For decades, guitarists have accepted an uneven string response as part of the instrument’s character. Whether it’s the notoriously loud G string on an electric or the weaker response of phosphor bronze strings through magnetic pickups, players have simply learned to compensate. Now, Australian guitar manufacturer Cole Clark believes it has solved a problem that has challenged pickup designers since the birth of the electric guitar.
The company has announced that it has been granted the full patent for its groundbreaking True Balance magnetic pickup technology, an innovation developed by respected Australian engineer Paul Gale. While the technology was originally created to solve a specific challenge for Cole Clark’s acclaimed True Hybrid guitars, it has since evolved into a development with the potential to improve the performance of virtually every magnetic electric guitar pickup.
Gale’s pursuit of better pickup design stretches back more than 50 years. Having worked as a musician, technician and electronics designer since the early 1970s, he has spent much of his career finding practical solutions to problems guitarists often considered unavoidable. One of his earliest breakthroughs came in the mid-’70s when increasing interference from lighting dimmers and stage equipment prompted him to develop a stacked pickup design to eliminate unwanted noise-well before such designs became commonplace.
“I’ve worked on electric guitars for years,” Gale explains. “There’s always been dramas with strings being too soft or strings being too loud. It happens in single coils, it happens in humbuckers, and there wasn’t a lot you could actually do about it.”
The opportunity to finally tackle the problem arrived when Cole Clark began developing its dual-output True Hybrid guitars around 2017. The instruments combined an authentic acoustic sound with a magnetic electric output, but there was an obvious obstacle. Acoustic players overwhelmingly prefer phosphor bronze strings for their richer tone, yet magnetic pickups only respond to the nickel core inside those strings. The result was an electric signal where the lower four strings were noticeably quieter than the top two.
Rather than compromise, Gale went back to the drawing board.
The solution required rethinking one of the most fundamental elements of pickup design: the magnets themselves. Instead of treating every pole piece identically, Gale devised a computer-controlled process capable of individually adjusting the magnetic strength of each magnet. After designing a specialised magnetising system from scratch, he developed a process that first completely demagnetises each pickup magnet before precisely recharging it to an exact level required for each individual string.
The result is remarkably consistent output across all six strings, regardless of whether the guitar is strung with phosphor bronze or traditional nickel strings.
What began as a fix for the True Hybrid guitars quickly revealed far broader applications. Conventional electric guitars have long suffered from uneven string balance, with the G string often dominating while the B, high E and sometimes D strings sit further back in the mix. By individually controlling the magnetic strength beneath each string, True Balance technology creates a far more even response without altering the familiar tone players expect from traditional Alnico 5 pickups.
Importantly, Gale stresses that the company hasn’t reinvented the classic electric guitar sound.
“We use standard windings, standard bobbins and Alnico 5 magnets for the tones everybody wants,” he says. “We’re simply controlling the level of each magnet.”
The technology also opens the door to recreating the subtle characteristics of vintage pickups. Rather than substituting weaker magnets to imitate decades-old instruments, Gale’s process allows modern Alnico 5 magnets to be precisely softened to reproduce the sweeter response of naturally aged pickups while maintaining their original tonal character.
It’s another example of Gale’s engineering philosophy-using technology not to radically change guitar tone, but to refine and improve it.
Cole Clark’s newly patented True Balance pickups will begin appearing through the company’s dealer network in the coming weeks and can already be heard in the recently re-released Cole Clark Hollow Baby and Culprit 3 electric guitars. For players who have spent years compensating for uneven string volume, this uniquely Australian innovation could represent one of the most significant advances in magnetic pickup design in decades.