Sunbucker
$160.00 – $320.00
The Fralin Sunbucker gives you 25% Humbucker tone and 75% Alnico Single Coil tone – with humbucker aesthetics. Enjoy a beefy, hum-cancelling single coil tone  – all with traditional humbucker looks. Thicker, darker, and louder than our Big Single, and clearer than our Pure P.A.F.
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PAF Tone Meets Fender® Clarity
Want to learn more about our Sunbucker? Here's all the information you'll need:
Sunbucker FEATURES:
The Fralin Sunbucker® guitar pickup is a very snappy, bright sounding humbucker with a Single Coil vibe. Based on Lindy’s original design, the Sunbucker humbucker is clean, very articulate, and clear. You can expect a spanky, snappy clean tone that’s very articulate, unlike most modern humbuckers, while offering a lot of Single Coil tone. The Sunbucker has a medium output, which is very dynamic and expressive. Lindy created this pickup to help balance out very dark sounding guitars, or for those who want a bright, snappy tone with no hum.
- 75% Single Coil tone, 25% Humbucker
- Clear, Clean, Articulate sounding Guitar Pickups
- Late, smooth breakup
- Bright wound strings, pure-sounding plain strings
- Made by hand, one at a time.
Sound
Very bright, clear, and articulate. Sunbuckers will stay clean as it won’t break up as early as modern humbuckers, and you’ll find that it’s spanky and plucky. Built with AlNicCo V and 42-gauge plain enamel wire, this guitar pickup is an excellent solution to a dark-sounding humbucker in the neck position, or for those who are chasing after a single-coil tone with no hum.
When playing clean, you’ll find that this guitar pickup sounds very much like a single-coil: it’s incredibly dynamic, bright, and snappy. With distortion, you’ll find that the smooth and late, with a pronounced pick attack and pure-sounding plain strings and bright wound strings.
FAQs
- What makes this humbucker sound different? The Sunbucker uses Alnico 5 Magnets instead of Steel Slugs, like a normal humbucker. This gives this humbucker design a Fender Sparkle.
- What Pots do you recommend? You can experiment. 500K pots will give you the brightest, snappiest tone. 250K pots will mellow it out a bit, but it will still remain bright. We recommend 250K pots most of the time.
- What lead do I choose? This depends on your guitar and a few other things. Gibson Lead: Go with this if installing a set into a Gibson-style instrument, where each pickup has its respective volume pot. 2-Conductor: Go with this lead if buying a Single, or installing into a Fender-style instrument.
- What’s the String Spacing? 49.2, 50, 52mm. We can make them in all sizes.
- How far away do the strings does the pickup need to be? Push your Low E String down at the highest fret. Measure from the top of the pole piece to the bottom of the string. The ideal starting location should be 1/8? on the bass string, and 1/16? on the treble string, when the High E string is pushed down at highest fret.
- Wiring Diagrams? Here!
Tech Specs
Wound with 42Â & 43 Gauge Single Poly Nylon Wire and Alnico 5 Slug Magnets. 250K Pots are recommended with this pickup.
Our Stock Set reads 9.8K in the Neck and 10.3 in the Bridge, due to mismatched coils.
Sizing
Humbucker Lead Color Codes
See below for our Humbucker Lead color codes. For help with matching to other manufacturers, check out this resource here.
Gibson Braided Lead:
2-Conductor Lead:
3-Conductor Lead:
4-Conductor Lead
Sunbucker Questions And Answers:
Have a question about our Sunbucker? Leave it here! We will answer your question within 24 hours.
Beautiful fullness and warmth on the neck, bridge can definitely growl especially with some OD, mixed has a nice plinky sweet spot with my tone and vol dialed back a bit. These are great pickups if you play chord melodies, strum rhythms, and rip big leads. Basically super versatile no pickups that sound great in every situation.
I love the sound of this pickup! You can definitely hear the scooped mids. It’s paired with a fralin hum-cancelling p90…the Sunbucker is a lot lower output than the p90 which makes them a bit unbalanced in volume which is a bit unfortunate. Lindy does amazing work and I appreciate how helpful he and his team are. Fralins are the only after market pickups I buy and they’re worth every penny.
Just what I wanted. Perfect!
Lindy hit a home run in recommending these pickups… they’re beyond wonderful
Awesome full single-coil sound without hum….Love it.
Great pickup. Really didn’t know what to expect and I’m really impressed. Thinking to use again in another guitar.
Sunbucker Bridge Pickup
Perfect bridge pickup mate to the Alnico Rod P90 in the neck of my swamp ash Tele build. Great clarity and a nice mix of a single coil/humbucker tone and response. Love it!
I just got my guitar back from the luthier with the Sunbuckers installed and plugged into a clean high headroom amp. Â Awesome pickups. Â Really does that single-coil sound and very much improved the 2xHB telecaster that I had upgraded.
I have recently installed a Sunbucker in the neck of my latest Telecaster build along with a Split Steel Poled in the bridge. I had them build me a harness for this guitar also. WoW!!! I think I found my holy grail. It is exactly what I’ve been looking for. These pickups sound very good together and individually. Very balanced and the clarity is remarkable. Great string separation and sensitivity. Very responsive to different pick attacks and approaches. Add a little dirt in the amp and the tones are freakin’ fantastic. No pedals needed. Most definitely my favorite neck pickup yet.
I have a Gibson historic 1963 ES-335 custom shop 2013. Basically, a beautiful guitar, but with a great need for sound improvement (the Burstbucker 1 and 2 are way too flat to my hear…).
I ordered a Sunbucker for the neck position and a PurePaf (8k) for the bridge position. It was the best decision I could make to turn this guitar into a real musical instrument! FYI, I use a Mesa 2020 amplifier (not for the year, as I bought it in 1995 ;), a triaxis preamp, Eventide H8000 effects, celestion gold speakers (2 times 1×12) with a sound that generally has little distortion but a lot of attack. The result is perfect! Thanks Fralin’s team, amazing product!
Problem now… I can’t stop playing!