In our second installment of articles by Helmut Lemme, we turn to a special kind of pickup that was favored by Les Paul but for a number of reasons never made it big in the guitar world: the low-impedance pickup. In fact, it has all the right features and should be the go-to type of pickup – as the article discusses. It is interesting to read how  circumstances make history sometimes write the best technology out of the picture. With the low impedance pickup, we would have much more control over the sound of our guitars – in fact we could mimic each an every pickup type and brand with it. The one drawback – the small output voltage – would not be an issue at all with modern electronics. But it was not to be. Still, you might become interested to experiment a bit, so give this a read:

Low-Impedance Pickups

P.S.: this article was originally issued in the magazine SUSTAIN (September, 2012); we appreciate being given the permission to re-publish it here!