Dry-Z : From the blog of Jun Takano

There is a lot of speculation on what makes a DRY-Z sound like it does. Nobody really seems to know what that is except perhaps the persons who designed it way back in 1979. 

Jun Takano (高野順)was one of those people and is well-known today as a boutique winder for K&T pickups.

Jun Takano from http://www.musicland.co.jp/content/ktr/img/about/takano.png

Fortunately, he wrote a few pages about the development of the DRY-Z. There are unfortunately no secret recipes revealed. The following is translated from the original 2010 Japanese language blog entry of Jun Takano.

Z-DRY
It's been already 30 years since the birth of that humbucker. It is pretty well known that I had a close relationship with Greco at the time and is not a secret so I am going to tell it like it happened. 

At the time Greco guitars were made by Fujigen Gakki, now known as FUJIGEN. I was making regular business trips to Matsumoto for development and improvement as a non-regular employee.

I was younger and had a lot more stamina back then.:-)

The person who best understood my demands and offered his collaboration, while also matching my arrogance and self-centeredness, and with all the respect due to him as a top engineer, was the "hard-working genius" Ushimaru-san.

More than being limited to woodworking, Ushimaru-san had a deep knowledge of electronics and was second to none in skill, as shown by his development of the GR guitar synthesizer.

It was the summer of 1979 when Ushimaru-san and I started prototyping a new pickup. Even now the memory is fresh of the brilliant green of the rice fields of Matsumoto.

Fujigen factory (from http://www.fgnguitars.com/images/history/11.jpg)

We took this up during a one week business trip. At the end of so many meetings that it was getting to be too much, the pickup we made ended up looking from the outside like a regular humbucker.

We put the prototype we had made into in an original shape solid guitar and had it sent off to Kanda Shokai. That became unit #1.

That was the beginning of a very busy time in many different ways.

Part Two to follow.

DRY-Z Innards

I have a couple of DRY-Z that came with plastic shielded leads and changed them over to the braided wire yesterday and took a few pictures along the way.  According to the seller the pickups were from an ESP strat, hence the plastic shielding to avoid problems with accidental grounding.

Up to now I had the Zs in my Tokai LS-150 and they completely lived up to their reputation for clarity and responsiveness. So why take them out? I have a nice set of Seth Lovers that I wanted to used in the LS-150 and I want to use these Zs in my Tokai LC-100 or Greco EC68-80. To deal with the lack of gold hardware I also traded the polepieces and covers with those from a set of PU-2s in gold I got from Yahoo Japan recently.

After measuring the resistance I realized that the one that had been in the bridge (with a shorter lead) has lower resistance at about 7.7k compared to the neck at 8.3k. The bridge needs a bit more volume so I switched them around.

From the numbers on the baseplates these pickups were made about 5 months apart. 210509 should be May 9, 1981 and 201106 should be November 6, 1980 if I am not getting things confused. The "2" is a production line number as far as I have read and doesn't indicate the model. These were not made They could have been purchased as after-market parts which may explain the different dates.

Here are some pictures to show the innards of these pickups.

With polepieces and bobbin screws removed

Outer tape layer removed.

Double black bobbins.

210508 with bobbin removed. Maple and mahogany spacers?
Note light wax potting and polished roughcast magnet.

Back of the magnet showing some rough edges.

Wax potting and very rough magnet surface. I didn't take this out to see if the back was the same.

Back of the bobbin of 201106

Ready for installation in the Greco EC68-80.

New Momose LPs from Deviser at Guitar Planet

You could definitely do worse than getting one of these Momose MLS1-STD/NJ Les Paul-style guitars. Links here and here to Guitar Planet in Ochanomizu. Photos from Guitar Planet. No affiliation with the store, I just like the guitars.

Here is a link to the product page on the Deviser site.