Introducing Nomads With Rabea Massaad
8th March 2024
Nomads: The journey continues.
Introducing Nomads, the latest pickup from the Rabea Massaad signature Bare Knuckle collaboration. Rabea also collaborated with Bare Knuckle to create the signature Silo humbucker and Triptych Strat sets.
“I’ve always loved using Telecaster tones on my recordings. They have an aggressive mid range that just brings that extra bit of gnarliness to heavier guitar tones and they also add wonderful clarity to clean and mid-gain tones.
When designing the Nomads I wanted to create something more controlled and powerful that would cater to my heavier sounds just as much as the ambient and cleaner side of what I do.
The Nomads can get super heavy without any unwanted spikiness, but also respect the original early ‘50s tele tones for all the lower gain chime and spank that I love.
I really couldn’t be happier with these pickups!” Rabea
With an approach to the Telecaster as individual as his playing, Rabea’s Nomads fill a void left by traditional Tele pickups and push forward the boundaries of Tele tones, allowing players to think past the conventional and be inspired to create new music.
Nomads build on the same foundation of Alnico III powered bridge and Alnico V neck coils as the Triptych Strat set to reproduce another dimension in Rabea’s signature range of tones.
The bridge coil is flat magnet profile with a thicker ‘50s style copper-plated steel baseplate and a hot wind of 43 AWG plain enamel wire, designed to deliver a combination of muscular output, plus masses of dynamic headroom. Mids are totally dialled to add the perfect throatiness to complement the depth in the bass and rich attack in the high end.
A special neck coil design allows for superb balance of output with the bridge, whilst delivering both weight behind single notes and a hollow snappy tone, again hand wound with 43 AWG PE.
Signature green and black cloth ‘push back’ hookup is standard and there is a choice of RWRP or stock neck with optional 4 way mod wiring. Rabea’s preference is for a solid nickel silver neck cover, however all neck finish options are available, including custom etches.
