H Rendal Wall pickups (Heritage Guitars)

[David King]

I stumbled into this pickup this week because someone asked me to make a set of custom ebony pickup rings for it. As it turns out the rings are just Schallers and the pickups look like Schallers as well but there's a lot of lore about these and the folks who have them love them. The story goes that H. Rendal Wall (who owns Heritage Guitars) either rewound the Schallers or remanufactured them with different magnets and or screws, slugs etc. It could also be that Schaller was doing it all and got tired of it. They aren't available anymore so the used prices are pretty steep. I'd be curious to know more about these if anyone has some beans to spill.
I found some photos here: http://cdn1.gbase.com/usercontent/ge...rlw2ozy_so.jpg

Here's a quick video of Rendal playing a guitar he was setting up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p93KrwIa-zE

[Lollar Jason]

weve made alot of pickups for heritage and i know rendal wall has made many a pickup for them. You can buy raw parts from schaller so i would doubt they would bother to rewind- all the extra work to do that. I know Rendal has particular ideas about how pickups should be made but thats all I know.

[salvarsan]

I used to have an H555 thin hollow body and a Lucille at the same time. The H555 pickups were leaner and more detailed sounding than the Gibson's, sounded better clean or with slight crunch, not something you'd want to distort.

Heritage confirmed that they were in-house, rather Rendall confirmed they were his and not Seymour Duncan's.

Anyone else have a similarly good experience?

[fieldwrangler]

I have some kind of Heritage thin solid Les-Paul-ish shaped thing that was burned up in a music store fire (this is a separate discussion.)

It had some kind of stock Schallers that I initially looked at with some disdain until I made the thing play and heard it; I was quite surprised at how good the whole mess sounded.