Lawrence pickups all around:
Bill Lawrence worked at Dan Armstrong's shop in the late 1960's, where he taught Seymour Duncan and Larry DiMarzio how to make pickups (Kent Armstrong is Dan's son, makes 'em now too). He then set up Gibson's Nashville factory in 1974, where he also designed the Gibson L6S - a guy named Paul Reed Smith made great use of the switching he "borrowed" from that. One of Lawrence's business partners stole his name in a crazy legal battle - Bill just doesn't want to spend time in court, he wants to make more new stuff all the time. He also taught George L how to make steel guitar pickups, and solderless cord systems... he moved his shop to California a few years back because he's doing consulting work for Fender, he designed their noiseless single coil pickups and their "S-1" switching system.
If he wanted to spend the rest of his life in court suing people who'd ripped him off, he'd have more money, but he doesn't need it, because he has some proprietary patents on manufacturing processes that means he makes a few pennies from most every electric guitar made in America. The best way to get ahold of them is to call, if you're lucky you can leave a message and they'll call back on
their dime, cause Bill can get gassin' away for hours about the old days and all the crazy musicians he's work for or tried to work for - Hendrix, Beck, Clapton, you name it. Fender put him in charge of designing the pickups for both their Eric Johnson and the EVH-branded Eddie Van Halen guitars, and he gave up and blew them off because both those guys are lunatics - don't ask him about "brown sound" ask him about
frequencies.... he's an engineer, not an idiot (that's a quote). To get hold of the real Bill Lawrence:
http://www.billlawrence.com/
The fake Lawrence stuff comes from a guy named "Jzchak Wajcman dba Bill Lawrence Products", it irritates the hell out of Bill because those pickups feed back and hurt his reputation, but again, he's too busy puttering in his workshop to do anything more about it. StewMac was selling the fake Lawrences for a long time, and the thief still sells them on Ebay. Seymour Duncan just recently put out their "Dimebucker" which is a direct ripoff of the killer Lawrence L500 humbucker (see above picture) - $94 for a Duncan fake or $56 for a real Lawrence. :icon_scratch:
That one you have could be just about anything, he's made hundreds of different pickups over the years. He's still putting out his own pickups at about 2/3 the cost of the ones Fender, Duncan and others copied from him, I guess because he's got a building full of manufacturing equipment, it keeps his (young) wife busy and he just likes musicians. It's kind of weird, he has done more to advance pickup technology than anybody since Seth Lover and you see the Bardens & Kinmans & Lollars selling for so much, but he just doesn't
care - maybe I'll be the same way after my first few million too. :toothy10:
P.S. Here's a blurb about the work he did for Fender:
http://www.billlawrence.com/Pages/SCNHistory.htm
