There’s going to be a new kid on the block this summer. Actually, several. All coming from the mind of Galeazzo Frudua. Frudua is a luthier, making custom guitars and basses since 1982. Quite nice instruments, I’m told. He attended the famous IPIALL school in Cremona, the city made famous by Antonio Stradivari. The school is considered to be among the most famous and prestigious violin and lutherie institutions in the world. After school, Galeazzo chose to focus on electric guitars, basses and even tube guitar amps.

This year, he has two new lines of Asian-made, and Italian-setup basses coming to market. We’ll cover them too, but for now, we want to look at a very novel pickup on his SuperB bass that’s part of the Exlusive line (not a typo, the ‘c’ is intentionally left out). The pickup is called the Esacoil. It’s a triple coil setup, but that’s only the beginning…

As Galeazzo explains it, “The Precision Bass and the Stingray are the two most sought-after rock tones of all times, and are completely different from each other. In designing these basses, Leo Fender placed the pickups for the ‘P’ and the pickups for the ‘MM’ in an exact point in the scale of the instruments.” He’s right - placement and pickup design are a big part of the sound of the P and the MM. While you see combination P and J-basses, you almost never see a combo of the P and the MM. That’s because, it is difficult to mount the two original pickups on the same bass in the same position of the scale, because they would be partially overlapping each other. This is what the Esacoil pickup was made for. It’s coil design, shape, size and position allow it to capture the two tones in the exact position of the scale, reproducing both on the same instrument. Check out this nifty drawing:

We are quite intrigued by the Esacoil pickup, the new Exlusive and the Tuscany basses. The price ranges for the Exlusive basses should be around $800. The Tuscany basses will run around $500. All instrument production will be supervised by Frudua and setup by his staff in Italy. They are due in July and will initially be sold on-line only.
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