Homespun Pickups in an Emmons Legrande

[Nathan Pocock]

I picked up an Emmons Legrande on the forum last fall. It's a D10, SN #435L. It had Pentad pickups in it. The C6 pickup sounded strange to me and I just generally like single coils more so I decided I was gonna spruce this thing up a little bit. The original fretboards were very worn and faded and I decided to put on new replacement Emmons fretboards at the same time after seeing them on a Push-Pull that had been reworked. The neck replacement also gave me a chance to really clean up the necks and get the gunk out of everything. I polished the fingers at the same time since they had some pretty good grooves worn in.

Anyway when I pulled out the C6 pickup I saw that one of the wires was broken, so one coil wasn't working properly. Its an easy fix to solder it back on with that particular pickup. I may put these up for sale if anyone has any interest in them, they are an interesting pickup. Each coil by itself has pretty high resistance, and it seems like they are intended to mostly be used as a single coil but with the option to put them into humbucking if necessary for noise reduction. They also had an out of phase position which didn't sound useful to me. Basically I liked the positions for bridge coil only and parallel humbucking (I like this less but its useful if you're having 60cycle problems).

For the replacements I decided to try out some Homespun Pickups Troubadour Classics. Actually I ordered one and found an original Emmons single coil on the forum and I was going to put the emmons in the C6 neck. But the two pickups were visually not that close to each other and I wound up getting a second Troubadour. The Homespun pickups are a little bit narrower on the top of the bobbin than the emmons. They have a harder bevel cut into the top of the bobbin which shows the layers in the material. This makes the white stripes in the bobbin a little more visible and they are also a cream color where the Emmons was a little more white. The emmons has slightly more rounded corners.

IMO the troubadours look really sharp in this guitar but that's not too important if they don't sound good. So let me just say they sound fantastic. Just what I was looking for, a classic fat single coil sound, plenty of bite but not over the top, and extremely clear. Great low-end clarity and girth just like you would want. I wired them up to the 3-way switch and then to the jack so there are no tone/volume controls on the guitar. I left the two 5-way pentad knobs in place but they are disconnected. Out of the guitar I go into a Sarno Freeloader and then down to a Goodrich pot pedal, from there I have several amp choices but I really like this guitar into a Milkman Half & Half 15" combo loaded with a Peavey Neo Black Widow.

If you're looking for a nice single coil steel pickup I think you have a great option with Homespun. I would not hesitate to order some again and I'd love to try out one of their humbucking options too. Clay was great to deal with and shipped quickly. He sent along some cool stickers with each pickup as well.

Here's the E9 pickup installed

e9 Pickup.jpg

Both pickups

Both Pickups.jpg

Starting the process

Neck Off.jpg

One of the necks finished up

1 Neck Done.jpg

Working on the C6 neck

Control Plate Out.jpg