Think of Joe Bonamassa and you don’t necessarily think of the blues guitar maestro as a P-90 player. Sure, he owns electric guitars with P-90s, but his tone is more commonly associated with the sound of PAF humbuckers, or golden era Stratocaster single-coils.
Well, it turns out that it did take a little bit of time for Bonamassa to find his ultimate P-90 – a pickup that Seymour Duncan has meticulously replicated for a limited edition set that is one of the most exciting electric guitar pickup releases of 2026.
And when we say meticulous, we mean it. These Custom Shop winds even have the period-accurate dimpled baseplates of the originals.
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Got an Epiphone guitar you want to upgrade? Read on. Got a Gibson Les Paul and fancy swapping them out for the hot, wild and rock-and-blues-friendly sound of the P-90 single-coil? Read on. They’ll fit many a guitar. As Bonamassa says, these pickups might be modelled on his SG’s pickups but they’re not “SG-centric”.
“You can put them in the ES guitars,” he says. “You can throw these in a Les Paul. You can throw these in a Fender. It’s not just for an SG Special.”
But it was an SG Special in which he found the inspiration for this new Seymour Duncan signature set. The SG Special was a guitar he had his eye on ever since seeing Pete Townshend playing them with the Who.
“I’m a huge fan of Pete Townshend, those great clips of him playing those SG Specials. Even Carlos Santana at Woodstock, he’s using an SG Special,” says Bonamassa, in a video shot for Seymour Duncan. “That’s what really got me into P-90s, the way they clean up really well but they would roar.”
Bonamassa and Seymour Duncan were in conversation about where their longstanding collaboration might go next. They had done the 1950 Broadcaster set, the 1960 ‘Bolin Burst’ Les Paul set. Pre-CBS Strat tones were back on the menu with the “Greenburst” and Cradle Rock ’63 Strat sets. Seymour Duncan also recreated the pickups from his 1955 “Bonnie” Strat, “The Blonde Dot” 1960 PAF humbucker set and Amos humbucker.
What next? What about a P-90?
Bonamassa did a little bit of inventory and pulled out just the very thing, a 1961 Gibson SG Special that was a truly miraculous find in a most unlikely location.
“Very rarely do you find a special guitar in a pawn shop,” says Bonamassa. “Well, one day in 2010, I was playing the Embassy Theatre, Fort Wayne, Indiana. It was in the middle of winter and I heard that there was a pawn shop around the corner that had an interesting SG in it from one of the crew guys. I walked in and this was hanging on the wall, a 1961 Gibson SG Special in Polaris White with the tilted bridge.”
(Image credit: Seymour Duncan)
Bonamassa made the deal and brought the SG back to the venue to put it through its paces. It was a revelation. All the other P-90s he had played were either too bright, or too dark. Even though the P-90 sounded great when players like Townshend and Santana used them, Bonamassa was not sure if he’d ever click with them
“I plugged it in, and these particular P-90s were the P-90s that I was searching for in my head over the years,” says Bonamassa. “This was the beginning of my love affair with P-90s. The light finally went off in my head, going, ‘Okay, this is really strong.’”
So, that was the guitar – and these are the pickups. Seymour Duncan is making a limited edition run of them, based around an Alnico IV design, and they are wax-potted to help cut down on unwanted squeal.
The 610 sets currently available in this run all come with a signed COA (by Bonamassa and Seymour Duncan), and assorted case candy, including an inventory tag marked #001, because when the Mayor of Nerdville first took a census of his six-stringed citizens the Pawn Shop SG Special was the first one he logged.
The Pawn Shop Special set is available now, priced $375. See Seymour Duncan for more details.
