Guitarists, proceed with caution, or glee, depending on your playing style -- Mansons and Bare Knuckle, a United Kingdom-based manufacturer of custom pickups, have joined forces to produce the MBK-3, a unique set of guitar pickups for every kind of player wanting tight tone, huge bass response, and powerful output.

The new passive MBK-3 pickups have a bigger kick than the current run of MBK-1 and MBK-2 pickup sets, according to the manufacturers. They continue, "As featured on the company’s custom guitars and used by artists such as Matthew Bellamy and Josh Homme, the new Manson MBK-3 pickup sets feature a tech spec to delight the player to whom the word ‘d-jent’ needs no further explanation." So, these pickups are built not quite for chugga-chugga playing, but for a cleaner, more refined kind of guitar noise miscellany.

Ideal for playing hard rock, metal, punk, and any other unruly kind of music, the new MBK-3s are said to be more flexible than a metal-sounding pickup, but still hard-hitting. The chrome custom-etched MBK-3s combine the power of three ceramic magnets in the bridge with an Isotropic Alnico V in the neck, and will work in any humbucker-equipped guitar.

The already available MBK-1 custom P-90 in a humbucker set continues to provide hot-rodded blues and rock tones with a punchy, clean, single-coil vibe, while the MBK-2 set combines a further modified P-90 humbucker neck pickup with a fat, mid-heavy, highly defined custom bridge humbucker that uses Alnico V magnets. Mansons will continue to experiment with its custom pickups at their Devon-based workshops. For now, enjoy the new MBK-3.

The passive pickups are handmade in the UK by Bare Knuckle pickups using the top-grade materials either manufactured by Bare Knuckle or locally sourced. They say that the launch of the MBK-3s comes after extensive consultation with Mansons and is the culmination of years of experience (meaning, trial and error) developing the best-sounding pickups money can buy.

The MBK-3 pickup sets are now available now for 229 GBP including VAT (or approximately $340) from the Mansons Guitar Shop.