar itself?

Lindy Fralin: I’ve never been a huge fan of transistor distortion. So most of the time I’ve always stuck with some kind of boost. For like 25 years, there’s always been a seven band EQ in my board. And what I’ll do is cut the deepest bass a notch down, and the cut the brightest treble a notch down, but then crank the volume. And so then when you stomp on it, you just get a lot of extra power to push the amp. But since you’ve cut the deepest bass, you’re not going to get into distortion as much. You basically thicken everything up. That works for me, because that way you’re pushing the amp into natural distortion rather than relying on transistors to do it for you. I just use it purely as a power boost to really push those tubes.

VirtualWoodshed: So you’ve never used an overdrive?

Lindy Fralin: Oh, well, I’ve always had an overdrive around and I’ve tried just about everything on the market. In fact the other night with Steve [Basset - a noted Hammond B3 player in the Virginia music scene] I used one of those little RC Boosts and I loved it. I must have used it on three fourths of the songs. It’s just a simple overdrive that has bass, treble, gain and volume, and it doesn’t make your guitar sound like anything else, it just gives you a really smooth grind. You don’t even notice it distorting in other words. You can still hit chords and you don’t lose that clarity. Now that was a situation where I did want to have lots of distortion and sustain.

VirtualWoodshed: You know for you to be such a Hendrix guy, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you play a wah pedal.

Lindy Fralin: I had one that night! There was one song I had to use it one. But I’ve never been good at the wah wah. I guess it’s just not very comfortable standing there on one foot, so I never really practiced the thing.

VirtualWoodshed: Hendrix used to put his whole weight on the thing. I heard that he’d go through a dozen wah pedals in a tour.

Lindy Fralin: [laughs] Yeah, I’ve heard stories like that.

VirtualWoodshed: But you use a delay too right?

Lindy Fralin: In the Bopcats, I’m always using delay and even tremelo. I use a bit of tremelo because I don’t have it in the white amp I use now. [ed note: the VVT Lindy Fralin model] I’ve got an Aqua Puss for delay and the tremelo is a Carl Martin. It has both pitch bending and volume, you know tremelo and vibrato in there. And it’s pretty good. And then I have a tuner. And the overdrive I’ve been using lately is a Carl Martin because it’s got a dirty and a clean in the same pedal. The clean is nothing but a volume and the dirty has three knobs like you always do.

VirtualWoodshed: Well, that’s a pretty spartan rig. And I guess it’s what people would expect out of one of the world’s greatest pickup winders.

Lindy Fralin: With the Bopcats, I’ll play distorted three or four times a night, out of say fifty songs. But I have it there when I want it. But most of the stuff we do is pretty darned clean.

VirtualWoodshed: And you’re playing most of these gigs on a Tele?

Lindy Fralin: I don’t know about that. I always have a dirty guitar and a clean guitar. I’d say half the time there’s a Tele or a Strat there for the clean stuff, and then for anything like Chuck Berry or Freddie King where I want that thicker sound, I usually have P-90’s or P-92’s. I love my Flying V and I love my little Special [ed note: Lindy is referring to a custom Les Paul Special replica made by noted luthier Tom Rodriguez.] One has P-90’s and one has P-92’s in it. But both of ‘em have the sawed off Bigsby’s. You know, if I want to be a little more dirty or just have that thickness. But I’ll always have two different kinds of guitars at a gig.

VirtualWoodshed: So what kind of new and exciting stuff is coming out of Fralin Pickups these days?

Lindy Fralin: Well, for the last year, we’ve been doing nothing but the hum-canceling P-90 and the hum-canceling Strat pickups. Those things took a long time to prototype and tool up. And then once I had the parts I had to wind literally hundreds of them to learn about how I could wind it most effectively. But they’re now up and in production. They’ve been on the market now for five weeks and eight weeks respectively.

VirtualWoodshed: Are you selling many of them yet?

Lindy Fralin: Well, they’re kind of slow right now. I mean, not only is there a recession on right now, but we haven’t advertised at all. And that’s mainly because I don’t like being backed up more than three weeks. We got ourselves backed up about five weeks on some of the big orders. You know, you have no control over when stuff gets ordered and sometimes they’re really big. Two or three people at the same time will really set us back, because everything there is hand built one at a time and hand wound one coil at a time. Even if it’s a two coil pickup, they might be wound back to back off the same roll of wire, but they’re still one coil at a time.

VirtualWoodshed: So are most of your orders to re-sellers or to individuals?

Lindy Fralin: I would say 85% are to builders and music stores. We deal direct all the time, but we encourage people to buy from our dealers. We deal direct when people either want something really custom or they just want to buy from us.

otherwise reproduced without the explicit written consent of the author.