Dealing in Volume : Garden Grove Retiree’s Long-Ago Invention Helped Make History (and Really Loud Music), but Now Seth Lover Spends His Time Quietly

There have been times at Seth Lover’s house when the 83-year-old electronics engineer is working in the garage while neighbor kids are out in their driveways waxing their four-wheel-drive vehicles, the doors open with the cassette decks blasting out a heavy-metal ruckus.

Lover doesn’t especially love that brand of sonic endeavor, believing, “If you can’t hum it, it’s not music.” Still, the kids have cranked it up at times, heedless of his displeasure and still more heedless that such music might not even exist were it not for their quiet neighbor and his tinkerings.

Back in the ‘50s, Lover worked for the Gibson guitar company and designed a guitar pickup (a microphone-like device that senses a string’s signal and sends it on to an amplifier) called the Humbucking pickup, with the intent of removing electrical interference from the sound (bucking the hum).

The pickup also had the side effect of being louder than others, a fact noted a decade later by Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck and a legion of followers who used Lover’s Humbucking pickup to create a new, distorted realm of sound.

Additionally, around 1961, Lover had designed the first fuzz-tone distortion device. Using one of his boxes, the Rolling Stones in 1965 came up with the immortal buzzy guitar line on “Satisfaction.”

Soon everyone was using fuzz boxes and, although younger generations have enjoyed the fruits of Lover’s efforts, he doesn’t go out of his way to take credit for this louder world he’s made. Not that misgivings slowed him down any: Working for electric-guitar pioneer Leo Fender in Fullerton in the late ‘60s, Lover went on to design an amplifier so loud--with 1,000 watts--that it was the first amp ever to carry a hearing-loss warning label.

One of these hulking brutes looms behind Lover as he sits at his workbench in a garage piled to the rafters with electronic gear, test equipment, old radios, boxes of vacuum tubes and sundry items, as well as a grain-roaster he built so he and his wife could make barley coffee. Most afternoons still, he’s in the garage, coming up with new pickup designs, fixing radios and young rockers’ amps or junking old gear for parts he can use.

Motioning with one hand toward his project-crowded garage, Lover said, “I call this my Ph.D.: piled higher and deeper.”

It’s about as close to higher education as he gets. He was born Jan. 1, 1910, in a farming area on the outskirts of Kalamazoo, Mich. His family split up, and then his father died when Lover was 15, and he was taken in by a farmer who offered to send him to high school if Lover would work for him.

“The thing was, the guy didn’t send me to high school. If it was raining I could go, but if it was nice weather he made me work,” Lover recalled. For three years in a row, he had to drop the classes he started because work or transportation problems got in the way.

When he was 12 he sold seeds door-to-door--”not so easy when the doors are far apart in the country like that,” he claims--to earn a crystal set, which proved such a cheap disappointment that he determined to build his own radio. He got a schematic out of the Philadelphia Public Ledger newspaper, saved for parts and pieced it together.

Finally he turned it on, and “the first station I heard was WDZ in Springfield, Mass. Boy, I was really happy then, because that was a long way off.” That thrill got him hooked, and he subscribed to a mail-order radio course.

Lover enlisted in the Army at 18 and was assigned to an artillery unit where, he took another radio course, and after his hitch he returned to Kalamazoo, where he repaired radios for several years before going to work for Gibson right before World War II.

He did two stints with the Navy, training radio operators, but otherwise was with Gibson until 1967. During that time, he designed most of their amplifiers, guitar electronics and effects.

Lover says that when he went to work for Gibson, “I didn’t know one end of a guitar from another,” and he still doesn’t play. Some of his ideas resulted from inspiration and research, while others had less noble beginnings.

He designed one Gibson effect, called a Varitone, he said, “because we’d inherited all these switches from another company we’d purchased, and it was either find something to do with them or throw them out.”

The fuzz-tone was the result of trying to duplicate a defect.

Lover has mixed feelings about the part he’s played in the prominence of the electric guitar.

“Back in the early ‘30s, I designed audio amplifiers for a bandleader, and at the time guitar players just had acoustic guitars. You could see him waving his arms strumming back there, but you couldn’t hear him.

“I can see why the electric guitar was needed. The thing is, I felt they should have kept those bandleaders, somebody who, instead of letting every guitar player play as loud as possible, would tell him to quiet down.”

As for his 1,000-watt amp, he opines: “I designed an amp that would play and put out a lot of power. How they treat it is something else. If you play decent music through it, it sounds decent. If you play horrible music through it, it sounds horrible.”

Although museums house many less influential inventions and more ephemeral bits of music history, Lover keeps his original Humbucking pickup in a cigar box.

Early production models of the pickup--distinguished by decals on the bottom reading “Patent Applied For”--sell for up to $500 each, twice what a whole Les Paul guitar went for in 1958.

Those vintage guitars, meanwhile, command prices in the $30,000 range, in large part because they were the first Les Pauls equipped with Lover’s Humbucking pickups.

Since then, Gibsons and other guitars in the millions have employed his Humbucking pickup design. Although guitarist Les Paul--who by most informed accounts except his own had very little to do with the design of the guitar bearing his name--has been lionized, Lover has been all but forgotten.

Since retiring in 1975 at age 65, Lover’s been busier than ever, he says, in part because he has to be. He receives a small retirement income from Fender and Gibson (which sends him $42 a month), but “if we want to eat once in a while, I have to work,” he says. He makes no money off his patents, since they became the property of his employers. The ideas he’s had since, he says, he can’t afford to patent.

A few years back, Gibson ran ads commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Humbucking pickup, which, to add to its historical look, included the bold signature of the patent holder, Seth E. Lover. The only problem was, it wasn’t Lover’s signature, just some ad person’s forgery.

“I contacted Gibson, and told them I’d have been glad to give them my signature,” Lover said. “They told me they didn’t know I was still alive.”