Tonerider was born from one aim – the need to make the best sounding music gear on the planet – at prices the working musician can afford. We don’t have ‘student lines’ or ‘pro series’; every pickup we produce is designed to perform in a professional environment. We’ve made all kinds of electronics parts and assemblies over the years from amplifier circuit boards for large US corporations to a range of guitar effects under our own brand, but for now we’ve chosen to focus on perhaps the most vital part of any guitars signal chain… the pickups.
The art of making great sounding pickups involves great design, superb machining and toolmaking, material sourcing and, finally, world-class assembly. We gather the best materials we can – for example we use USA sourced wires (like our push-back braided wire), nickel-silver sheet from Taiwan, and fibreboard from Japan. The pickups are then wound an assembled at our workshop in Shenzhen, China, just over the border from Hong Kong.
We use scatterwinding techniques on every pickup – tailoring the wind to our tonal goals for different pickup designs. With patterns based on my early hand-wound coils, CNC machines now allow us to get the “hand-wound” tone into every pickup with incredible levels of repeatability. We’ve been working with the same small team for over 10 years, and we hope that anyone who’s had the pleasure of owning and installing a Tonerider pickup can see and feel the quality. Contrary to Internet rumour, all pickups aren’t all “made in the same factory.” Only Tonerider pickups come out of the Tonerider factory. We do a small amount of OEM work for guitar manufacturers, but NONE for other retail pickup companies.
Our UK based operation hosts our distribution, design and sales office – both shipping direct to customers and to our worldwide dealer network.