Vintage Guitar - February 2018 - 119

POLE POSITION
The Rivet '63/'64 Pickup Set

R

ivet Pickups founder David Petschulat
made the first locking vibrato with fine
tuners for the EVH company, and worked
stints at Kahler and Gibson.
With Rivet, Petschulat has developed a
unique pickup design with two mini-coils that,
once connected to their base, allow a variety of
tonal options via various wiring cards.
Rivet pickups are the same size as standard
humbuckers but have a very unique ap-

Price: $329
Info: www.rivetpickups.com

pearance thanks to their arrangement and
number of polepieces. The '63 is designed
as a neck pickup and has a row of six pole
pieces alongside a mini-coil of three poles; the
bridge-position '64 has a row of six poles with

POWER STATION
The Strymon Zuma

A

re you tripping over a spiderweb of effects power cords? Have a pedalboard
that requires an advanced degree in electrical engineering to operate? Or are you just
confounded by your home setup of a few
pedals patched together with a mish-mash
of cords that mysteriously become a rat's
nest when you're not looking?
Strymon's Zuma power supply might be
your answer. This beautiful blue box is the
highest horsepower, most tech-savvy supply
of its kind - and at a reasonable price.
The Zuma provides nine high-current,
isolated circuits, each with its own custom
transformer and dedicated regulator. The
nine channels all deliver 9 volts via the
provided short or long cords.
Two channels are switchable between 9-,
12-, or 18-volt output. This is ideal for most
regular or even higher-power effects - and
if you have a 9-volt stompbox that provides
more headroom or output at higher voltages,
you've got options. Each output delivers a
whopping 500 milliamps of juice. If you

don't speak fluent electronics, all you need
to know is that the Zuma is never going to
let your stompboxes down. Each output is
also topped by a small operating light to let
you know when your connection is made.
Zuma engineers were also thinking
ahead to your future world tour, even if
you weren't: the power-in options include
any variation from 100 to 240 volts with the
IEC cable supplied.
The Zuma is also amazingly quiet. Some pedals
designed to work with
batteries can churn out
background static, but
the Zuma's dual isolation stages eliminate ground-loop
a nd AC-l i ne
noises. So you
re a l l y on l y
hear your pedals working, not
complaining.

February 2018

119

a four-pole mini-coil. The pickups connect to
a card base with slip-on connectors; the base,
in turn, has a slot for an interchangeable card.
The unit tested with the Crunch 108 card allowed for a hotter output when the push/pull
pot is in the down position. Other available
cards include a Glass model, designed to give
a more Tele-like tone from the set.
But where Rivet pickups really outshine
other passive pickup designs is in their
unique use of mini-coils to produce a clearer-sounding neck tone and a fatter-sounding
bridge tone thanks to the arrangements of
the mini-coils. For example, when the neck
position is chosen, various amounts of the
bridge's mini-coils, positioned under the
high strings, are added in to create a clearer
and wider overall "neck" tone. Conversely,
in the bridge position, the neck mini-coils
positioned under the bass strings are mixed
in to fatten things up.
The Rivet system is a highly idealized and
extremely versatile set of pickups. Thanks to
the ingenuity of founder David Petschulat,
the '63/'64 set offers a wider variety of tones
and output levels than traditional humbuckers via it's card system and imaginative use
of mini-coils. - Zac Childs
If the Zuma's more juice than you need,
Strymon also offers scaled-down Ojai models.
The basic Ojai has five 9-volt outputs, whereas
the Ojai R30 offers two selectable outputs for
12- or 18-volt units. And they can be daisychained together to expand your system.
The Zuma and its little siblings are
lightweight, rock-solid, simple to operate
(even for guitarists), and downright cool
looking. - Michael Dregni

VINTAGE GUITAR

Price: $249
Info: www.strymon.net
http://www.rivetpickups.com http://www.strymon.net
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Vintage Guitar - February 2018
