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Post by blademaster2 on Aug 21, 2019 16:14:42 GMT -5
Perhaps the brightness of rounds will not be as evident when playing on a fretless neck. The thing I always liked about fretless was the grainy, organic tone and of course the glissando. Rounds would also tend to squeak as you slide (which can be a desirable thing, but not always).
If it was mine, I might use flats at first - or even start with nylon-for-electric strings. Then I would 'graduate' to more damaging types of strings if the tone was not satisfactory.
Either way, that job you did looks amazing and I now wish I had tried something like that myself.
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Aug 20, 2019 10:36:10 GMT -5
Post by blademaster2 on Aug 20, 2019 10:36:10 GMT -5
If I have understood both statements correctly, I believe the assumption of linearity with signal and magnetic flux *would* permit superposition to be used and I would go this way myself. However if this assumption is not suitable then the level of signal and flux in the core from one pickup would change the behaviour of the pickup for the superimposed signals from the other, and superposition principles would not work accurately (unless new values for model elements were used to account for the effect of the nonlinearities, but that would require a different circuit model for each case and signal level).
All of these nuances are fun to discuss in theory, but to model these in any accurate way that produces results that can be trusted would certainly make *my* brain hurt. Nonetheless I have been surprised recently when changes in configuration do not produce similar expected sonic results between different guitars/pickups, so I admit that simplifying assumptions are not always accurate but I am too lazy/time-starved to dig deeper. I would turn to laboratory testing, and even more so to listening to the pickups themselves with a guitar to get the true sense of what the effects is. Ultimately, even frequency response curves can only go so far in predicting how something will sound - my favourite test apparatus is a guitar, amplifier and my ears.
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Post by blademaster2 on Aug 19, 2019 11:59:35 GMT -5
Beautiful job!
I was strongly tempted to get a second neck for fretless conversion years ago myself, but as a less-than-stellar-bassist I have not placed it high on my list of priority tasks.
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Aug 19, 2019 11:11:30 GMT -5
Post by blademaster2 on Aug 19, 2019 11:11:30 GMT -5
The effect of loading, either by one pickup on the other or by other resistances in series and/or parallel with them, will always obey Kirchoff's Law and will include the principle of superposition. The trick will always be to model the non-resistive circuit elements in that model (capacitances and inductances, effect of eddy currents, non-linear and frequency-dependent values of many parameters including magnetization curves, temperature dependencies, et cetera).
Keeping things simple/possible to model, assuming all of the non-linearities and variations do not exist, still is useful but the need for the model to consider Kirchoff's Law and superposition cannot be ignored. This applies whether Thevenin or Norton equivalents are used.
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Post by blademaster2 on Jul 31, 2019 9:01:58 GMT -5
I thought of that already, but this guitar uses shorting to switch off pickups, so both PUPs will need to be in parallel at once and frankly I was too lazy to do that added math.
Good suggestion however. I might turn to it today (it was too late last night, and I am struggling with how something so simple did not do what I expected).
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Post by blademaster2 on Jul 31, 2019 0:13:32 GMT -5
Okay, so now I am confused.
I reconnected one of the two Dual Sound DiMarzio pickups in another guitar of mine so that it would switch between series-humbucker and split coil. I *expected* to hear something similar to the difference I have heard in other pickups with that switchable configuration (such as last week's trial using Seymour Duncan Black Winter pickups). The result? *Nothing*. No difference I could detect between the two settings. I went back and checked my connections and all seemed to be correct using an ohmeter and hearing the noise when I touched the signal lines. As far as I can tell it is doing the split coil setting correctly. But no difference in sound - at all.
I then reverted back to the series/parallel connection and confirmed that the very subtle difference I heard before was back, as I expected.
So now I am eating my words about split coil versus parallel. Plus, I am totally confused as to why there was no perceptible change when throwing the switch, while on the other humbuckers the difference was profound. I have another guitar where I wired the bridge pickup to do series, parallel, and either coil alone (same as split coil), and finally phase reversal of the two coils together and the single split coil reverse phase. That guitar, too, sounds very different with single coil settings versus parallel.
So two out of three experiments support my assertion, but this last one not at all.
I will need to give this some further thought, and maybe some more experimentation.
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Post by blademaster2 on Jul 30, 2019 16:38:26 GMT -5
I like your thoughts related to the humbucker. I'd agree that the difference between humbucker in series and single coil is more dramatic then between humbucker in series and humbucker in parallel.
The question is, how to deal with 2-humbucker guitar? For example, series humbuckers can be connected in series or in parallel. Or coil splits can be connected in series or in parallel. How dramatic the difference will be in these cases?
One guy made a video with comparsion of 42 different guitar sounds. Have a look into my highlighted comment with timecodes to be able to switch between different parts of the video easily: I wanted to analyze all switching options to find out which of them are similar to each other. But I was not able to find the proper tool for this. I made spectrograms for each part of the video, but that was not helpful at all.
If applying the same concept to a 2-humbucker guitar, no humbucker can be set to parallel mode (but split exists). However, both of them can be series or parallel to each other.
I have never tried hooking up pickups themselves in series (Brian May does it), and I think that most guitars will more easily support a parallel combination than a series combination with pickup selection (both Les Paul's and Stratocasters switch their pickups in parallel through their selector switches). Again, if the effect is similar to the coils of a single humbucker in series/parallel then I anticipate less of a difference between the two for the pickup selector switching, especially if they are similar impedance and therefore similar loading effect on each other when connected in parallel.
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Post by blademaster2 on Jul 30, 2019 12:14:24 GMT -5
Oh man! Lots of fun there, but if I had a stash of stuff like that my wife would freak!
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Post by blademaster2 on Jul 29, 2019 10:31:24 GMT -5
The key portion of the above is the term "very hot". Coil splitting does make a much larger difference with overwound types of pickups. With a more vintage style HB, I think the parallel/series option works better. It is quieter because it's hum-cancelling, and I find the added brightness similar to what one gets with a split coil. To take an extreme example, I tried coil-spitting a "dual rails" HB (a HB in a SC form factor with tiny coils in series). The resultant volume drop made the single-coil option unusable. I then rewired the two coils for series/parallel, and both are now usable sounds. But even with regular HBs (not "hot" wound), I like parallel better. Of course, individual tastes vary, if they didn't we'd all be playing the same type of guitar. Good point. I have yet to try this with my guitar with DiMarzio Dual Sound Pickups (essentially Super Distortion with Series/parallel switches). That will be the best apples-to-apples comparison I can make. The original Washburn guitar pups had the bridge pup with split coil and it, too was a big change compared to the Dual Sound series/parallel change and supports my claim (and I do not think those were very 'hot' pickups), but more work needs to be done. The coil-split mod to the guitar with dual sounds is the next step in my journey .... Newey, in your example you had a SC size humbucker with which you made your observation of the series/parallel effect. However that places the poles closer together and will be different (per my initial comment about the filtering effect of spacing the poles farther apart) compared to a standard-width humbucker and the larger spacing. As such yours was not quite apples-to-apples either, so I will see what I get with the coils split using the dual sounds as the only change on that guitar and make another observation.
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Post by blademaster2 on Jul 25, 2019 20:45:14 GMT -5
I have mentioned in a few posts here and there that I replaced the stock pickups in my Washburn solidbody guitar (an MG-821, Mercury II Series) with Seymour Duncan Black Winter pickups. I had these recommended to me by a thrash metal guitar player friend of mine. The Washburn guitar is very well built and with excellent hardware (really, only the pickups were deficient), and it set up with incredible action and plays extremely well. Really, these guitars are underrated in my view and the quality is far better than many guitars of higher value. The new pickups needed to be 'trimmed' at the metal base so that they would fit into the Washburn routing (corner radius was larger than the route, and the tabs were slightly too wide), and I also needed to slightly enlarge the width of the route but this only required sanding flat the little bit of lacquer overspray at the edges. Once that was done the new pickups 'barely' slid into place. A beautiful fit. This guitar had no pickup rings and instead bolted its original pickups directly into the body, so I did the same with the new pickups. As a result they new ones sit a little low and I needed to adjust the pole heights up so that the distance to the strings was smaller to get a reasonably strong signal (although the Black Winters are very hot and it sounded fine before I raised the poles). I expect that body-mounted pickups will have more "body wood tone" in the result and some (including Van Halen himself) claim that it sounds better. No, I do not expect to hear any difference blindfolded, but it likely does have more resonance when I play it. Wiring-wise, I used the existing coil split switch in the guitar (which had only worked on the original bridge pickup) and wired both new pickups with coil split capability. That was a good call, since it was very easy to do. Results: The new sounds that the guitar can make are amazing. Compared to standard HH (Les Paul) or SSS (Stratocaster) types of guitars, this guitar now has more variety in sounds and the differences in the various options are all very usable. These so-called 'metal' guitar pickups are very clean, and provide tone that lends themselves to a wide variety of playing styles.... and definitely my friend was right: these pickups can indeed do well in creating that "melt-your-face-off" thrash metal sound when desired, but they can also do so much more. I am very, very pleased with them. Photos follow:
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Post by blademaster2 on Jul 25, 2019 15:19:44 GMT -5
I have been thinking lately about the series/parallel difference in tone, since I have used that for my DiMarzio Dual Sound pups in a guitar that I built ages ago. In that guitar I have found that the difference in sound between series and parallel is pretty subtle. It is there, for sure, with parallel adding a slightly brighter and slightly thinner tone but definitely not a night and day change.
Then recently I installed a set of some very hot (Seymour Duncan Black Winter) humbuckers into another guitar, and I hooked them up to a coil splitting switch (even though I could have opted for series/parallel). The coil split switch is simpler to hook up, as it just grounds out the first coil in the series chain for each pickup and makes them essentially a single coil pup, making no change to the magnetic field shape nor the magnetization of the string.
The coil split difference is *far* more noticeable than the series/parallel difference. Huge.
Now considering that the series/parallel changes the signal level (series pup signal is probably around double the parallel pup signal) and the total pickup impedance (series pup impedance is similarly around double the parallel pup impedance) it tells me that the sonic effect of the electrical load of the cable/amplifier on the pickup's total impedance, and the signal level being doubled or not, is relatively subtle. What seems to make the *biggest* sonic difference in a humbucker is the spreading of the sensor for the signal along the string length between the two sets of poles versus the single point of sensing done by a single coil pickup. That effect noticeably changes the frequencies that are produced, where the humbucker signal has a low-pass filtering due to the wider sensed region of the string length and presumably smooths out its associated harmonic content and loses the highs a little.
Bottom line for me: series/parallel makes a small difference whereas coil splitting for single coil/humbucker makes a much larger difference.
With that, I am actually now considering ditching the series/parallel switching configuration in my old guitar with the DiMarzio dual sound pickups and changing them to coil split switches.
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Post by blademaster2 on Jul 24, 2019 11:34:20 GMT -5
Throughout my career I have worked as an engineer/manager on space robotics (manned and unmanned missions), remote operations techniques using semi-autonomy and artificial intelligence, imaging/instrumentation, satellite actuators, full satellite design/build/test/launch and commissioning, and on-orbit operations. I have met many astronauts, including Buzz.
... and all of that while struggling to improve my abilities to build, play, and experiment with guitars and recording guitar music!
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Post by blademaster2 on Jul 24, 2019 9:54:30 GMT -5
The alarming number here is 5-20% . That's very low. I would say alarmingly high. YMMV. Being a career-long employee in the aerospace sector, I have been interested to see just *what* the conspiracy theorists think is the evidence that it is/was a hoax. None of the 10 or more so-called 'proofs' are true or convincing. If it was a hoax (which I do not believe) it was done with technology that no one believes existed at that time. A great example is the lunar dust that gets kicked up and falls ballistically (not swirling around in the air) - which means it was in a vacuum. Try taking cement powder and tossing it and then see that it would never fall like that in air. There was a large vacuum chamber in existence at that time, but I do not think they could make it also look convincing as lunar footage shows. Then there is the path that the dust follows, which is indicative of less than 1 g of gravity (meaning it would have been a huge vacuum chamber that was *also* accelerating down toward the earth like they do in the KC-135 'vomit comet'. I cannot buy that theory either). Then the famous flag waving thing, which claims there was air in the 'sound stage'. So if they had this huge vacuum chamber, why would they not have used it when they planted the flag, too? This dust *could* be faked on the video footage if they could use CGI, but computers could not do CGI back then .... Of course then we have more recent Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter images showing the landing site and the tracks of the astronauts. There is also the reflector placed on the lunar surface that can be detected. There are the radio signals from the Moon that Russia also received. The list goes on and on. What unfortunately also gets people going are the NASA images that were created as composites. "Faked images" - sure, meant to look prettier than reality but that does not mean that they never went there. I see travel advertisement images of Newfoundland showing a Newfoundland Dog standing on the shore looking at an iceberg and a humpback whale crashing into the ocean. I doubt that actual scene ever existed - it is a composite - but no one is claiming that there is no such thing as that dog, iceberg, or the whale or that no one was ever there to see them.
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Jul 10, 2019 16:49:20 GMT -5
Post by blademaster2 on Jul 10, 2019 16:49:20 GMT -5
The OP only asked to define "load" but since you're asking, yes, I already went down that path some while ago and constructed a spreadsheet for a 2 humbucker model with one voltage source per coil. Parallel humbucker I cheat (thevenin impedance) but single coil, humbucker and their series and parallel combinations are calculated with one voltage source per coil. Well, that gets my attention... for not what you might call the right reason.
Thevenin's Theorem deals with replacing a source with a voltage-producing 'black box', i.e. a constant voltage. But pickups, by their very nature (that being magnetic), are current devices, not voltage. True, you can't have one without the other, but when it comes to analyzing components, it helps to remember that capacitors pass AC voltage, and inductors tend to resist changes in current - not voltage. Thus, I suggest that you try using Norton's Theorem, that of replacing a current source with a black box designed for such analysis. Your 'cheating' should come closer to real-world results.
Or at least that's how we did it, back when I went to school (when dirt was still a novelty ).
HTH
sumgai
Whether you decide to use Thevenin's or Norton's equivalent usually depends on the magnitude of the load impedance versus the source impedance. A much higher source impedance, which is possibly true for a pickup, tends to behave closer to a current source. However, ignoring the cable capacitance for the moment, the amplifier input impedance is usually much higher still than the pickup impedance across much of the frequencies. As such it is not an obvious choice, and more likely either one could be used. Like JohnH, I have generally used Thevenin models for guitar pickups whenever I did simulations. This makes sense to me with the signal being fed to a tube amp, which is also a voltage-sensitive device that draws very little current. Using that approach, along with the principle of superposition, should (in theory) yield a fairly good prediction of the response - provided the complex impedances of the sources/loads in the end-to-end circuit of the guitar/cable/amplifier are modeled correctly. As with any simulation models, the modeling part of it - correctly modeling the complex impedances of the system - is where the real challenge lies.
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Post by blademaster2 on Jul 5, 2019 8:41:05 GMT -5
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Post by blademaster2 on Jul 4, 2019 8:48:09 GMT -5
I looked at that article but did not see anything where power was connected within that footswitch. - it was all passive.
It can be done, however, if you wanted to include a battery in the footswitch to light up the LED to indicate a particular switch state (footswitches never show you what state they are in visually). You would need to have a connection being switched that is not involved in the other connections in the unit (like a third pole on the switch) so you could connect to, say, a 9V battery positive terminal to the LED and series resistor and back to the 9V battery negative terminal when the switch is at the setting you want to indicate. For that voltage the resistor would be around 1.4kohms and could be pretty low power rating (only dissipating 35mW so a 1/10W rated resistor is fine). A 9V battery with around a (typical) 100mAH capacity would last around 20 hours with this indicator steadily on.
There might be a safe way to connect this through the DPDT switch shown in that article but it needs more digging into which pole is switched and trying to avoid any coupled switch event 'glitch' from getting into the guitar signal and being audible, which might be more likely in that configuration.
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Post by blademaster2 on Jul 2, 2019 8:44:53 GMT -5
Remember to add a series resistor to the LED to set the current. Otherwise if the voltage switched to it is higher than, say, 2 Volts, it will draw much more current than you want.
For example, a 10mA current (typical to light them up, but I have seen 5mA work just as well) into a LED requires a resistor of around 300 ohms in series if the voltage you are switching is 5Vdc. (To get very precise current would need to look at the data sheet for the particular LED, but many are around 2 Volts across them so you subtract that from the applied voltage and divide the result by the desired current you want through the LED).
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Post by blademaster2 on May 30, 2019 16:20:36 GMT -5
You can see why the pickup companies are reluctance to share technical details. It might effectively be identical to Super Distortion, but since neither has an especially distinctive sound, how would you know? The fact that two pickups are marketed differently is reason enough for them to exist, even if they are otherwise identical. I'm hoping the price of LCR meters comes down to be similar to that of a generic multimeter, so that people who have Black Winters on hand can tell us what the inductance is, since the company that makes them would rather keep us in the dark. Good points. In my case I also have a guitar that has DiMarzio Super Distortions installed in it. My impression from trying my friend's guitar with the Black Winters - although I never tried at the time that my friend was visiting to do a good A/B comparison - was that the Black Winter has more of a biting, crunchy tone through my Marshall combo than the Super Distortion pups do. Of course any differences in age/condition of the strings would also influence this a fair amount even if I had done that. Specification for the Super Distortion was around 10kohms resistance and 8.5H inductance if I recall correctly (published data when I bought them many years ago, not measured by me), so there is apparently a difference at least in the DC resistance compared to the Black Winter ones. What I heard was compelling enough that I might just get a pair and install them into one of my guitars to try them out. As pickups go they are not cheap, "but I'm worth it" (or so I will tell my wife!).
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Post by blademaster2 on May 29, 2019 9:28:00 GMT -5
I had a chat with a friend of mine, who is a professional metal guitarist, about his pickups of choice. His answer: Seymour Duncan Black Winter
When I played his guitar, equipped with one of these in the bridge position, it was far clearer and 'crunchier' than another guitar I had with me - of the exact same brand and model - with stock pickups. This was through the same amplifier at the same settings.
I see that these models use ceramic magnets and are wound quite 'hot' (16.9kohms), but that is all I know of their specifications. I saw nothing on their frequency response out on the internet.
Has anyone done any controlled measurements with these pups? I am very curious how they compare to, say, the DiMarzio Super Distortion or equivalent models.
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Post by blademaster2 on May 23, 2019 17:27:42 GMT -5
"Electrostatic" refers to a DC charge stored on something by its capacitance. This occurs noticeably on our bodies when walking on carpet (called triboelectric charging) during dry weather and we discharge this onto something else like a doorknob and feel the slight 'jolt'. It also causes a one-time 'snap' sound through the amplifier when *first* touching the strings on a properly-grounded guitar, and I have also noticed a series of quieter 'snaps' happening as I slide my hand up and down the neck (not touching the strings) when the triboelectric charging and discharging occurs between my hand and the neck finish.
Static means it is not varying over time, so unlike hums and buzzes I do not think we generally encounter electrostatic 'noise' otherwise in any other way on an electric guitar than the cases I noted above.
For guitar noise we are more likely looking at electromagnetic interference ('EMI'), which is also sometimes called radio-frequency interference ("RFI"), only in that case a high frequency RF wave gets demodulated by the guitar/amplifier back down into noise within audio frequencies, which is of course much lower than radio-frequencies. The EMI noise is picked up by the guitar in several ways, and the most notable is the EMI fields from lights/appliances passing through the guitar and causing a line-frequency hum and its harmonics (this noise can be cancelled through use of humbucker pickups). Other ways that this noise can be produced include human body capacitance providing a path for induced EMI current getting into the guitar shield when someone touches the strings and going to ground, which in turn will cause a voltage waveform - there is a lot of challenge in trying to eliminate this form of noise ingress because reducing it requires very low resistance ("Class R" bonding possibly) and low inductance in the shield-to-ground path and the coupling is also influenced by the resistance of your body in contacting the strings.
The voltage field component of EMI can be almost-eliminated with a Faraday cage ('shielding' the guitar electronics using conductive material - not necessarily ferrous - that can 'ground out' the voltage fields), which prevents them from reaching the circuitry (more or less) however the magnetic field component of EMI cannot be blocked by shielding and can only be redirected using ferrous material or cancelled by humbucking or an equivalent differential detection technique like the twisting of balanced microphone cables. Also, given that electromagnetic fields propagate as waves there is a "directionality" to them, sometimes simply rotating my guitar to a different angle can make EMI noise get better (or worse).
So, that is my electrical-engineering understanding of the phenomenon of guitar noise sources. And yet, with all of that theory brought to bear, it is still difficult for all guitars (especially single coil ones) to be made completely free of noise.
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Post by blademaster2 on May 21, 2019 11:42:51 GMT -5
Actually I disagree with Sumgai on one subtlety here: An electric guitar as an instrument *includes* the amplifier. Focusing on, or exploiting, the amplifier's tonal characteristics is all part of playing electric guitar. Given the complexities and interactions of this end-to-end tone-generating system, and the never-ending debate on the influence (or not) of the wood of a solid-body guitar on the tone, a player is playing the pickups/amplifier as much as he is ever playing the guitar (and then it all feeds back into the body more and more as volume goes up). I do not expect we can ever separate all of that into its parts. Since we're in the mode of disagreeing.....
I can separate the parts of the discussion, quite easily in fact.
I'll agree that an amplifier is part and parcel of the tone of an electric guitar, but the very term "amplifier" is the key here - an amplifier is meant to to exactly that - amplify what was put in to it, nothing more. When you have an amp that adds to that with various effects (Gain being my personal bugaboo), you are no longer just amplifying, you are modifying the tone along its way to the speaker. And here I speak even to the added reverb, but not to commonly found tremolo. The former does affect the tonality (usually reducing some of the treble), but tremolo merely adjusts the volume level in a repetitive pattern. (At least, that all it's supposed to do.)
How many amplifiers today, even those of 30 and 40 years ago(!) add a lot of baloney effects to produce a "different, unique" tone? How many of them add modeling? (Answer: a lot.)
I understand that in today's world/market, makers/sellers need to stand out from the crowd. But it's one thing to embellish tone to accomplish a given ideal (pure, clean, etc. or perhaps simply loud, quality of tone be damned), and another thing entirely to substitute a completely different sound, and call that "the best sounding amp you'll ever buy". They're correct - it has a sound, but does it have The Tone? I think not.
And no, for those who are just tuning in, I'm a Fender owner/former player, but I don't think that Fender has always had the best tone. I like them, that's true, but in fact I'd opt for an old Gibson RVT79, or even an GT17 (or 19), given my druthers. Neither of those are particularly loud, but they are are so well suited to many genres that don't require stadium-sized volume levels. And if you wanna talk bass, then you can safely stop with Ampeg's B-15, the very definition of how to do it correctly the first time out the door.
Tonewood? See many discussions on this Forum.
The tone is really in one's fingers? I think reTrEaD said it best - "I shook my fingers all night, and not one Tone dropped of them - ever!!" Need I go on? (Probably not, eh? )
And lest we forget, we should let ashcatlt chime in with his version of what constitutes tone. Versus sound....
HTH
sumgai
I guess we will need to disagree on those, rather subtle, points about tone. To me, "tone" is simply the individual's perception of the quality of the sound coming from the end-to-end instrument. The player's fingers, the guitar itself, and the amplifier/volume all are involved. Separating "Tone" from "Sound" is opinion-based. And simple amplification without any distortion/nonlinearity (however small) is only theoretical, since all amplifiers will colour the sound coming from the guitar signal to some extent even if their are no deliberate effects in the chain. The same guitar will sound slightly different when plugged into my AMPEG compared to my VOX amplifier. Both are clean (relatively), no effects added, and both have great "Tone" - just different despite having the same guitar plugged in and the same player playing it. To me the guitar and amplifier always remain inseparable as the "instrument".
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Post by blademaster2 on May 17, 2019 9:57:38 GMT -5
Actually, tone is in the ear of the beholder, I think we can all agree on that. But there are certain, shall we say, universal concepts that attract much more than a small fraction of the listening audience..
One of the major differences we already see in this very thread, is the difference between Tone and Sound. Jimi Hendrix made it to the big time by not relying on Tone, but on Sound. (As did Robin Trower, later on.) And here, I get to quote a friend of mine, a former teacher in Nashville (where you had to be a cut above the rest in order to make it at all). He said "That man's not playing the guitar, he's playing the amp!"
Whether it's amps or pedals, if you going beyond the guitar's natural output in order to obtain a sound (and I'm excluding sustain here, except where sustain is a byproduct of distortion), then you're in Sound territory, and no longer in Tone territory.
As noted, many players tend to develop a synergy between their perceived tone, and what/how they play. I myself tend to think like a sax player when I solo, because I like to use a sax sound from my synth machine(s). I can't think in terms of double-stops unless I'm using a piano or organ tonality/sound. But wouldn't you know it, I almost refuse to play the bridge of Amazing Grace if I don't get to use the Bagpipes tonality/sound. Sends shivers up and down my spine... and I'm not even a Scotsman! But I can bring tears to the eyes of more than one person in the house, it just sounds right, for that particular tune.
So. Why care about tone? Some don't need to, some don't want to, and some think that's the sum-total of the endgame. It's all over the map, just like ToneWood (and it's offshoots) - it's a crap-shoot as to what the next listener might want to hear, so one might as well forget about what other people want to hear, and make themselves happy.
HTH
sumgai
Actually I disagree with Sumgai on one subtlety here: An electric guitar as an instrument *includes* the amplifier. Focusing on, or exploiting, the amplifier's tonal characteristics is all part of playing electric guitar. Given the complexities and interactions of this end-to-end tone-generating system, and the never-ending debate on the influence (or not) of the wood of a solid-body guitar on the tone, a player is playing the pickups/amplifier as much as he is ever playing the guitar (and then it all feeds back into the body more and more as volume goes up). I do not expect we can ever separate all of that into its parts.
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Post by blademaster2 on May 16, 2019 13:59:16 GMT -5
That is a very clean and professional-looking job. Nicely done. The finish texture looks like other high-quality Gibson finishes I saw in the 1980's.
I admit that the green did not seem as promising at first to me, but it works and the overall look is one that Gibson should be proud to still bear their name.
It is a shame that the sound is not inspiring to you - does your friend feel the same. Despite the effort you already spent on the pups, perhaps different pups would improve it? I would myself probably try a Strat-style pup at the neck position (like a Seymour Duncan SSL-1) to see how it sounds (I have done this by removing the SSL-1 cover so it fits straight inside a HB mounting ring, but I did also drill new mounting holes in the ring to take it closer to the fingerboard).
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Post by blademaster2 on May 16, 2019 8:49:13 GMT -5
Interesting discussions and opinions. I am always eager to hear people's opinion of great guitar tone, and examples of it.
I want to remind everyone that my initial comment was essentially that there is (electric) guitar music for which the tone was not really good or noteworthy, in the listener's opinion, where it did not matter because it is still appreciated for the composition and musicianship. That was why the thread was entitled "Why care about tone?"
My secondary point was that there are subtleties where IMHP the guitar tone is evident only to the player himself/herself - which in my case is inspiring as I play my own music - but is unimportant or even inaudible to the listeners. Not to say that we cannot appreciate it, but the finer points might escape our ears if we are not the player.
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Post by blademaster2 on May 13, 2019 11:22:31 GMT -5
A young guitarist asked me once to say which guitarists had the best tone in my opinion.
It sounded like an easy question until I tried to answer it. My problem was that the guitar music I liked the most, and the solos I liked the most, were not examples of amazing guitar sounds but more that the composition or musicianship was what spoke to me.
Here are some examples of music I like very much with not-so-impressive guitar tone (IMHP): - Black Dog by Led Zeppelin (always sounded like a cheap fuzz pedal, but who cares since the song is legendary!) - We Will Rock You by Queen (I know, I know, but I always liked May's playing more than his tone, which I found to be limiting and nasal at times) - All of Boston's first album (guitar tone, to me, was too soft and fuzzy but I love the music) - Won't Get Fooled Again by The Who (sounds 'crashy' and poorly-defined) - Hocus Pocus by Focus (low sustain, not a rich distortion but what is there loses the notes in the chords)
On the other hand, there are players known for their tone, like Eric Johnson, where their best playing does not (IMHP) show off their tone very well. Perhaps the difference is too subtle in these cases. I saw Eric live and never was struck by a particularly noteworthy tone, although he played well.
So maybe, as I have said in the past, guitar tone is more for the inspiration and appreciation of the guitarist themselves playing it than it is for the audience. As a listener, even as a guitarist-listener, it is either not very noticeable compared to the composition and playing, or it is inaudible. I have made recordings in the distant past where I cannot tell from listening which of my guitars was used (and I have long forgotten from the session itself), and yet they do indeed sound different when I play them.
[Just to add a final comment for the record, I have always loved the tone that Van Halen had for the first album (not so much the subsequent ones), and that Ritchie Blackmore achieved in Deep Purple, and that Hendrix achieved.]
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Post by blademaster2 on Apr 25, 2019 15:47:08 GMT -5
I do see sandblasting the finish like that as slightly different from the 'relic' look. Still, I prefer a gloss finish as it shows off the woodgrain better.
I never had interest in seeing a perfectly good new guitar get beaten up in an effort to emulate honest wear from a real player over many years. Fortunately (!!??) I am old enough to have guitars that do have honest wear from my own and prior owners' gentle handling and playing, and even some finish checking. No road wear - they are in far better shape than artificial 'relics' - but at least it is honest.
I spoke to a guy who even refuses to clean out the dirt from people's fingers on the textured control knobs. Ew.
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Post by blademaster2 on Apr 25, 2019 11:03:56 GMT -5
If it is a 9-volt battery sometimes the connectors get loose and on the cable connecting to it you can use pliers to gently squeeze the one that connects to the positive battery terminal (the one that springs open slightly) to make it grip tighter.
Given that your problem is similar to the previous one you had where cleaning these terminals worked, it is worth a try. It does sound like a poor connection somewhere and this is a likely place.
If that does not work then the next place I would look is the output jack or your cable, as these connections can be intermittent. If so, replacement of the jack (or your cable) is probably the way to fix that.
If you can get at them, cleaning the potentiometers (I am assuming this guitar has a volume control but I do not have an image of it in front of me) might also be needed.
Whichever of the above it is, it is all fixable. Good luck
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Post by blademaster2 on Apr 23, 2019 16:19:21 GMT -5
... and you can get bipolar capacitors to avoid the problem with the polarity question (I used one to fix my solid state Marshall Amp years ago) I think the term is actually 'non-polarized'. Bipolar can be used to describe certain transistors and well ... me. Of course - not something I refer to often but I believe you are right about the conventional name for these things (however with a Google search just now I saw both terms used here and there but I still think you are correct). Whatever they are called, my solid state Marshall combo works well to this day since I used one in place of a reverse-biased tantalum capacitor that was in the original build. It was odd, since the board was assembled correctly according to the silk screen designations but there were a few volts of DC reverse-biasing this coupling capacitor. It created occasional 'pop' sounds but otherwise worked properly, and several repair shops were unable to find the problem so I bought the amplifier very cheap.
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Post by blademaster2 on Apr 11, 2019 12:00:14 GMT -5
... and you can get bipolar capacitors to avoid the problem with the polarity question (I used one to fix my solid state Marshall Amp years ago)
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Post by blademaster2 on Apr 11, 2019 11:58:55 GMT -5
I would expect you need a resistor (high value is okay) to tie the midpoint of the two capacitors to a known DC reference if you plan to use two in series.
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