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.