The Seymour Duncan JB humbucker is one of the all-time great electric guitar pickups – especially for rock and metal.
The JB is hot. It’s juicy. It’s rich in harmonics and designed to hit the front-end of your guitar amp hard, but not too hard – it’s versatile, excelling at gently pushed blues guitar tones. And it is now available for your Fender Telecaster’s bridge position.
Slimmed down in a single-coil footprint, with all the same output, the JB Jr For Tele will take some beating as far as Telecaster mods go. It has the same four-conductor wiring setup, putting series, parallel, and split-coil wiring options on the menu. And it takes the Seymour Duncan story back to the beginning.
As Kevin Beller, Seymour Duncan’s VP of engineering and new products, notes, the original JB humbucker was one of the pickups that put Seymour Duncan on the map.
“The JB was one of our original seven humbuckers,” says Beller. “People were still working with pretty much vintage Fenders, vintage Marshalls, and the JB offered considerably more output compared to a PAF, so it enabled players to be able to hit the front end of those amplifiers a lot harder to create more sustain. The JB was instrumental in bringing people some new tonalities.”
But those people were not Telecaster players – at least they were not those Tele players who voiced concern at the idea of rerouting the body for a humbucker.
Understandably so, that’s major surgery. And you could imagine the opprobrium these days if anyone had such sacrilegious intentions with a vintage Telecaster. So yes, the JB humbucker, hitherto been out of bounds for the Telecaster’s bridge position.
Enter, the JB Jr For Tele.
“With any replacement pickup, you’re constrained by the shape of the pickup that you’re trying to replace,” says Beller. “If you’re trying to replace a Tele [pickup], you can’t really deviate from a Tele shape very far. Basically, what we’re doing is we’re trying to fit two coils into the space where one big single coil used to occupy.”
Making the pickup to fit was one part of the equation. The other was making sure it had the same output as the regular full-sized humbucker. This required a change of the JB recipe. Where the original dual-coil JB was designed around an Alnico V magnet, Seymour Duncan is using ceramic magnets on these JB Jr models.
The DCR figures compare similarly at 16.28k for the JB Jr, 16.6k for the JB. Both have been vacuum wax-potted to cut down on the squeal… Helpful given the high-gain, high-volume environments these will be deployed.
Is this a new era for Telecaster tone? It’s certainly one of the coolest aftermarket pickup options we’ve seen for some time. Priced $129, the JB Jr For Tele is available now. See Seymour Duncan for more.
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