The first Ronin Foilbucker "DT Prototype" was first built for guitarist and producer David Torn - this same set still lives in his infamous Mirari guitar aka "Pinky".

All Ronin pickups are built and assembled in-house, and are specifically designed for our instruments. Our philosophy is simple: give the player as much detail, nuance and responsiveness as possible while providing an overall balanced frequency response. Our pickup casings are CNC machined from aircraft-grade billet aluminum, which structurally and sonically provide the perfect foundation on which to craft our sound.

At the core, the Ronin family of pickups dispatch with many of the common design practices of the past, while improving upon successes of these older designs. We have reimagined the idea of coil geometry (internal layout and parameters of the coil), and started fresh with our own EQ voicing. A strong fundamental, without an overly aggressive midrange, is essential in achieving balance. A pickup's EQ is like salt in a soup: one can easily toss it in, but try taking it back out! Our high end is fast, natural and ripe with musical information, without the harsh or glassy overtones sometimes associated with a "bright pickup". Bass response is tight yet invitingly spongy while quality-over-quantity rules the mid voicing, allowing a welcoming palette for compression, overdrive and fuzz.

These elements allow your ear to enjoy each string, each note and each chord for an eminently satisfying and inspiring relationship between you and your instrument. So much of what we hear as tone comes from the bits of information surrounding, lingering, floating in-and-around the attack and release of the note. The Ronin family of pickups was designed to let all of that wonderful resonance and detail come through, so you can have the maximum level of expression—because in the end, that is what this is all about.

"Ronin have some very detailed pickups, even in their higher gain models. But I've never played a guitar where I thought, "this pickup isn't LOUD enough." I truly do not understand that concern. Guitars are for tone. Pedals and amps are for gain (and tone, of course). Most people do it backwards and that's partly why most people sound like most people.

Gain is the most abundant resource in the universe. You can have it easily and cheaply anywhere in your signal chain. I do not understand why people insist on getting it from the guitar. The guitar is the place to set your EQ curve. More often than not, when you coax gain out of the guitar, you do so at the cost of DATA...tonal details. Those 1's and 0's that carry the info about exactly how you picked or didn't pick that last note? Those are mostly in the highs, and those are the frequencies that you start sacrificing when you just HAVE to make the whole thing LOUDER by the time it even hits the first cable. There's no way to get that data back; it just wasn't transmitted in the first place. But if you come off the guitar with the data in tact, even if you darken at a pedal or the amp, tons of that data perseveres through that later darkening."  -  Mark Cuthbertson