By Brett Ratner

ibson USA's Blueshawk , unveiled at summer NAMM in July, was an instant eye-catcher, with its combination of the Nighthawk's sleek, elegant body lines and the ES-series' semi-hollow construction. But the BluesHawk's fresh, new look proved to be just a teaser for the fresh, new sound produced by its "Blues-90" electronics--a system of special-design single-coil pickups with hum-canceling capabilities.

Single-coil humbuckers? Sounds like an oxymoron. Actually, it sounds like a dream-come-true for blues, country, or even rock players who have fantasized about putting the power of a humbucker behind the sharp attack of a single-coil pickup. Here is how that dream came true:

Gibson's R&D Guru, J.T. Riboloff, who won an award from the Music Trades magazine in 1993 for his design of the Nighthawk, was one of the creative forces behind the BluesHawk. Instead of merely slapping a new configuration of pickups and a new name on a Nighthawk and sending it out the door, Riboloff put in a year of thought and hard work to create a versatile guitarthat would give aficionados of the single-coil sound new levels of expression.

"The main feature of the Blueshawk is that you can obtain a good single-coil, fast attack-type sound with hum-canceling capability," Riboloff said, "With the hum-canceling mechanism in place, it also makes the pickups more efficient and makes them more powerful."

The secret of Riboloff's "Blues-90" pickup system is a hidden pickup coil, placed away from the strings to cancel hum without interfering with the working pickups. He explained how the hum-canceling mechanism works.

"The 'dummy' pickup is basically another pickup, but doesn't have the magnetic core in it," Riboloff said. "It cancels out the opposite side of the A/C signal and provides a path for the other side of the signal to travel through to prevent the hum."

Riboloff notes that the idea of a third coil is not new, but his use of the technology is."Dummy coils have been used in the past, but I've never seen it used in the manner that I used it in," he said. "It's wired into the circuit in a unique fashion to where it knows to get out of its own way when it's not needed. The user doesn't have to worry about turning it on or off; it automatically happens when he selects his pickups with the normal three-way pickup selector. When you are in the middle position, for example, the two normal pickups cancel each other out and the dummy coil is automatically inoperative. The pickups are 360 degrees out of phase with each other, which makes them actually in phase but opposite polarity. One pickup is picking up the top side of the sine wave and the other pickup is picking up the bottom half."

With magnets rather than screws for pickup poles, the Blues-90 pickup is obviously different from Gibson's traditional P-90, but the differences go far deeper, Riboloff explained.

"On a Blues-90, the core of the pickup is the actual magnet mode whereas on a P-90 pickup, the core is steel with the magnet placed beneath it, he said. "This, in effect, will give the Blues-90s a narrower, more precise magnetic path to pick the strings up with. The result is a faster attack. On a P-90, the steel tends to warm up the sound more and gives you a fatter sound. I was going for more of a brighter tone with a faster attack than a P-90. Also, to increase the high end of the pickup and get more of a traditional single coil sound, the coil of the Blues-90 pickup has fewer turns of the magnet wire."

Riboloff went a step further by implementing a "Varitone" circuit similar to the one Gibson introduced in 1959 on the ES-345 (currently a feature of the B.B. King Lucille model). By filtering out specific frequencies in it's five settings, the Varitone gives the Blueshawk enough sounds to satisfy a session player.

"The Varitone opened up the spectrum of the tone paths of that instrument quite a bit," Riboloff said. "The other nice thing with that Varitone is the push/pull tone pot which bypasses the circuit. The Varitone selector is a rotary switch, and somebody might want to change his tone in the middle of the song, but he's also thinking about keeping his timing. He doesn't want to count how many times he's clicked his Varitone knob. What this allows him to do is, for example, leave the circuit in bypass and preset his Varitone at the beginning of the song. So if you want to locate position 5 on the Varitone, for example, preset the knob so that all you have to do is push that pot down."

The end result is a fresh new sound. "It fills a whole new niche because it's not quite a "Fenderish" type instrument," Riboloff said. "It doesn't sound like a Les Paul either."