For guitarists seeking to elevate their Telecaster's sound, the Bare Knuckle Nomads set emerges as a compelling option. With 11 different flavors of Telecaster pickups, Bare Knuckle Pickups has a reputation for quality and innovation. If there were a MasterChef for pickup makers, Tim Mills would have won it countless times over the past 21 years.
Bare Knuckle Pickups is based in the UK. While there are some online shops that carry some models in stock, for the most part you are going to be ordering through the Bare Knuckle Pickups online store. Anyone with a troublesome Tele, whatever style you play in, needs to hear these.
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The Bare Knuckle Nomads Set: An Overview
Pickups for Telecasters come in numerous sonic shades, and to that end Bare Knuckle already makes quite a few. In fact, adding this new set, the company has 11 different flavors, including the historic Blackguard sets; the Flat ’50s have been powering this writer’s Tele for the past few years.
The Nomads set was designed with versatility in mind. “I wanted to create something more controlled and powerful that would cater to my heavier sounds just as much as the ambient and cleaner side of what I do,” states Rabea. Like his Triptych set for S-style guitars, the Nomads use a different magnet blend.
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“In order to make them synergistic with the Triptych set, I decided on a similar approach,” says Bare Knuckle founder, Tim Mills. “I opted for Alnico III magnets in the bridge coil and Alnico V in the neck. Alnico III has the lowest pull of any of the Alnicos used in guitar pickups and this, paired with a relatively hot wind of 43 AWG plain enamel wire, allows for the high-end to really breathe and for plenty of extension in the bottom-end.
“It puts all of the dynamic headroom at the player’s control, either by rolling back the volume or digging in more with the pick to push the signal harder.”
Key Features and Specs
Both pickups are well crafted, and the bridge uses what looks like a traditional copper-plated steel baseplate. Tim tells us it’s actually “a much thicker 1950-style baseplate that would have been zinc-plated, but we decided copper-plating would be a nice touch to change things up.
“The thicker steel alters the inductance of the coil, delivering more solid high-end response with plenty of weight behind each note. More of every frequency - but most players particularly feel it in the high-end where it removes any hint of spikiness and really fattens up single-note lead work.”
The neck pickup plays with the recipe, too. “It features a taller coil than normal,” says Tim, “and slightly narrower-diameter magnetic poles - though our vintage-correct full drop Tele neck covers, which are made from pure nickel silver with our own tooling, still fit! The taller coil allows me to use a hotter wind than I would usually go for while sticking with a 43AWG plain enamel wire, which maintains the balance with the bridge, and the narrower-diameter magnets keep the bottom-end under control with plenty of snap in the upper mids and highs.”
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Here's a quick look at the specifications:
Bare Knuckle Nomads Set: Specs
- Launch price: From £261.60 (£276.60 as reviewed) / approx $335
- Type: Single-coil pickups for Telecaster and T-style electric guitars
- Origin: UK
- Mounting type: Standard
- Polepiece spacing/style: 55mm/flush pole (bridge); covered (neck)
- Hook-up wire: Vintage-style push-back cloth-covered single conductor
- Magnet type: Alnico III (bridge), Alnico V (neck)
- Coil Wire/Wind: 43 AWG plain enamel/scatter-wound
- Potting: Yes
- DCR (kohms): 10.4 (bridge); 7.2 (neck)
- Options: Nomads etch on neck pickup cover (as reviewed) adds £15
Sound and Performance
One thing that impressed us about the Triptych set was the apparent balance between positions - and that’s evident here. These pickups are designed to play well for traditional Tele-like tones and also under much higher gains.
Starting clean and loud, the bridge isn’t ferociously bright, but it’s certainly a Tele with gnarly honk, very present depth and clear highs without that eyebrow-raising treble many of us will have experienced. For funk or jangle fans, the mix is deliciously widescreen, combining depth and sparkle; it’s extremely musical. It’s little surprise that these Nomads record really well.
At the neck, it’s more Strat-y to our ears, with well-tuned clarity, depth and percussive bounce. For funk or jangle fans, the mix is deliciously widescreen, combining depth and sparkle; it’s extremely musical. It’s little surprise that these Nomads record really well.
Edging up the gain you begin to notice how well that bridge pickup especially responds to pick attack and dynamics, while the neck puts on a Texas bluesman’s hat. Running through a variety of dirt pedals, the Nomads lap them up.
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Unlike on so many Teles we’ve wrestled with over the years, our right hand isn’t constantly riding the tone control to pull back the sharp highs, and we’re not wishing for more clarity at the neck.
On the one hand, these Nomads are just another set of pickups for a Telecaster, but those decades of listening - not least to players such as Rabea - have not only satisfied the artist but created a recipe that has all the taste of this classic plank with a very seasoned, musical flavor.
I think that we all know that one can replace pickups in a guitar or bass if we want to. For me, a pickup change has frequently changed a guitar from play maybe to play frequently. While I have used pickups from Seymour Duncan, Jason Lollar, Suhr and Lindy Fralin, all excellent, I find myself going first these days to Tim Mills, founder of Bare Knuckle Pickups. As I make no claim to know what is best in terms of a pickup for a particular guitar and my playing style, I tried reaching out for some guidance. While both Lollar and Lindy Fralin were helpful companies, on my first reach out to Bare Knuckle Pickups, I got a very rapid response from Tim Mills who runs the company. I had first heard of Bare Knuckle Pickups on That Pedal Show and thought they might be worth trying out. I was blown away that Tim responded directly and he was actually interested in what I wanted to achieve and what I did not like in the pickups that were in that specific guitar now.
Bare Knuckle | Rabea Massaad Signature Nomads Tele Set
My first purchase was to replace the pickups in a PRS Custom 22 that I had bought used some twenty years ago. It’s a deep raspberry 10 top with a great feel, but always sounded too thick to me. It is an old one as it has the old PRS rotary pickup selector. When my preferred technician pulled the old pickups, we discovered that the original owner had replaced the factory pickups with a pair of PRS original Dragon pickups. I was surprised because I do own a later Dragon instrument and have never found it to be too thick. The PG Blues changed the guitar completely. There was still the ability to push hard, but there was also a top end that the Dragons did not have. For my uses and to my ears, the change was transformative. I was and remain very impressed.
Thus when I decided that I did not like the tonality of the Gibson Memphis Historical Series (MHS) pickups in my 1960 reissue ES-355, I contacted Tim for his thoughts. I could have gone with Lollar Imperials again as I had done in my ES-335, but wanted to get Tim’s thoughts. He respects the Lollars but thought that I might prefer the Bare Knuckle Pickups Stormy Monday humbucker that is a lower output PAF style pickup. I found them completely better than the MHS pickups. No loss in bass, but a definite reduction in mud with a nice crisp but not ice picky high end. I personally really enjoy semi-hollow body guitars and the Stormy Monday pickups were again transformative. I was also able to get them with nice gold covers to stay in alignment with the rest of the guitar fixtures.
My next foray was my Micawber. I looked around until I found a Squier Classic Vibe that felt great. I wanted a Squier because I knew that the guts would be coming out. I bought two sets of Bare Knuckle Pickups Boot Camp series. One is a Telecaster set from which I took the bridge pickup and the other is a Humbucker set from which I took the neck pickup. Along with changes to the saddles and a switch to Broadcaster wiring (that has not worked out, so it is getting changed back to classic Telecaster wiring) I was able to create my own version of Keith Richards’ famous Micawber Telecaster, with only five strings tuned to Keith’s default open tuning. It’s perfect for Stones tracks, and also pretty cool for slide.
I own another Strat whose pickups I did not like. It’s a very early Eric Clapton Signature, that came from the factory with Fender Gold Lace Sensor pickups and a TBX tone control / boost. I reached out to Tim and he sold me a complete pickguard prewired with a set of his Pat Pend ‘63 Veneer Board Strat pickups. When I put them in, I also removed the TBX circuit entirely. That guitar now sounds as beautiful as it plays. It’s currently with my preferred technician to reinstall the TBX circuit now that I know that I have pickups that I love the sound of.
My most recent effort was a bit of an outlier. I bought in November of 2022 a .strandberg Boden 6 with a vibrato arm. If you have never played one of Ola Strandberg’s instruments you owe it to yourself to do so. It’s my second .strandberg as my first is an eight string Boden with a fixed bridge. The eight string came with Fishman Fluence pickups which are decent enough. The six string is a version old and came with .strandberg factory pickups, whereas the current model comes with pickups from Suhr. I could have gone with Suhr and probably been happy but again, I reached out to Tim for his thoughts. We chatted about the guitar and what I felt was missing from it. I felt the single coils were very out of balance with the bridge humbucker. It is an HSS layout and I could not get a decent combination of bridge and middle. The bridge pickup was pretty hot and I had to lower it a lot to relieve excessive boominess. In position four, I wasn’t getting want I liked best out of mixing neck and middle, although either on their own were quite nice. It’s a chambered mahogany body with a maple cap. Being headless, it is thus incredibly light and the body has terrific resonance. Tim thought about things and came back with a custom setup based around a neck and a middle pickup from his Trilogy Suite and the Polymath humbucker for the bridge that was designed in conjunction with Adam “Nolly” Getgood. You may know Nolly from his recordings or from his outstanding Impulse Response development work.
I just got the guitar back as my preferred technician had been off with some health issues and we are both completely blown away by how awesome that guitar sounds now. Kevin, the technician that I work with most, has been exposed to hundreds of different pickups but this was the first time he had ever worked with a Polymath and he was so enthused we talked about that one thing for twenty minutes. During the holidays, I was able to acquire a Tone King Gremlin through a local shop’s Dutch Auction. I already own a Tone King Imperial Mark II and was pretty sure that I was going to like the Gremlin. It is a five watt all tube combo with a custom Celestion speaker. Tone King build incredible amplifiers and this little five watt critter is really loud and so the built in Ironman Attenuator is hugely valuable. It has an on switch, a volume knob and a tone knob and that is it. It’s the closest that I can get to short signal path out of anything that I own and so has become my testing platform for guitars, pickups etc, as well as my go to amp in my room. It has two channels. One is clean until it isn’t and the other channel called Lead, is never really clean. There is no channel switching, so to change channels you move the cable. The first time I played the .strandberg when I got it back was through this amp. I like the Trilogy single coils better than the factory pickups to be sure, but that Polymath is incredible! Tim also sold me a new tone control so I could coil tap the Polymath and when doing so I can get a real Strat bridge sound, but no ice pick in the earhole pain. So far I’ve only played the .strandberg through the Gremlin but it will go into some other amps in short order.
The simple fact is that after multiple purchases from Bare Knuckle Pickups, always of a different option, I have never been dissatisfied. Moreover, the direct engagement of the founder in my transactions tells me that this company is genuinely interested in their customers. Moreover, they are very quick. I had an experience with a different company, when trying to buy a very specific pickup for a very specific project. They took my money and when I followed up to check on delivery, they then told me six weeks. If this kind of thing comes up again, (unlikely but one never knows), I will just be smarter and reach out to Tim. Let’s face facts. Customer service combined with superlative quality is a winning combination. It did that thing that Teles do, but not all that well, and though it was a lovely guitar to play, the sound was on the thin side of things clean, and just disappointing to play with gain. After a fair bit of research I finally went for the complete pickup overhaul option, with a Bare Knuckle Piledriver in the bridge and, to keep up with it, a Warpig in the neck. Overkill? The first thing I should mention is pot values. Yeah, I know they don’t sound exciting, but they’re something that really need to be thought about when changing pickups. Initially, I decided that since the Piledriver is a true single coil, and the pickup that would be used the most on a Tele, the 250KΩ stock pots would be fine. In hindsight this was pure folly. A 13.1KΩ output pickup is still 13.1KΩ output, regardless of how many coils it has. With the 250KΩ pots the guitar sounded pretty lifeless, and I quickly decided to swap the pots for 500KΩ replacements. Once fully modded up the guitar sounded like a completely new instrument, though still unambiguously a Telecaster.
Starting with the Piledriver, the first thing I noticed was that though the low end was still remarkably tight, there was a definite increase in the bass end. The perception of more bass can often be caused by a lack of high end, but looking at a spectrum analyzer it’s clear that all that high end is largely still there, only now with more bass. The sound and feel is somewhere between what you would normally expect from a Tele bridge, crossed with a fat P90. Into a clean amp the sound has all the spank and twang you could want, but the option of a gut punch in the bass that most teles are just not capable of in my experience, should you want it. This is fun and all, but the pickup really comes into its own when plugged into a crunchy amp. Though more low end than a regular Tele, the bass response in the Piledriver is vastly more tight and controlled than any humbucking pickup I’ve used, and it can take just about any amount of gain you care to throw at at. If you’re squeamish about hum you may not wish to put the Piledriver into a high gain amp, but you would be sadly missing out. The tightness in the bass and clarity in the highs will yield a crushing metal rhythm tone through a moderate to high gain amp, and no matter how much gain I’ve used with it, the string separation remains spectacular. For most metal purposes though, I’d probably not use the Piledriver by itself, but absolutely love the sound of double tracking rhythm parts with the Tele on the left, and a humbucker loaded guitar on the right. And if you really can’t stand the hum, a multiband gate, such as the TC Sentry, should take care of that without compromising your signal. Another particularly fun use for the Piledriver is with fuzz. Moving over to the neck position, we now encounter the Warpig.
The Warpig is one of Bare Knuckle’s better known pickups, and has an impressive lineup of metal players who use the bridge version of this pickup to deliver monstrous brutality from pretty much any amp that breaks up nicely. Happily, unlike a ceramic loaded pickup may have, the Warpig did not let me down and, assuming your amp has the headroom to take it (this was pre-treble bleed or, as I call it, the Dark Before Times) will deliver a warm round sound with a pleasing quantity of natural compression that worked rather well in a jazz context. Indeed, I personally prefered the sound to the typical PAF-with-the-tone-rolled-off setup that many jazzers use, because unlike that setup, which completely kills the top end, the Warpig keeps the higher frequencies, but still gives you a smooth warm tone perfect for outside runs. Which is fine, because that’s not really what the Warpig is for. Where it really excels is in high gain situations. And with that amount of output, lets face it, most situations are high gain situations. In most contexts I can’t say that that I enjoy humbuckers in neck positions, and if when I do they tend to be low to moderate output ones. Telecasters are something of an exception for me, for reasons I’ll come onto, but even so I have to admit that I rarely use this pickup in isolation. Which brings me nicely onto why I wanted a humbucker in the neck position in a Telecaster anyway: the middle position.
Looking at the outputs on paper one could be forgiven for thinking that given the relative output impedances, magnet types (they’re the same), and position along the string the Warpig would vastly overpower the Piledriver. This is simply not the case at all. Whether its because of the competing magnetic fields of a humbucker, some kind of phasing thing, position of the magnets or some other thing I’ve not thought of, single coils always seem to be hotter than an equivalent output impedance humbucker, and in this case the pickups are almost perfectly matched to each other in terms of actual output. Which is nice, particularly since the middle position provides what may well be my favorite lead sound of any of my guitars.
So, to sum up, the Piledriver is everything I could possibly want it to be, delivering a recognizably Tele tone, but with huge quantities of extra output, and with a bottom end that, while still tight, is actually there, unlike many Tele pickups. The Warpig would not be my regular choice of neck pickup, but in this particular situation is perfect, thanks to the joyous sound of the middle position for lead. As a further mod, I am now seriously considering getting rid of the tone circuit, something I have never deliberately used in this particular guitar in the 15 or so years I have owned it, and replacing it with a bass cut circut, not unlike the kind you might find in a Reverand. I’m pretty sure that this, in conjunction with the treble bleed, would allow a very traditional tele sound to be dialed in with minimal effort. If so, I shall report back.