Gibson Ripper bass humbucker

The Ripper humbucker, and it's associated circuitry was designed by Bill Lawrence, who was briefly working for Gibson in the early/mid 1970s. The first version of the Gibson Ripper bass humbucker was mounted directly into the body wood of the Ripper itself, via two screws down the central axis of the pickup, in line with the polepieces. In 1977 the covers were changed to include three mounting tabs, although the coils themselves were unchanged. This second version, (the type later used on the 1980s Flying V bass) was fairly similar to the first, having the same internal structure, but with a new plastic cover with three mounting tabs. These allowed the pickups to be fitted to the guitars scratchplate rather than screwed into the body wood, improving height adjustability.

The pickup itself has a similar construction to the EB humbucker of 15 years earlier, though with a considerably lower number of turns, and designed for a cleaner sound. The coils are sidewinders, with a central metallic core holding the polepieces, and an Indox magnet on the far left and another on the far right.

Despite the extra mounting tabs on the second version, the metal centre-piece which holds the polepieces still has holes for through-mounting the old way - the coils could be removed and fitted into old-style covers.

The 'three tab' mounting allowed for more accurate height and tilt adjustment; an equally strong signal from each pickup is very important when using the out-of-phase settings of the Q-system (see Ripper controls), and this helped achieve this. But these tabs were not as strong as perhaps they might be, and they do break off. Unfortunately removing/replacing the covers is practically impossible, so a broken mounting tab can very often require a whole new pickup.