hello , love your blog , I’d like to take your opinion on something , while i was trying to get a clean tone close to jonny’s in weird fishes , it sounds a lot closer to my ear on a humbucker than on a single coil ( my amp is a vox pathfinder 15r ) , does jonny’s single coil sound closer to a humbucker than a regular single coil ( if that’s even a thing ) ?

As we’ve discussed previously, the fastest way to get the sound of Jonny’s Telecaster Plus V1 is to buy any solid-body guitar with humbuckers.

A photo of Jonny with his Fender Telecaster Plus V1 in Radiohead’s studio during the recording of Weird Fishes / Arpeggi (at least if the photo title “jonnyarpeggi3” can be trusted) (deadairspace).

It’s true that Lace Sensor pickups are based on a single coil design, but their internal design is radically different in a number of ways. For more technical info, check the bottom of this site. But in terms of sound, Lace Sensors can be made to sound very different from each other with only small changes to the pickup construction. By contrast, regular single coil pickups almost always just have a bright tone. Depending on the “color” of the Sensor pickup, you can get a tone from single coil to P90 to humbucker (though to be honest, the main difference is just the amount of bass and the output level).

From Jonny’s page:

The pickups on Jonny’s Fender Telecaster Plus V1 are the stock Fender Lace Sensor pickups: a single Lace Sensor Blue pickup in the neck and a Lace Sensor Dually Red-Red pickup in the bridge. The neck pickup may be shaped like a single coil, but it uses a different technology and is voiced with a “warmer 50’s humbucking” tone, according to Lace. In contrast, the Lace Sensor Red is voiced with a “fat, punch humbucking” tone.

The “Dually” pickup is just a pair of Lace Sensor Red pickups screwed together — in theory, they can be wired in any configuration, and the stock Telecaster Plus offers both Series wiring and coil taps for each individual pickup (Fender wiring diagram). However, Jonny had the coil-tap switch removed to make space for a cutoff switch. Given that the Lace Sensor Red pickup is voiced as a humbucker, the Dually Red-Red can be thought of as a humbucker made from two humbuckers, and its super-loud output certainly fits that description.

A closeup of Jonny’s Fender Telecaster Plus V1 from Radiohead’s performance of 2+2=5 at Lollapalooza on July 29, 2016 (radiohead.com).