Cool new gear: Seymour Duncan Liberator

No need for the soldering iron now.

No matter how simple it may be for some of us, soldering and soldering irons really does scare a lot of people. The heat and the potential for burns or damage to things is probably the main thing that puts many off from doing their own pickup replacements.

Seymour Duncan have brought out a great new product that should save people a lot of money. Instead of paying guitar techs to install their new pickups, guitar players can buy the new Seymour Duncan Liberator, and probably save some coin in the process.

Now when it comes to installing new pickups all you need is some screw drivers and perhaps some wire cutters to clip the old pickups from your old electronics.

Here are the details from Seymour Duncan:

TECHNICAL DETAILS

With a Liberator installed in place of a volume pot, changing pickups becomes fast, easy, and solder-free, but just as reliable. In fact, it’s more reliable than a less-than-perfect solder joint. You simply insert the bare end of each pickup lead into one of Liberator’s pickup connector stations and tighten the screw-clamp to lock it down. Turning the screw lifts up a carriage that locks the wire against a fixed pad, securing the connection in place. It’s completely simple, and completely solid.

For experienced guitar techs, Liberator makes pickup changes much faster and simpler, but with the solid, reliable connections of the Lockdown system.

For those who have never soldered before, Liberator opens up a world of tone exploration. You’ll be able to easily explore how different pickups change how your instrument sounds and responds in ways that will inspire your playing and enhance your personal voice.
Parts of the Liberator

Liberator is like a studio patch bay, where connections that can be easily but securely exchanged up front correspond to hard-wired connections behind the scenes.

There are two main parts to the Liberator System: the ten-station pickup connector, and four-station potentiometer connector. The wire colors adjacent to the pickup connector indicate which color wires you should install in each connector station. This is according to Seymour Duncan’s wiring scheme for four-conductor humbuckers, but Liberator comes with a color-code guide for easily connecting other manufacturer’s pickups.

The potentiometer connector stations correspond to the three terminals on a potentiometer-in, out, and ground-plus an additional ground for bridges or tremolo systems. For those who prefer to solder, there are optional gold-plated solder pads adjacent to the potentiometer connector, plus seven gold-plated oval solder pads that go to ground. These pads are much easier to solder than the back of a potentiometer.
Liberator Versions

Liberator with Volume Pot comes in 250k and 500k versions. (Warmer 250kΩ pots are typically used to tame the brightness of single-coil pickups, while brighter 500k pots are typically used with humbuckers.) We’ll also be offering pre-connected wiring harnesses and pre-wired pickguards for easy installation.

Looks like a pretty cool device, and anyone considering a pickup swap in their guitar who is not really wanting to use a soldering iron should consider one of these.