Bare Knuckle PolyPaf Humbucker Set | Review

Bare Knuckle PolyPaf Humbucker Set | Review

MSRP: (Set) From £377

Hand-wound to evoke the tones of the late 1950s; the Bare Knuckle PolyPaf Humbucker Set aims to capture the warmth and detail of classic PAF pickups with the added precision of modern construction. Created in collaboration with Adam "Nolly" Getgood, The PolyPafs provide articulate highs, creamy mids, and balanced lows, making them ideal for everything from vintage rock to contemporary styles. Nick Jennison tells us more.

I have a complicated relationship with Bare Knuckle Pickups. The company's main man, Tim Mills, is a hugely impressive individual — both as a person and as a pickup-building megamind. Their small team consists of some of the coolest, nicest folks in the industry, and their pickups are among the highest-quality (and most innovative) passive pickups I've ever played.

"What's complicated about that?" I hear you ask. Well, despite the high regard in which I hold Bare Knuckle, I've never played a set of their pickups that I've personally bonded with. To be clear, this is not for lack of trying. I want to have a Bare Knuckle set in my life, but none of them have been quite right for me — until now.

Enter the PolyPafs. Designed in collaboration with golden-eared British producer Adam "Nolly" Getgood, these pickups are a follow-up to his excellent Polymath signature set, but with a more "vintage" output and a classic PAF sonic signature (as the name suggests). Far from a simple PAF clone, these pickups represent an optimized take on the classic Seth Lover recipe, emphasizing the qualities Nolly appreciates in a PAF while minimizing or eliminating the characteristics he doesn't. Considering my all-time favourite neck pickup is essentially a "modernized PAF," I was more than a little excited to fit these into a guitar — and my word, did they deliver!

To give the truest evaluation of the PolyPafs, I decided to install them into my "old faithful" PRS Custom 22 — a guitar I've played for nearly 20 years and know intimately. What immediately struck me was the evenness of the upper mids and highs, which are clean, extended, and glassy, rather than the slightly gritty qualities of my favourite PAF clone. It's a stunning tone, reminiscent of the best modern mini humbuckers, but with the solidity and low-end weight of a full-size PAF. For modern styles, this is priceless — the even, "non-spiky" response smooths out aggressive gain tones, creating a pleasant, bubbly hand feel and reducing unpleasant resonances that might otherwise require a notch filter in mixing. They also chug better than any PAF I've ever played. This is a game-changer for my playing with Blitzkrieg, where I often have to choose between the PAF-like lead tones I love and a hotter pickup capable of handling heavy rhythm work.

Cleans are graceful and refined, offering a "mix-ready" quality that remains crystal clear even with heavy compression and ambient effects, without losing the classic PAF character. This clarity extends to low and mid-gain tones, where the brightness and articulation evoke the "big fat Telecaster" vibe that original PAFs were famous for — but with a cleaner, more modern texture.

As with every Bare Knuckle set, the PolyPafs are crafted to the highest standard and are visually stunning from every angle. The four-conductor construction allows for a variety of wiring configurations, including phase flipping, series/parallel, and the increasingly popular coil split. This leads me to my only criticism: the split-coil tone. This isn't a design flaw but rather an inherent limitation of low-output pickups, where each individual coil lacks enough output to produce a convincingly full single-coil sound. This issue is easily addressed by using an in-line resistor for a "partial split" (as found in modern PRS guitars), but it's worth noting that the more common coil-splitting method may yield less-than-impressive results. That said, the full humbucker tones are so good it's hard to imagine wanting anything else.

The Bare Knuckle PolyPafs are a genuinely superb set of pickups. They deliver classic PAF output and character with an optimized response tailored for the modern player. More importantly (to me, at least), they're a set of pickups I can see myself using in a variety of contexts — and I'll almost certainly be ordering a set of my own.

For more information, please visit:

bareknucklepickups.co.uk