A Los Angeles luthier’s workshop.

TV Jones is an American maker of guitar and bass pickups, best known for its versions of the Filter’Tron, the humbucking pickup Ray Butts designed for Gretsch in the late 1950s. The initials are its founder’s: Thomas Vincent Jones, who, the company says, was born and raised in Los Angeles, bought his first guitar at 14 and taught himself both to play and to build instruments. In the early 1990s, it says, he worked professionally at The World of Strings in Long Beach, California, where he earned a name as a guitar technician.

The company is in Poulsbo, Washington, today, but it did not start there. English Wikipedia says it was founded in 1993 in Whittier, California, and an archived version of its website from 2000 agrees: “TV Jones guitars are completely handmade by Thomas Vincent Jones in his Whittier, California workshop.” That early site described the business as makers of “hand-made stringed instruments and hand-wound classic pickups.” The company’s current website dates the founding of TV Jones, Inc. to November 1993 and says it “began as a custom guitar and repair shop.”

The move north came later. A company biography archived in 2009 said that in 2001 Jones and his family relocated to the Pacific Northwest “to build a larger shop and concentrate full time on pickup manufacturing,” and that the business sat on more than two acres “just outside the charming Norwegian town of Poulsbo.” Poulsbo is on the Kitsap Peninsula, west of Seattle across Puget Sound, and is known for its Norwegian heritage.

Brian Setzer’s blind test.

The turn to pickups came through one player. Jones has worked on Brian Setzer’s guitars since 1993, the company says, and his first close look at a Filter’Tron was on Setzer’s 1959 Gretsch 6120. In a 2023 feature for Guitar.com, Matt Blades reported that Setzer reached Jones through his technician Rich Modica, that Jones sent a vintage Filter’Tron’s magnet and screws to a metallurgist, and that Fred Gretsch gave him a 1959 “patent applied for” Filter’Tron to study. His changes, the article said, included wax saturation and wider pole spacing at the bridge. Jones spoke to Ray Butts once by telephone, it reported, but never met him; Butts died in 2003. The company’s current website names Butts, “inventor of the original Filter’Tron pickup and Echosonic amplifier,” as its inspiration, and says Jones has spent much of his career “preserving, refining, and advancing the Filter’Tron design for modern players.”

In 1998, the company says, Gretsch needed pickups for its new Hot Rod guitar line, and Setzer chose Jones’s design in a blind test of many pickups. Most of its accounts call that pickup the Hot Rod; a 2016 history page named the TV Classic instead, so we note both. Months later Jones became an independent consultant to Gretsch, designing pickups and guitars and working with its artists — the start, the company said in 2016, of “a lively relationship with Fender and Gretsch Guitars.”

Guitars stayed part of the business. The Spectra Sonic, which Guitar.com’s Chris Vinnicombe traced to a 2000 collaboration between Jones, Gretsch and Setzer’s technician, was first built at the Hamer factory in the United States and later in Japan, and Gretsch dropped it from its catalogue by the end of 2005. TV Jones revived it as the Spectra Sonic Supreme, which Vinnicombe’s review, dated 2018, described as made at the Terada factory in Japan, where many Gretsch-badged guitars are built, at £2,295 with a case. English Wikipedia dates the Supreme, and a smaller, lighter solid-body Model 10, to 2008.

Design and documentation.

A guitar pickup — a coil of fine wire around magnets that turns a vibrating string into an electrical signal — is a part many electric-guitar players choose to replace. Several American firms have built businesses on making those replacements.

In California, Seymour Duncan, founded in 1976, gives Santa Barbara as its home on its website, while Wikipedia places its headquarters in neighbouring Goleta; EMG, also founded in 1976, is based in Santa Rosa, Wikipedia says, and its website says “Made in California Since 1976.” In Washington State, Lollar Pickups says every pickup is made in its Tacoma workshop, and TV Jones, founded in Whittier, California, in 1993 according to Wikipedia, now gives its address as Poulsbo.

In the East, DiMarzio’s website gives an address on Staten Island, New York; Fishman, known for acoustic-guitar pickups, lists Andover, Massachusetts; and Lindy Fralin Pickups, which dates itself to 1989, is based in Richmond, Virginia.

Ownership, as far as the public record shows, is private. Wikipedia describes Seymour Duncan, DiMarzio, EMG, Fishman and Lollar as privately held; the other two websites name TV Jones, Inc. and Lindy Fralin Pickups, LLC. We found no report of any of the seven being bought by a larger group in the sources we checked.

Founding dates are not always settled: Wikipedia gives both 1987 and 1995 for Lollar, and the early 1990s for Fralin, which says 1989.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

The ’Tron family.

Its pickup line is built on that one design. Alongside the TV Classic and TV Classic Plus are the Power’Tron, Super’Tron and Magna’Tron; signature models for Brian Setzer and Billy Zoom; a Paul Yandell Duo-Tron and a Ray Butts Ful-Fidelity; T-Armond and T90 models for DeArmond and P-90 sizes; and Starwood pickups for Telecaster, Stratocaster, Jazzmaster and humbucker guitars. For bass there are the Thunder’Tron, Thunder’Blade and Thunder’Mag. The apostrophe-and-“Tron” naming is borrowed straight from the Filter’Tron. Its shop also sells other makers’ parts — Bigsby vibratos, Vibramate mounts, Switchcraft jacks and CTS pots among them — for players fitting the pickups themselves.

On manufacturing the company is emphatic. “Every TV Jones pickup is proudly manufactured in the USA using exclusively USA-made components,” its website says. It adds that it reproduced the late-1950s alnico Filter’Tron magnet, buys from the same supplier that made the original magnets, and “handcrafts your pickup and wiring harness at the time of order.” A 2016 page said its pole screws were made in the USA too. We give these as the company’s claims; we found no independent account of its workshop. It trades as TV Jones, Inc., is privately held according to English Wikipedia, and we found no record of a sale.

For a design guide, TV Jones shows how a maker can build a whole identity around reworking one vintage part. Compare Bare Knuckle, another maker that sells hand-built pickups, and Fender, which TV Jones names alongside Gretsch as a long-standing partner. For this guide we use a chrome grey, a sunburst orange and black with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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