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Post by pyrroz on Feb 14, 2023 15:20:28 GMT -5
an idea regarding those who say that pickups do not create or damage sustain .. not damage = create in some sense. How can a pup damage sustain? by pronouncing those frequencies that resonate together with some moving part (such as truss rod) or the wood itself.
Therefore I believe that for a specific guitar there should be specific pups!
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Post by cynical1 on Feb 16, 2023 15:39:55 GMT -5
Pickups, like everything in the electrical and physical world that is the electric guitar, play a role in usable sustain. I'm not as up on the technical side of pickup design...although I've burned a few brain cells reading about it here on the Pickups board on the forum. There are some gifted souls over there who can give you a much better answer than I can. If nothing else changed, physically, on your guitar...and the strings all act as they did prior to the pickup change, then I agree. The change in pickups have made a difference in the perceived or usable sustain from that instrument. This is just another avenue to go down. By making one change you have changed the character of this instrument from a very practical standpoint. While the SD Blackouts gave you great sustain, they also had a habit of sounding like a jet coming in for a landing... Design is merely a selection of trade offs to achieve a desired end. Since you have been down this rabbit hole before, I would challenge you now. How can you make this guitar sound like pyrroz...or what can you get out of that guitar. It has a specialty...you just need to see if it suits your ear. If you can't find it, or can't use it...what can you change to make it sound the way your mind hears it? HTC1 |
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Post by pyrroz on Feb 16, 2023 15:57:51 GMT -5
Pickups, like everything in the electrical and physical world that is the electric guitar, play a role in usable sustain. I'm not as up on the technical side of pickup design...although I've burned a few brain cells reading about it here on the Pickups board on the forum. There are some gifted souls over there who can give you a much better answer than I can. If nothing else changed, physically, on your guitar...and the strings all act as they did prior to the pickup change, then I agree. The change in pickups have made a difference in the perceived or usable sustain from that instrument. This is just another avenue to go down. By making one change you have changed the character of this instrument from a very practical standpoint. While the SD Blackouts gave you great sustain, they also had a habit of sounding like a jet coming in for a landing... Design is merely a selection of trade offs to achieve a desired end. Since you have been down this rabbit hole before, I would challenge you now. How can you make this guitar sound like pyrroz...or what can you get out of that guitar. It has a specialty...you just need to see if it suits your ear. If you can't find it, or can't use it...what can you change to make it sound the way your mind hears it? HTC1
tough questions !! and here the GAS part comes into play.. this is about greed... this is about that new unique sound while retaining all past sounds, so wanting all at the same guitar... not gonna happen, and this is like the 5th HH guitar with floyd rose and double locking in a row... unique?? no way...
so I think the psychology here has a tough problem to solve!
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Post by cynical1 on Feb 16, 2023 16:06:08 GMT -5
OK, so you say you have 5 guitars...all HH configurations with a Floyd. OK, this seems to follow a pattern. Aside from the need for a reliable backup for shows, what's the justification for the other 3? What do they do that justifies their room and board?
HTC1
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Post by gckelloch on Feb 16, 2023 18:15:10 GMT -5
I'd think magnetic string pull could decrease sustain a bit, but I don't think sustain is as much an issue as are the atonal modulations asymmetric string pull can cause. Just to be clear, any sympathetic resonance in the guitar would drain string energy. A passive guitar pickup has only one resonant peak, the level and freq of which depend on the pickup Q-factor & inductance, and the capacitance, and resistance of the circuit. I recently swapped a loaded pickguard from a Roasted-Ash w/trem system body and Maple neck/Ebony FB/Ni fret S-type guitar to an Austrian Pine hardtail body with Wenge neck & FB/Stainless fret S-type guitar. The tonal difference is massive. The new guitar has a much brighter attack and is notably lacking mid-bass-- even though the pine body is 4.2 lbs. Turning the tone knob down to ~7.3 adequately tames the brightness to a typical Strat level, but I'd need an active EQ to fill in the mid-bass. I tried embedding a Brass Trem block in the body screwed to the bridge, but that didn't fill in the mid-bass much. I assume it's being absorbed between the neck pocket and the block. There's only so much passive pickups can do. I'm thinking of going with a Mahogany body, or maybe I could embed a few Copper pipes in the back from under the neck plate to the Brass block...what could go wrong?  |
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Post by cynical1 on Feb 16, 2023 19:10:51 GMT -5
or maybe I could embed a few Copper pipes in the back from under the neck plate to the Brass block...what could go wrong? I have often wondered what would happen if I wove round brass rod through a body to resonant points...  The only problems I've had is bending it reliably and replicatible. Propane doesn't get hot enough. Cold bending is right out after .125". MAPP gas works, but there is a learning curve... As you say, what could it hurt... HTC1 |
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Post by gckelloch on Feb 16, 2023 19:28:54 GMT -5
or maybe I could embed a few Copper pipes in the back from under the neck plate to the Brass block...what could go wrong? I have often wondered what would happen if I wove round brass rod through a body to resonant points... The only problems I've had is bending it reliably and replicatible. Propane doesn't get hot enough. Cold bending is right out after .125". MAPP gas works, but there is a learning curve... As you say, what could it hurt... HTC1 You're proposing to embed mass at resonant points. I did once attach a Gibson tailpiece to the headstock of that Maple/Ebony neck and it improved low-end clarity on the lower frets, but that isn't what the new guitar suffers from. I'm just thinking of stiffening the structure from the bridge to the neck pocket, assuming that would make the most difference. I was joking about it not causing a problem. It may not eliminate the mid-bass loss, and the loss of wood for the pipes in the pocket might weaken it so it bends or breaks. I'd really have to make a solid structure that the bridge and neck attach to. A new body would be a simpler solution. I could get a piece of Mahogany (or Black Walnut) for the center line. Route it for the pickups and neck, and then cut the Pine body up for side wings. Still, a lot of work for something that may not sound as intended, and I don't really have the space or tools for that. |
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Post by pyrroz on Feb 17, 2023 2:59:16 GMT -5
OK, so you say you have 5 guitars...all HH configurations with a Floyd. OK, this seems to follow a pattern. Aside from the need for a reliable backup for shows, what's the justification for the other 3? What do they do that justifies their room and board? HTC1 Good Day! I have : - a strat SSS with mini humbuckers SC-size (Aria with Dimarzios FT2, FT1, chopper) - a super strat Floyd HH (Kramer 210) (SeymourD livewires non-metal)
- a neckthrough pointy Floyd HSS (Carvin dc135, dimarzio SuperDist, original middle,air notrton S) - a LesPaul-type HH (Ibanez ARZ800) (EMG 81b/60n)
- a 7-string double locking super strat (Ibanez Universe uv70p, HSH w dimarzio blazes IIRC) - a new strat HSH this is my own creation HSH (EMG 85b, unnamed noisy chinese middle, EMG 81n)
and one yamaha acoustic IIRC 500APX
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Post by pyrroz on Feb 17, 2023 3:04:33 GMT -5
what could go wrong? Great post man!! Please share the outcome!! |
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Post by pyrroz on Feb 17, 2023 3:10:46 GMT -5
I dunno about Austria, but here in Athens/Greece we got to much pine, but this is useless as it is so soft.
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Post by cynical1 on Feb 17, 2023 9:10:14 GMT -5
Greek, where do you live again? Your national tree...Olive wood, man... You want a hard wood, that stuff is damn near as hard as ebony...and any olive burl or crotch cut is going to be stunning.  You also have holm oak...which is harder than North American oak...and the graining is more tame as well. Geography lesson over...HTC1 |
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Post by pyrroz on Feb 17, 2023 11:17:27 GMT -5
Greek, where do you live again? Your national tree...Olive wood, man... You want a hard wood, that stuff is damn near as hard as ebony...and any olive burl or crotch cut is going to be stunning. You also have holm oak...which is harder than North American oak...and the graining is more tame as well. Geography lesson over...HTC1
Yep I know we got oak in my home region, IMO in Athens not so mcuh. Regarding Olive tree , yes it has a fantastic touch, nice smooth and ... oily !! haha, *BUT* a) this is heavier than water, so this is a problem b) this comes from useful tree so if any one cuts it (especially in Crete) he will face the consequences !
In Crete they dont use olive tree for their traditional stringed instruments : pls look here! |
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Post by cynical1 on Feb 17, 2023 13:29:25 GMT -5
In Crete they dont use olive tree for their traditional stringed instruments : pls look here!Those are acoustic instruments. The cedar and cypress over there is perfect for that. We are not talking about acoustic instruments...at least I doubt I'm talking acoustic instruments anytime I talk with you.  This is beautiful:  HTC1 |
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Post by gckelloch on Feb 17, 2023 14:32:48 GMT -5
I dunno about Austria, but here in Athens/Greece we got to much pine, but this is useless as it is so soft. Lightweight "Sugar" Pine is sometimes used for Tele builds, and they sound great. The Austrian Pine body is pretty soft as well. Perhaps the relative flexibility compared to something like Alder lowers the average resonances into the mid-bass range? It wouldn't seem so skewed towards the upper mids if the neck wood weren't quite so hard. I'm definitely not going to try embedding Cu pipes in it for several reasons, but I may swap to a Mahogany body at some point. A cheap solution I might try first is a set of Brass covers. It has a somewhat different effect than rolling the tone knob down. I normally wouldn't want to reduce the high-end, but this guitar is just so darn bright. It should also reduce some of the harsh 3-3.5kHz range by rolling off the high end above ~1kHz, and Alibaba has a nice Bronze-colored set to fit the look of the guitar. It won't fill in the mid-bass, but it might sound just fine if it's not so harsh and bright. |
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Post by geo on Apr 4, 2023 16:10:02 GMT -5
I'd think magnetic string pull could decrease sustain a bit I never understood this theory, since the magnetic field's effect is symmetric; it speeds the string up on the way in and slows it down on the way out. It's a so-called "conservative force", so when the string gets back to the position it was before, the magnetic field's total impact will have been zero. The one thing everyone neglects to mention when we talk about sustain is volume; the guitar sheds its energy by vibrating the air. The more air it moves, the less energy is staying in the guitar. In an acoustic guitar, this means that a body which better receives the vibration from the strings will lose its energy faster. The same is true for an electric, played through headphones or at low volume. Something special happens when you play an electric guitar at high volumes, however. The amp is putting out a great deal of vibrational energy back into the air, and just as the guitar is a good resonant shape for emitting vibrational energy, it's also a good resonant shape for receiving it. We've all played with feedback on our amps; sustain is no different, just a smaller amount of gain in the feedback loop. So yes, pickups do create sustain; by driving the amp, which vibrates the guitar! The circle of sustain. |
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Post by gckelloch on Apr 4, 2023 19:56:48 GMT -5
I'd think magnetic string pull could decrease sustain a bit I never understood this theory, since the magnetic field's effect is symmetric; it speeds the string up on the way in and slows it down on the way out. It's a so-called "conservative force", so when the string gets back to the position it was before, the magnetic field's total impact will have been zero. The one thing everyone neglects to mention when we talk about sustain is volume; the guitar sheds its energy by vibrating the air. The more air it moves, the less energy is staying in the guitar. In an acoustic guitar, this means that a body which better receives the vibration from the strings will lose its energy faster. The same is true for an electric, played through headphones or at low volume. Something special happens when you play an electric guitar at high volumes, however. The amp is putting out a great deal of vibrational energy back into the air, and just as the guitar is a good resonant shape for emitting vibrational energy, it's also a good resonant shape for receiving it. We've all played with feedback on our amps; sustain is no different, just a smaller amount of gain in the feedback loop. So yes, pickups do create sustain; by driving the amp, which vibrates the guitar! The circle of sustain. My speculation doesn't qualify as a theory, but it could be that any pull on the string reduces sustain, or that the interference with the natural vibrating modes reduces sustain in that the modes "fight" more with each other. Again, I doubt it affects sustain as much as how it affects note modulations. I think acoustic feedback is from the strings being vibrated directly by the acoustic energy from the speaker. It's stronger in a hollow guitar with holes near the strings because acoustic energy is focused within the cavity and the energy coming out of the holes drives the strings even harder. Closed hollow guitars won't do that as readily. The vibrations from the speaker coming through the guitar to the strings are just as likely to be out of phase as in phase with string vibrations, and may actually damp some modes. I guess the same would be true with waves hiting the strings directly from the speaker depending on the distance and angle. |
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Post by geo on Apr 4, 2023 20:13:09 GMT -5
My speculation doesn't qualify as a theory, but it could be that any pull on the string reduces sustain, or that the interference with the natural vibrating modes reduces sustain in that the modes "fight" more with each other. Waves travel independent of one another; the vibrating modes never fight each other. It's referred to as the "superposition principle". |
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Post by gckelloch on Apr 4, 2023 22:51:39 GMT -5
Oh, right. The magnetic force is not wavelike, though. I should have said it might cause the string to "fight" with itself. The pull on a small string length causes a deformation entirely unrelated to the string harmonics that might damp vibration. I'd also assume that a strong enough field at a given point could create chaotic vibrations and damp very quickly. Be interesting to test my assumption with a very powerful magnet.
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Post by geo on Apr 5, 2023 1:53:55 GMT -5
Oh, right. The magnetic force is not wavelike, though. I should have said it might cause the string to "fight" with itself. The pull on a small string length causes a deformation entirely unrelated to the string harmonics that might damp vibration. I'd also assume that a strong enough field at a given point could create chaotic vibrations and damp very quickly. Be interesting to test my assumption with a very powerful magnet. I'm sorry, I meant the vibration along the string is wavelike, so adding any kinds of vibration together just superposes the two; they coexist without fighting each other. The magnetic field is conservative, so it won't remove any energy from the system, no matter how the string moves inside the magnetic field. At most, the magnet vibrates with the body and provides another (extremely weak) way for the strings to transfer energy to the body. The magnetic field doesn't deform the strings appreciably compared to their regular vibration, so I wouldn't worry about anything in that direction. It's just a little bit more tension; gravity does more than the pickups in this respect. A strong enough field wouldn't create chaotic vibrations, but it would add a great deal of tension on the strings, and eventually glue them to the body/fretboard. You'd need a very large, powerful magnet to accomplish this, however, and if your strings were strong enough to withstand the tension you'd need to keep them from being held against the fretboard (very thick strings or very high tuning), they'd sustain as much as without the magnet. Right up until it starts making them hit the fretboard. |
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Post by gckelloch on Apr 5, 2023 7:13:45 GMT -5
Well, even AlNiCo V poles can cause strong string warble on higher frets. You saying that doesn't affect string sustain at all? If so, how do you know that?
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Post by geo on Apr 5, 2023 17:05:12 GMT -5
Well, even AlNiCo V poles can cause strong string warble on higher frets. You saying that doesn't affect string sustain at all? If so, how do you know that? The warble is a non-harmonic vibration which can be produced by non-linear waves, but in our case the non-linearity has the special feature that it's being caused by a conservative field (remember the magnetic field is conservative in the absence of electrical currents), so while the amplitude of waves doesn't add linearly near the magnet, no energy is taken away from them. The effect I'm ignoring in the above explanation is that steel strings stretch some non-zero amount, and that deforming them requires some energy. However, this is a small effect, and the magnetic field changes the amplitude of vibration almost negligibly; almost all of the string's amplitude is from the waves traveling on it. Edit: Think of it kinda like waving a magnifying glass over some text. The text gets distorted one way as it approaches the center of the magnifying glass, then distorted back the other way as it exits. You don't wind up increasing or decreasing the size of the text once it leaves the lens. (Imperfect analogy, but it's the best I can do.) |
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Post by gckelloch on Apr 5, 2023 20:03:03 GMT -5
Yeah, it's the friction from the deformation I'm thinking of. Maybe that reduces sustain by some insignificant amount? I really couldn't say. The magnifying glass isn't really applying force on the text in your example, unless we consider how the light might be focused to increase heat on a given spot of the paper. Technically, that could warp or even burn the paper. Perhaps a more apt analogy would be the effect of focusing light/heat at a point on a vibrating string. Would the increased flexibility and/or air pressure change at just that one point damp sustain at all? I'm not losing sleep over it.  |
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Post by geo on Apr 6, 2023 4:07:37 GMT -5
Yeah, it's the friction from the deformation I'm thinking of. The energy that goes into deforming the string is because the string stretches. When it's not vibrating, it has one length. When it vibrates, its length increases; it's longer at the extremes (when it swings furthest from the guitar body and closest to the guitar body) and shorter as it's passing its rest position. This is a very small amount of the energy loss for the string, and you don't notice it; otherwise your strings would be hot when you finish playing. The effect of the magnet is that the string's furthest position from the pickup is slightly closer to the string's rest position and the string's closest position to the pickup is slightly further from the string's rest position. Since we'd expect the amount of energy lost to deforming the string to increase the further we deform it (up to the point we start breaking it), this might mean a very slight increase in the energy expended to deforming the spring. I don't expect you would be able to measure a difference, even for a warbling pickup and a string that was struck very hard. There is a test, if you would like to prove this to yourself; take an instrument with a piezo and test its sustain with and without the pickup. I suggest putting a "dummy pickup" with no magnet or with demagnetized AlNiCo bars so you have the same exact mass distribution. If you have a friend swap the dummy pickup in/out and only play with the piezo engaged, never trying that pickup, you'll have a blind test. Edit: Okay, really cool video of acoustic guitar strings vibrating to illustrate how their length changes as they're plucked. The string has the same distance between the two points it's anchored to (bridge and nut), but it takes a wiggly path, so it's gotta be longer. If you add a magnet, the length change will be altered by some minute amount, but the difference is likely immeasurably small. (Note that playing the note slightly harder will change the length by an appreciable amount, so the magnet's effect is really, really nothing.) |
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Post by sumgai on Apr 6, 2023 15:12:01 GMT -5
geo, Nice find! While no one here has proclaimed themselves to be honest-to-Gawd physicists, for the most part this discussion has stayed on that kind of level, and not descended into "but what-about-ism", nor purely reflexive emotional "but I can hear it!" kind of dialogue. That's a Good Thing!  It's what makes this particular community stand out, and above, most others on the internet. sumgai
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It's what makes this particular community stand out, and above, most others on the internet.