DiMarzio Red Velvet, Analysis and Review

[antigua]

www.dimarzio.com/node/2156

Until recently I had three Red Velvets in a Strat. I had bought the set about three years ago. They're really meant to be a bridge pickup, specifically to emulate a Tele bridge pickup, so I found them just a bit too dark as a set, but not bad.

With an inductance of 3.8 henries, they've fairly similar to the stock ceramic pickups that come in Mexican Fender Strats, but with the higher Q factor at resonance that is afforded by the AlNiCo 5 pole pieces, which cause less eddy currents than steel pole pieces. The peak at resonance is 6dB, where as the steel pole pieces in import pickups reduce the resonance down to 1dB to 2dB. These pickups therefore have a transfer function that is a cross between hotter import pickups, and vintage AlNiCo pickups.

Probably the most popular "high output" AlNiCo Strat pickup on the market is the Seymour Duncan SSL-5. These are not nearly as hot as those, with an inductance in excess of 5 henries. The Red Velvets are hotter than Texas Specials, which are closer to "vintage output" than people probably realize. The Red Velvets truly are comparable to an average Tele bridge pickup with AlNiCo 5 pole pieces.

These AlNiCo 5 pole pieces that came in these three Red Velvets are an unusual formulation, as measured by gauss strength and conductivity. The gauss strength measures upwards of 1200 peak at the pole tops, where has 1050 is typical, so these are stronger magnets than average. The higher Q factor (peaking at 14.6dB instead of a more typical 12dB) also suggests lower conductivity than usual. It's unlikely that this is on purpose, so if you were to buy a set of Red Velvets now, you might not receive a set with these peculiar AlNiCo 5 pole pieces.

The loaded resonant peaks of the three pickups are all identical, and the capacitance is a bit on the high side, suggesting these are machine wound, with high consistency. The loaded peak of 3.17kHz is similar to Tele bridge pickups, darker than typical Strat pickups, which tend to fall between 3.7kHz and 4.3kHz.

I'd recommend this pickup if you want a Tele bridge type tone in a Strat, because they did get the electrical values close to that of a typical Tele bridge pickup, and they're priced fairly cheap, too.


DiMarzio Red Velvet

Red Velvet #1 ser. 721778
- DC Resistance: 8.56K ohms
- Measured L: 3.800H (3.675H without base plate)
- Calculated C: 144pF (154 - 10)
- Gauss: 1200G

Red Velvet #2 ser. 727137
- DC Resistance: 8.38K ohms
- Measured L: 3.858H
- Calculated C: 138pF (148 - 10)
- Gauss: 1100G

Red Velvet #3 ser. 734304
- DC Resistance: 8.43K ohms
- Measured L: 3.837H
- Calculated C: 126pF (136 - 10)
- Gauss: 1200G


Red Velvet #1 unloaded: dV: 14.6dB f: 6.58kHz (black)
Red Velvet #1 loaded (200k & 470pF): dV: 5.4dB f: 3.17kHz (red)

Red Velvet #2 unloaded: dV: 14.8dB f: 6.66kHz (green)
Red Velvet #2 loaded (200k & 470pF): dV: 5.4dB f: 3.17kHz (gray)

Red Velvet #3 unloaded: dV: 14.8dB f: 6.97kHz (green)
Red Velvet #3 loaded (200k & 470pF): dV: 5.4dB f: 3.17kHz (gray)







The base plate...

One of the gimmicks of the "Tele bridge for Strat" is the base plate. Another set that does this is the Bare Knuckle Irish Tours and the Seymour Duncan APST-1 Twang Banger. I say gimmick, because there is an assertion made that this base plate plays an important role in duplicating the "Tele bridge tone", that is not true. For example, the copy on DiMarzio's site say, as of August 2017, www.dimarzio.com/node/2156 "the Strat® stings and screams, while the Tele® punches and sings. We thought it would be neat to have a Strat® pickup that does both, and this is it. The punch comes from the bottom-loaded Power Plate™" (is there anything DiMarzio won't trademark?)

The truth is that the base plate has a very minimal impact on the electrical or magnetic properties of the pickup. Below are separate measurements of the first pickup (the Red Velvet with the lowest serial number), with and without the base plate attached to the pickup. Sometimes the base plate is copper, but more often it is steel, but in both cases it makes only a small difference. The DiMarzio happens to be steel.

The first electrical measure to look at is the inductance, which with the capacitance of the coil, determines the resonant peak of the pickup:

Red Velvet #1 ser. 721778
Measured L: 3.800H (3.675H without base plate)


The inductance drops by 125 millihenries when the steel base plate is removed, and according to this measure the resonant peak, with and without the base plate...


With base plate in place:
Red Velvet #1 unloaded: dV: 14.6dB f: 6.58kHz (black)
Red Velvet #1 loaded (200k & 470pF): dV: 5.4dB f: 3.17kHz (red)

With base plate removed:
Red Velvet #1 unloaded: dV: 16.7dB f: 6.66kHZ (green)
Red Velvet #1 loaded (200k & 470pF): dV: 6.1dB f: 3.17kHz (gray)





... the 125mH difference barely moves the resonant peak at all. More noticeable than a change in resonant peak is a lowering of the Q factor, which is where you see the plot lines diverge on the slopes, and even that divergence is small. The plot lines never diverge by much more than 1dB at particular frequencies. I performed this same test with the Bare Knuckle Irish Tours, and got the same results.

A steel base plate under a pickup has several potential purposes; besides barely increasing the inductance and damping the Q factor, as seen above, it can act as a magnetic "keeper", helping the AlNiCo hold its charge. While Leo Fender might have though the base plate had merit as a keeper in 1950, it's been decided over the course of time that the keeper is not a great benefit, and so it is rarely seen now, except in vintage Tele bridge pickup replicas, and Strat pickups like this that claim to duplicate their tone. The base plate could also serve as a means of blocking electrostatic interference, but as the base plate on the the Red Velvet is not "grounded", it does not do this.

The steel base plate is magnetically permeable, so the magentic field does change when the base plate is present. I measured the gauss level at the tops of the AlNiCo pole pieces with and without the steel base plate, and saw no difference, and it's this is no surprise, because the permeability of AlNiCo is relatively low. The tallest pole piece measures around 1200 gauss, with or without the base plate, so it's inconsequential to the performance of the pickup. When the pole pieces are of higher permeability, such as steel slugs or screws, you see a greater impact on the flux density when you change the magnetic field underneath the pickup. For example, in a PAF style humbucker, using longer fillister screws results in a weaker magnetic flux at the strings, because the long underside of the screw magnetically opposes the top half of the screw.

Fender did not put a metal base plate on the Telecaster bridge pickup of their American made Telecasters during the period when they were using plastic mold bobbins, and still don't include a base plate on their steel/ceramic important Tele bridge pickups, but Fender has included them in their numerous reissue style Tele bridge pickups. There have been some pretty funny looking Tele pickups coming from China that try to combine a ceramic bar with a copper base plate. They do this because there has been a myth built up that the base plate improves the tone of the pickup. Not every guitar player keeps and LCR meter on hand, but (very nearly) every guitar player has eyes, and so these aesthetic gimmicks live on.

The reason a Tele pickup has "growl" is not because of a "Power Plate™", but because they're wound hotter than Strat pickups. Where has a Strat pickup has about 7,500 turns of 42 AWG, a Tele bridge typically has closer to 8,500 turns of 42 AWG. They're only wound hotter becuase they happen to have larger bobbins. When Teles and Strats were invented in the 50's, Fender wasn't paying any attention to wind counts or inductance measures, they just made a bobbin, and wound wire around that bobbin until it was full. They didn't start using wind counters until several years after they had already been in production. What we know now as the the "Strat" and "Tele" tones emerged mostly by accident. If you pop the base plate off a Tele bridge, it won't sound any different, because it's still a hot wound pickup, and the base plate doesn't induce a difference that exceeds 1dB, which is a very small increment in volume.

[lordquilton]

I have no experience with the Red Velvets, but I do have to disagree about the efficacy of a steel base plate, as far as audible results.
I just fitted a copper plated steel base plate to the bridge pickup on my stratocaster.
The change to that pickup's sound is obvious, and surprisingly even the neck pickup's sound is effected by the base plate that's on the bridge pickup.

[reTrEaD]

Sept 27, 2017 2:25:33 GMT -5 lordquilton said:

even the neck pickup's sound is effected by the base plate that's on the bridge pickup.

You should have the base plate alloy analyzed. I suspect there may be some Vibranium in the mix.

[lordquilton]

So just the mass added by the base plate mechanically effecting the sound of the guitar?
I suppose it couldn't reasonably be anything else.
I don't really have an opinion on the how, that's why I came here.

[antigua]

Sept 27, 2017 2:25:33 GMT -5 lordquilton said:

I have no experience with the Red Velvets, but I do have to disagree about the efficacy of a steel base plate, as far as audible results.
I just fitted a copper plated steel base plate to the bridge pickup on my stratocaster.
The change to that pickup's sound is obvious, and surprisingly even the neck pickup's sound is effected by the base plate that's on the bridge pickup.

There is no known scientific basis for what you're perceiving. 

[reTrEaD]

Sept 28, 2017 14:39:52 GMT -5 antigua said:

There is no known scientific basis for what you're perceiving. 

I suppose that all depends on whether or not you consider Psychology a science.

[antigua]

Sept 29, 2017 16:28:51 GMT -5 reTrEaD said:

Sept 28, 2017 14:39:52 GMT -5 antigua said:

There is no known scientific basis for what you're perceiving. 

I suppose that all depends on whether or not you consider Psychology a science.

You don't even... 

[lordquilton]

Soundcloud - Bridge baseplate test.

The neck pickup plays first with no base plate installed. It is followed by the neck pickup again, this time with the steel base plate installed on the bridge pickup.

The attentive, unprejudiced listener will readily hear the difference.
The way the notes and overtones "beat against" one another, and the sustained character of the decay, reminds me of the sound qualities one hears when a cheap zinc tune-o-matic bridge is replaced with one machined from solid brass, for example.

[antigua]

Sept 30, 2017 5:33:03 GMT -5 lordquilton said:

Soundcloud - Bridge baseplate test.

The neck pickup plays first with no base plate installed. It is followed by the neck pickup again, this time with the steel base plate installed on the bridge pickup.

The attentive, unprejudiced listener will readily hear the difference.
The way the notes and overtones "beat against" one another, and the sustained character of the decay, reminds me of the sound qualities one hears when a cheap zinc tune-o-matic bridge is replaced with one machined from solid brass, for example.

> Obviously I tried to eliminate as many variables as I could.


You can try, but you risk mistaking these variables for the influence caused by the base plate. 


> I draw your attention particularly to the way notes and overtones decay and "beat against" each other

The difference in beating is caused by two things, neither of which is related to the base plate: 1) when two or more strings are ringing out at the same time, slight differences in the pitch of the string's overlapping harmonics. The harmonics are close in frequency, but not identical, hence the beating.  You can actually figure out precisely how far apart they are in hertz by timing the rate of the beating. Given that you played the same note sequence both times, the beating can change if the pitch of any of the strings changed slightly between recordings, which can happen by simply lifting the guitar by it's neck.

2) the magnetic pull upon the guitar string. It's likely that when you reinstalled the pickup, you didn't set the height of the pickup exactly the same as it was before, causing the pickup's magnets to pull more strongly or more weakly. The magnetic pull causes an asymmetry in the string's vibration, which leads to beating, due to a secondary spring-like oscillation between the strings and the magnets. In general, the stronger the magnet is pulling, the greater the asymmetry, the faster the rate of beating.

[Deleted]

Sept 30, 2017 5:33:03 GMT -5 lordquilton said:

Soundcloud - Bridge baseplate test.

The neck pickup plays first with no base plate installed. It is followed by the neck pickup again, this time with the steel base plate installed on the bridge pickup.

The attentive, unprejudiced listener will readily hear the difference.
The way the notes and overtones "beat against" one another, and the sustained character of the decay, reminds me of the sound qualities one hears when a cheap zinc tune-o-matic bridge is replaced with one machined from solid brass, for example.

The audible difference is subtle, I had to try to listen the differences, but the waveforms seem different, and the volume/sustain seems slightly increased. But then again, what the player can feel and hear, is always more than some random listener who listens over soundcloud via headphones. I remember Frank Albo's story about engineers' specs/measurements and Yngwie's ears. Ok, Yngwie was right, and the SD engineers wrong. (I am a (software/maths) scientist myself, so I am not talking with prejudice)

[antigua]

I've tried conducting tests with strumming, and have found over and over that it's so unreliable that I've gone to great lengths to create a mechanical plucker, and even that isn't perfect. 

There are a lot of factors with hand picking; the angle of the pick, where you're holding the pick, how tightly you're holding the pick, the force used, the direction of the force, how the pick breaks away from the string, and more things I'm forgetting. These things have a huge effect on the transient, which in turn has a huge effect on the decay. I think there must be some trick of the mind that tells us our picking is consistent, because to listen to it, it sounds consistent, but then you see the wave form or the spectrogram and there are all sorts of visible differences, and then you listen to the plucks again, and now being aware that they are in fact different, they sound different too.

There's a fair amount of research that human seeing and hearing are based on a combination of real input and interpolation. The reason it has to be this way is because the input stimulus is too rich and complex to be 100% processed, and so your brain plays a trick on you, it processes some of it, and fills in the blanks with approximation. And it appears that the approximation process is informed by consciousness. For example, you might have seen something "wrong", like you could have swore there was a object floating in mid air, and then saw it correctly, and you can't go back to seeing it wrong again. Same with hearing. The error was interpolation, and once you corrected yourself, you couldn't interpolate it wrong thereafter. Here's a good example of it in action  .

There's a famous quote that rings true all the time; "people generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for". 

[Deleted]

The above theory at least applied to lorquilton's post in short says :
- lordquinton's brain/heart/soul/etc generally cannot process the full audio info 100%
- so he uses interpolation
- he concludes that he likes the base plate setup better

In case this is a subconsciousness effect (and not real change in tone), this alone, means that, out of the whole signal, he chooses to subtract the elements he wants or thinks he got an improvement on and then fill in the gaps with the desired result, or even stretch the various parameters to make it or persuade himself repeatedly to hear it like this.

So, this leads us to 3 possibilities :
1) the said person is a masochist who mods guitar pickups for no reason
2) said person sees / hears things and is in need for professional help
3) he/she is a very sane person with great music history behind him, with an extremely sensitive ear, and he knows very well what he is talking about.

I am not taking sides here, but the 3) is generally the least acceptable.

[antigua]

Oct 1, 2017 8:17:45 GMT -5 @pyrros said:

The above theory at least applied to lorquilton's post in short says :
- lordquinton's brain/heart/soul/etc generally cannot process the full audio info 100%
- so he uses interpolation
- he concludes that he likes the base plate setup better

In case this is a subconsciousness effect (and not real change in tone), this alone, means that, out of the whole signal, he chooses to subtract the elements he wants or thinks he got an improvement on and then fill in the gaps with the desired result, or even stretch the various parameters to make it or persuade himself repeatedly to hear it like this.

So, this leads us to 3 possibilities :
1) the said person is a masochist who mods guitar pickups for no reason
2) said person sees / hears things and is in need for professional help
3) he/she is a very sane person with great music history behind him, with an extremely sensitive ear, and he knows very well what he is talking about.

I am not taking sides here, but the 3) is generally the least acceptable.

A common mistake of observation doesn't mean one need's professional help. You're moving away from the underlying point; this is normal. The trick is just being aware of it, so you can account for it, and plan accordingly. 

Possibility #4, he's merely been "primed" by reading posts on the internet that say he should like the sound of a base plate, or a solid steel tail piece, better than the alternative. So, with this priming, he's already expecting to like the modified product better, the question now is, what does he hear that he likes? With such a rich spectrum of harmonics and overtones, some subtly beating against each other, you need only pick which of many possibilities confirms your expectation. In this case, it appears he latched onto harmonic beating and a hard-to-put-in-words quality about the decay. The fact that it's especially unlikely a base plate would change the beating, much less the energy dissipation, it's pretty clear that misattribution is in fact happening.

And let's be real, nobody takes the time to modify their guitar hoping it will sound worse, so the motive is there to want the perceive that an improvement has occurred. You spend $1,000 on a guitar, a lot big part of your paycheck, and it's what famous people use, and it looks pretty, you want it to sound good, too.


This whole myth around the base plate has a has some rather obvious underpinning. The tone of the Tele bridge is highly regarded, perhaps because it sounds good, or maybe just because people are so used to it. Either way, some people ask "why?". Without really knowing how or why the base plate would be to blame, they look at the pickup and ask themselves, "what's different about it?" they see the chuck of metal on the bottom and Jump to Conclusions ^tm  . Seeing is believing, especially when you don't have an LCR meter on hand with which you could also note that the typical Tele bridge 50% higher inductance than a typical Strat bridge, due to the wind count alone. Knowing that this design point originated with Leo Fender makes people want to believe that it's an important difference. Whenever Fender tries to make an "important difference" nowadays, everyone laughs and says it's gimmicky marketing, but if the Father of the Tele does it, it's beyond reproach. Leo Fender never put a base plate on the bridge expecting it would improve the tone, the motive was either to retain the AlNiCo pole piece residual flux, and/or shield against EMI.The fact that the base plate was ditched for the Strat should tell fans of base plates something they're clearly choosing not to hear. 


I also hear a lot about these sorts of people "person with great music history behind him, with an extremely sensitive ear," that people who've played guitar or produced music for many years have better hearing perception than everyone else. I've seen no actual evidence of this. Based on what is known of physiology and psychology, it is not likely our ears get more sensitive, it is more likely that we become increasingly biased about what we should be observing, and how we should feel about what we are hearing. You know that cliche about old guys saying the music the young guys are playing on the radio "isn't music" and "sounds like noise", until fifteen years later when that "noise" is the new normal? Not a coincidence, just psychology on a grand scale. 

[Deleted]

Well we are mostly rockers or jazz players or whatever, of course our ears are trained to accept something as "good". But the same holds true about our own playing, we expand to new styles, new genres, new folk music, new world music, new scales, we get trained to get used to our own sound/style and in some way we become fans of ourselves, even if we are twin brothers of EVH or YJM at *some* point we will deviate , create our own style, and then the "prime" now becomes "us".

Oct 1, 2017 11:29:23 GMT -5 antigua said:

And let's be real, nobody takes the time to modify their guitar hoping it will sound worse, so the motive is there to want the perceive that an improvement has occurred. You spend $1,000 on a guitar, a lot big part of your paycheck, and it's what famous people use, and it looks pretty, you want it to sound good, too.

Ok, but you see so many people with brand new expensive guitars replacing one pup after the other only to find their sound much later in the process. When I swapped my old SD livewires (metal/neck) for a (used) EMG 81/85 set for which *most* people will say that is the golden standard in heavy rocking music, (and already having a 81/60 set which I love), I thought it sucked. I tried the 18V mod and it sucked again, also the output was *so* unbalanced, 81 being much weaker. Then I flipped 81b/85n -> 85b/81n and reverted the 18v mod back to 9v. Phewww... that was a keeper.

It also has to do with the rig with the process chain. And not all that are depicted in some soundcloud clip.

Now I need a new guitar for the livewires

[reTrEaD]

Oct 1, 2017 11:29:23 GMT -5 antigua said:

A common mistake of observation doesn't mean one need's professional help. You're moving away from the underlying point; this is normal. The trick is just being aware of it, so you can account for it, and plan accordingly. 

Well said.

Oct 1, 2017 11:29:23 GMT -5 antigua said:

Possibility #4, he's merely been "primed" by reading posts on the internet that say he should like the sound of a base plate, or a solid steel tail piece, better than the alternative. So, with this priming, he's already expecting to like the modified product better, the question now is, what does he hear that he likes? With such a rich spectrum of harmonics and overtones, some subtly beating against each other, you need only pick which of many possibilities confirms your expectation. In this case, it appears he latched onto harmonic beating and a hard-to-put-in-words quality about the decay. The fact that it's especially unlikely a base plate would change the beating, much less the energy dissipation, it's pretty clear that misattribution is in fact happening.

And there's the rub. 
lordquilton says:  "The attentive, unprejudiced listener will readily hear the difference."
A scientist says:  "The attentive, unprejudiced thinker will readily look for all possibilities which might explain any difference heard."

When I read:  The way the notes and overtones "beat against" one another
my first thought was to consider what causes beating.

Beating is a phenomenon caused by reinforcement and cancellation of two frequencies that are nearly but not *exactly* the same. The difference between two frequencies describes the frequency of the beating.  A 1Hz difference between frequencies would cause the beating to occur once per second.  2Hz difference will cause the beating to occur twice as often.  It's likely that with four notes played together, there will be several instances of harmonic frequencies that are nearly the same. 

Is it logical to assume the tuning of all four strings was identical between these two samples?  Even if the base tuning was spot-on, I can easily imagine minuscule tuning errors due to fretting. 

The tuning possibility doesn't mean there isn't another cause in play.  It just means maybe there isn't.

[newey]

Ok, but you see so many people with brand new expensive guitars replacing one pup after the other only to find their sound much later in the process.

So, the guy spent $1000 on the new axe, and put $500 in new pickups in it, still didn't like it, puts more $$ into it . . .When he's spent an extra $2,000 or so, now he's thinking "This'll really sound great now!". And, of course, it does. He doesn't even need to consciously think this, the bias can manifest in the subconscious as well.

GD- You listened to his soundclips, and you heard a difference- but you knew in advance which clip was which.. At a minimum (ignoring other potential confounding factors) you'd need to set up a double blind situation, or the spectre of confirmation bias rears its head . . .

[antigua]

I didn't address the tone hunt aspect because I thought I typed too much already, but there are legitimate differences between pickups. That's why I do all this stuff. Base plates though, do not produce the differences that people want to believe they do, and this is proven in the top post. 

[Deleted]

Oct 1, 2017 21:53:33 GMT -5 newey said:

So, the guy spent $1000 on the new axe, and put $500 in new pickups in it, still didn't like it, puts more $$ into it . . .When he's spent an extra $2,000 or so, now he's thinking "This'll really sound great now!". And, of course, it does. He doesn't even need to consciously think this, the bias can manifest in the subconscious as well.

From ppl I have met, talked to, read in forums , etc, there are two main categories of experienced players (not newbies, the noob won't mod, if that tells anything) who buy expensive (>800 USD) guitars :
a) the ones who pay guitars in the range roughly 800(used)->2000(new) USD, for very specific reasons, and will chase their tone after that, either by exchanging or selling stuff/hw/pups/etc. Wasn't dimarzio which gave the option to return a pup and try a new one for no additional cost... I see this happening all the time. Those kind of ppl will chase their tone staying in the original budget
b) the collectors. Those will buy anything expensive, handle it with ultra soft gloves, put it under insurance coverage and then keep it behind armored glass.

So we are talking category a) here. Those ppl are either amateur enthusiasts (like you and me) or professional players who consider the instrument as a tool for their art, and in both cases most commonly are careful not to break the bank.

Oct 1, 2017 21:53:33 GMT -5 newey said:

GD- You listened to his soundclips, and you heard a difference- but you knew in advance which clip was which.. At a minimum (ignoring other potential confounding factors) you'd need to set up a double blind situation, or the spectre of confirmation bias rears its head . . .

The precise thing to say is i tried to hear the difference. I wanted to feel what Lordq' felt. This is not easy to do after the interference of dozens of analog/digital filters/converters/processors/compressors.
Also what if the second listener, being on the "science camp" has pre-decided to not hear any difference? How do we know about his bias?
Also there is the issue of sustain. In this case a blind test of a generic E major cord would not say much, but the E note on the 24th fret could say a lot. It is very complicated. A blind test between 2 ppl could show nothing. A repetitive test of a huge range of notes over a huge set of 100% neutral people might show something.

[Deleted]

2 clarifications :

1) I don't have any idea/opinion on the base plate effect. I (want to) believe both Antigua and Lordq's view.
2) If talking about blind tests, the sample must be really large. If it's small, me, Newey, and Antigua, then the OPINION OF THE LORDQ' ALWAYS HAS THE LARGEST WEIGHT!!! We are not all equal in this. One person searches his tone, the rest of us are most probably trying to prove our theories. Science ppl rarely talk about the prejudice/bias inside the scientists' head. A small sample I believe is worse than no sample at all.

[newey]

You are correct that a larger sample is needed, ideally you'd average results over a large sample of people.

I (want to) believe both Antigua and Lordq's view.

But they are mutually exclusive. On the one hand, we have data (objective, but there may be certain variables that cannot wholly be eliminated). On the other, we have anecdotal evidence/subjective opinion . . .

Of course, one's taste in sound/tone is wholly subjective, and if a player thinks one type of pickup (or other gear) sounds better than something else, more power to them, and who are we to disagree? My problem comes when someone then tries to sell that gear with pseudo-analytic claptrap- that's where a database such as what Antigua is compiling is valuable.

[antigua]

Even if you're working from the POV that one's personal musical tastes are of the utmost importance, and that all things relative to the individual, its still important to know the true causes and effects for a variety of reasons. Maybe you believe the base plate makes a difference in your own bubble, but if you go around telling people that it does, you've just propagated misinformation and set mankind back another decade. Maybe you will do something crazy and equip all ten of your Strat's pickups with base plates, at a cost of time and money.

If you want to just understand pickups as a more general matter, base plates fit into the bigger picture. Steel parts in and around the coil increase the inductance, but exponentially less so the further you get away from the core of the coil. The permeability of the steel also amplifies the flux change of the moving guitars string, but only if the steel is close to the guitars string. Steel parts also cause eddy currents, reducing the Q factor, or treble response at resonance, but again, less so if that steel is further away from the guitar strings. If you have a patch work of true and false information, it becomes very difficult to make sense of it all, compared to working with purely correct information. 

[Deleted]

Oct 2, 2017 17:15:45 GMT -5 antigua said:

Maybe you believe the base plate makes a difference in your own bubble, but if you go around telling people that it does, you've just propagated misinformation and set mankind back another decade.

If the fight against the evil misconception on the base plates' effect on guitars sound will move mankind forward (stop wars, poverty, crime, deaths, massive ethnic disposition - common things that happen at my side of the globe) then I will be the biggest anti-baseplate supporter.

[lordquilton]

But they are mutually exclusive. On the one hand, we have data
(objective, but there may be certain variables that cannot wholly be
eliminated). On the other, we have anecdotal evidence/subjective opinion
. . .

Hang on now, I have supplied data in the form of an audio recording.
Folks are free to call into question the integrity of the data,but it is data nonetheless.
And given that the intended purpose of a pickup is to make music, I'm going to say that there could be an argument made that the data I supplied is more meaningful to a musician than a graph is.

Secondly, at no point did I say anything sounds better than anything else.
The train of events for me was -

• I bought new pickups for my stratocaster.
  
• My experience with the strat bridge is it can be a little too lacking in certain frequencies compared to a humbucker.
  I bought a steel plate off ebay for $6, any inference that I have some sort hidden agenda that it must sound better because I spent so much money is spurious. I spent the $6 in the spirit of "the only way to know is to try".
  
• I put the base plate on the bridge pickup, it seemed to put the sound a little closer to what I would categorize as a "P90" sort of sound.
  I wasn't sure if I liked it, and when I switched to the neck pickup, it seemed to sound different. I wasn't expecting this, and it didn't make sense to me.
  
  
• I tried the base plate on the neck pickup, I didn't like it.
  I uninstalled it the base plate entirely.
  
  
• About a week went by, the strings settled in, I adjusted all the pickup heights to where I liked them, in short I let everything settle in and got the guitar to where I felt it sounded "the best".
  
  
• I decided to to give the base plate another try, mainly because of the apparent change to the behaviour of the neck pickup, which didn't make sense to me.
  
  
• I installed the base plate to the bridge but note: I only earthed the plate to the negative of the pickup. I did not fix the plate with bees wax or any other adhesive, so the bridge pickup was definitely somewhat microphonic.
  
  
• It seemed to me that the behaviour of the neck pickup was indeed changed from what I was accustomed to during "the settling in period".
  
  
• I recorded all three pickups (no in between positions) using a 10ft cable straight into a Roland Quad Capture. All driver level shaping (compression, lo-cut etc) were disabled. An Amplitube "Clean Tweed Deluxe" amp sim was employed in the DAW.
• Input gain and all other variables on the digital side were unchanged.
  
  
• The pickup heights were never changed. The bridge on the strat is a two point floating type, therefore the string clearance over the pickup was unchanged or the instrument would not have held it's tune.
  

A reasonable clip-on tuner was used, so  granted tuning wasn't "Peterson Strobe" accurate.

I recorded the neck pickup with the bridge plate installed first.
When it came to recording the "without base plate" sample, I did in fact do multiple passes to try to make the unplated examples have the same attack levels as the plated one. So feel free to attack my "poor methods", but the way I see it I consciously tried to make the two samples sound the same, and they still didn't sound the same.
So it's just as possible that the difference could be even greater if we had access to a perfectly consistent robot picking machine.
And I still hold that the initial notes are sharper with the base plate installed, though that's even harder to hear.

So I'm sticking with my theory for now, that the added mass of the base plate on the bridge pickup has mechanically influenced the response of the neck pickup. I do not expect or care if anyone agrees with this.

To be very clear, my original post was challenging the assertion that the base plate does not make an appreciable audible difference.
I maintain that it does, but I personally did not enjoy the effect on this particular instrument.

I appreciate everyone's input, particularly that of a more technical nature, which is what I was looking for. Thank you.

Now in a light-hearted way, I wish to throw down the gauntlet:
I do not accept the explanation that the audible difference is due to tuning discrepancies. I believe that would just sound unpleasant.
Given that persons who are party to this thread apparently have the technical means to do so, I say the onus is on them to replicate the character of my second sample using said tuning discrepancies.

Otherwise I say to you that they are in the position of the blind man who wishes to argue the existence of colours. Though he may refer to all manner of abstract technical data, the reality is self evident to anyone who possesses the faculties to perceive it in the first place.

If you have a patch work of true and false information, it becomes very
difficult to make sense of it all, compared to working with purely
correct information. 

Mathematics is like a mirror. It has a definite relationship to reality, but to take the reflection as reality is to be in error.

[antigua]

Oct 3, 2017 4:12:47 GMT -5 lordquilton said:

But they are mutually exclusive. On the one hand, we have data
(objective, but there may be certain variables that cannot wholly be
eliminated). On the other, we have anecdotal evidence/subjective opinion
. . .

Hang on now, I have supplied data in the form of an audio recording.
Folks are free to call into question the integrity of the data,but it is data nonetheless.
And given that the intended purpose of a pickup is to make music, I'm going to say that there could be an argument made that the data I supplied is more meaningful to a musician than a graph is.

If information is misleading or false, then it is not beneficial to anyone, regardless of their pursuit. If the assertion is that a baseplate will change the rate of beating, as you attempt to establish with your sounds sample, that is false information that would lead a person to potentially waste time and money adhering a piece of metal to their pickups. Like I said, its more likely that the strings changed tuning slightly, or you set the pickup to a different height when you reinstalled it, or both. That's why this testing stuff has to be taken seriously, there is a tremendous amount of room for error.


Guitar is famous for being an instrument you can just pick up and play without needing a lot of musical discipline or back ground in music theory, and I've come to realize that a lot of guitarists expect guitars to be as easy to understand as they are to play, but in reality, it is one of the most physically complicated musical instruments you could study. 

[reTrEaD]

This is one of the weakest attempts to prove cause and effect that could possibly be made.

Oct 3, 2017 4:12:47 GMT -5 lordquilton said:

Hang on now, I have supplied data in the form of an audio recording.
Folks are free to call into question the integrity of the data,but it is data nonetheless.
And given that the intended purpose of a pickup is to make music, I'm going to say that there could be an argument made that the data I supplied is more meaningful to a musician than a graph is.

Your data consists of two samples. No measurement of other variables that might affect the outcome is provided. You rush to attribute the (oh-so-subtle) effect to one variable of your choice. No care was taken by you to compare multiple samples without the chosen variable but with other variables present and determine their effect.

I do not accept the explanation that the audible difference is due to tuning discrepancies. I believe that would just sound unpleasant.

You're either uninformed or being intentionally obtuse. Subtle differences in tuning will cause a different frequency of beating far before it becomes "unpleasant". In fact, intentionally mistuning by a very small amount can be employed to make a more pleasant sound due to very slow beating rather than no beating at all.

Given that persons who are party to this thread apparently have the technical means to do so, I say the onus is on them to replicate the character of my second sample using said tuning discrepancies.

The onus is always on the one making the claim, not on those who dispute it. That said, any guitarist who hasn't heard a difference in beating due to minuscule differences in tuning while he was playing, hasn't been an "attentive, unprejudiced" listener.


If you can't show proof that other variables have been controlled or at least that their effects have been evaluated within the range they might be present, you haven't proved anything.

A change might be the result of your chosen variable. A change might be a result of other variables you have ignored.

[reTrEaD]

Oct 3, 2017 2:44:23 GMT -5 @pyrros said:

If the fight against the evil misconception on the base plates' effect on guitars sound will move mankind forward (stop wars, poverty, crime, deaths, massive ethnic disposition - common things that happen at my side of the globe) then I will be the biggest anti-baseplate supporter.

In such a fight I'd surely prefer to have your support and the quality of arguments you've just displayed, on the other side.

[antigua]

I didn't even have to offer the notion that the characteristics being heard were attributable to detuning and magnetic pull, much less prove them. That was charitable on my part. I could have simply said the data presented, in the form of a single short recording was wildly insufficient to prove cause and effect, and leave it at that. But that wouldn't be in the spirit of a forum that promotes science based discussion. 

The beating associated with overlapping harmonics, that are slightly out of tune with each other, is not something that has to be proven, it's as well established as the fact that water is wet.

This is what the harmonic beating looks like in a spectrogram, it manifests as periodic broken lines, seen most prominently at the bottom, below 1kHz. The distance between the "breaks" is determined by how much difference in frequency exists between the constituent sources. 

[lordquilton]

It's interesting to me that towards the top of the thread there was no known scientific reason to explain my perception.
Now there's so many they don't even have to deployed all at once.

I thank you for the spectrograph images, but please, I'm not being facetious - I can't hear those!
If you really want to help me understand, then some audio will have to be brought forward.
I surmise that with enough experience with graphs, spectrograph's and other purely technical data, one could have some idea how something sounds without actually hearing it.
I do not have this ability.
I am not interested in "winning" this discussion, I continue it because I'm hoping to come to a better understanding of my direct perception, and for better or for worse it seems the only way for me gain this understanding is through further direct experience.
 

[antigua]

Oct 3, 2017 18:37:56 GMT -5 lordquilton said:

It's interesting to me that towards the top of the thread there was no known scientific reason to explain my perception.

 

No known scientific explanation as to how the base plate could account for what you were perceiving, specifically. 

If you want to relate what your eyes see in the spectrogram with what your ears hear, check out this thread guitarnuts2.proboards.com/thread/8002/analyzing-wolf-tone-effect-spectrogram  In the analysis on "wolf tones", you will both see and hear "beating".

[stratotarts]

Oct 3, 2017 18:37:56 GMT -5 lordquilton said:

[...]
I thank you for the spectrograph images, but please, I'm not being facetious - I can't hear those!
If you really want to help me understand, then some audio will have to be brought forward.
I surmise that with enough experience with graphs, spectrograph's and other purely technical data, one could have some idea how something sounds without actually hearing it.
I do not have this ability.
I am not interested in "winning" this discussion, I continue it because I'm hoping to come to a better understanding of my direct perception, and for better or for worse it seems the only way for me gain this understanding is through further direct experience.
 

Actually, in recent threads the sound samples for these (or at least related) spectrograms were posted along with the spectrogram. So it is in fact possible to audition them.