Welcome to Zone Musical LLC, where our goal is to advance the "state of the instrument."
ZoneRanger
Pickups
Your Guitar's Voice.
Your Choice.
The humbucking pickup re-imagined.
Our Story
A Vision --- and Lots of Hard Work
Technology innovations come from a vision and sometimes, a "flash" of design inspiration. But nothing else happens without persistence and hard work.
The motivation comes from years of dissatisfaction with the status quo and wondering, "Can we do this better?"
The magnetic guitar pickup has been with us for many decades.
Is it time for a new approach?
Yes. The flash happened.
The pickups are at the heart of your electric guitar's tone.
Do you change from the old, "safe" choice?
Only if the instrument still has its traditional
sounds, but also is more musically useful, responsive, and versatile - no matter what
and how you play.
Introducing the ZoneRanger pickup system.
The ZoneRanger pickup system replaces the traditional humbucking pickup and adds a new "Voice" control which replaces (or can work with) the traditional passive tone control.
The pickup is actually two humbucking pickups -- a "pickup inside a pickup" --- which are "tuned" to different frequencies, have different magnet strengths, and are combined with the Voice control.
This pickup "cheats the physics" of the limitations of the two coils of the traditional full-sized humbucking pickup design.
This allows a greatly expanded, guitar-centric, musically useful "tone control" range while still being completely passive - no batteries required.
Dial in the
tones that you need.
Clean to dirty, country to metal.
You probably know already that you need "more mids, less highs" for higher gain crunch and distortion playing , and "more highs, less mids" and "spankier" for cleaner styles. Usually that means single coils for clean, humbuckers for crunch and distortion. Maybe different guitars.
What about in between? What if you just need a little more "cut" to sound your best in the band mix, or a lot more "pushed mids" and less high end to sound right in the small room with the borrowed amp? Or do you need just a great humbucker sound but with a bit more dynamics and clarity?
Will your next preset or switched-in pedal get you there? Will you have to tweak some knobs somewhere in your rig or go into a menu? Do you have time in the middle of a set or a song to figure it out?
Wouldn't it be better to be able to dial in your basic tone with one knob (or switch) onboard your guitar, with fine tuning control, to get the best "voice" from the pickup for your current song, rig, gain level, venue, while you play?
That's what the ZoneRanger system does.
The difference
that makes a
difference.
The ZoneRanger pickup is "externally voiced." What that means is that the pickup's tone character - it's "voice"- isn't fixed at the time it is made, but is set outside the pickup itself. By you--over a large range with no "bad spots." Weak or "meh"-sounding coil split sounds are a thing of the past.
With this, you don't need to buy a new pickup to change your tone to something else that sounds better with your playing, your gain level, and your rig.
There's always going to be a place for dedicated pickup makers with decades of experience and supreme attention to materials and detail -- but none of them will be able to create a pickup which has the tonal versatility of the ZoneRanger.
If you would like to, let's take a closer look at the pickup, the Voice control, and the way it all works.
Four Rails and Four Coils?
Why?
ZoneRanger Focus-G
ZoneRanger Focus-F
Why is the ZoneRanger pickup a quad rail, quad coil design? Haven't I seen quad coil/quad rail pickups before?
Yes, you probably have. This is different.
Previous quad rail humbuckers were just two double-rail single coil-sized pickups stacked together side by side on a common base and connected in series. These typically have been "super hot," midrange forward, intended for high-gain playing, and used in the bridge position.
The ZoneRanger pickup is also two separate pickups - but the inner two coils on the ZoneRanger are one pickup, and the outer two coils are the other. We call this a "pickup inside a pickup" or a "concentric" design.
The two coils of each "coil pair" are interconnected differently inside the pickup. Each coil pair has different electrical properties and sonic roles in the pickup but both pairs are completely humbucking.
These design choices allow the ZoneRanger pickup to be externally voiced - to get a much larger range of tones from the pickup than are possible with a single pair of coils or a "stacked" side-by-side, four-coil design.
The different look might grow on you after you have heard and played it.
"Voice
Control" ?
What's That?
The ZoneRanger pickup comes with a "Voice Control" board. This very small circuit board has a few more parts than the old "Tone" control but works in a vastly better way to provide control of the pickup's "voicing" -- the overall tone character of the pickup -- that until now was only possible with active EQ outside the pickup.
This board doesn't just mix or switch the inner and outer coil pair outputs. It combines them in a special way - the "secret sauce" of the ZoneRanger design. It just looks really simple.
The Voice Control board is typically used with a single Voice "pot," but may also be configured to use the existing "coil split" switch found on many instruments to provide two great voices - not a humbucker voice and an unsatisfying single-coil type voice, but a great humbucker voice and also a dynamic, bright and articulate voice without the big volume drop when you "coil split."
Versatile, sure.
But how good does it sound?
This is usually the place where lots of emotional marketing words get spewed out. We are not going to do that.
Having a lot of tone possibilities doesn't matter -- even if they sound good by themselves-- if they don't make sense in your own journey of music-making.
We've put a lot of time into listening and refining the design to make sure the ZoneRanger system will be the most musically useful tool for the largest number of players in many different styles. We think we have good ears, but you know how that goes ...
When you have an opportunity, please have a listen to the upcoming sound demos on this site, or listen to a ZoneRanger artist, if you want to hear what this pickup system can do for your instrument.
Stay tuned. You will be hearing -- and hearing more about-- this.
We're starting this journey.
The ZoneRanger system is in production now and available in limited quantity to independent luthiers, guitar techs, and small-run production manufacturers.
Instruments with installed ZoneRanger pickups will be available soon online.
Please join the newsletter to be notified on the upcoming Kickstarter campaign which will take ZoneRanger to full retail production - packaging, manufacturing engineering, and supply chain.
Hey, if you want to ask your favorite large manufacturer to give us a ring -- that's fine with us, thanks.
Latest News
Pickups
Focus-G
Best choice for most Gibson and PRS scale length guitars.
Focus-F
Best choice for super clean punch for Fender scale length guitars.
