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Post by antigua on Mar 12, 2024 10:42:28 GMT -5
I know that PRS aren't always looked at with kindness outside of PRS Land (where they are looked at with too much kindness), but they seem to be attempting more interesting pickups than most of the big names. The new Narrowfield DD pickups in the NF-53 are reported to sound quite good, and they use 12 rectangular magnetic pole pieces with 8 metal inserts in between them. Not exactly the same as using magnet rails, but possibly similar in practice? I read about them here prsguitars.com/blog/post/the_story_of_narrowfield_pickups , PRS's market position is to be for lawyers who can't decide if they like Fenders or Gibsons more because they love Hendrix and Clapton with equal amounts of zeal. So their mini humbucker design continues in the tradition of uncreatively averaging the a Fender and a Gibson design. About the metal in between pole pieces, we see that with the DiMarzio inter-pole piece slugs that they actually have a patent for. I would assume it's just steel pieces all the way across with a magnet underneath, because anything else would cost a lot more to produce and just make the pickup not work as well. If you took a blade single coil humbucking pickup, and cut little divisions in the blades, the magnetic field wouldn't change much at all, you're just adding some trivial air gap in inconsequential places. But the more important thing would be in terms of conductivity, this could reduce eddy currents to a large degree and increase the Q factor. Knowing PRS, I'm not sure that was even intentional on their part. I googled "Narrowfield DD pickups q factor eddy currents" and there's no evidence of these words all appearing on the same web page at once, at least until I press Post in a moment. That NF-53 looks pretty nice, but I'd wager dollars to doughnuts that PRS is probably getting help from Dall-E 2 for it's latest amalgamations.
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Post by antigua on Mar 12, 2024 10:28:15 GMT -5
I'm not aware of any dual-rail pickups that use alnico magnets as the rails themselves. I assume this is for some reason not viable? Well, the Firebird pickups do. They are not rail pickups per se, but internally they have alnico bars inside the bobbins. There are multiple reasons why not rails. First, manufacturers hate to use multiple magnets because they are a big part of the pickup cost. But also, the magnets are brittle so would break easily if left exposed. You may say, what about the round magnets? My understanding is that because AlNiCo is a self reinforcing magnet, where one side of the magnet helps keep the other side magnetized, They tend to work better when they're long, with the poles at the far ends. The cylinder shape is probably close to ideal with a 1:4 or 1:5 length to width ratio. I think this also explains why the bar magnets have such non uniform flux density along the length.
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Post by antigua on Mar 12, 2024 10:20:26 GMT -5
Thanks for all the education on this! So from the sounds of it if a traditional humbucker has everything too close together to create comb filtering within the audible range, then it would have to be that for a Strat-sized dual blade that's even more of the case. Which would leave the tonal difference, as stated, largely due to the difference in Q from Alnico pole pieces versus having a bar magnet on the bottom with two metal rails that aren't magnets, right? I'm not aware of any dual-rail pickups that use alnico magnets as the rails themselves. I assume this is for some reason not viable? Zexcoil Z-Series use metal pole pieces but then do use individual magnets at the bottom of each pole. Would this give a a result more similar to traditional alnico pole pieces instead of rails? The Mojotone Quiet Coil is a rail with AlNiCo bars, like a miniature Firebird pickup. What makes it less than viable is the low permeability and lower strength of the bar magnet form factor of AlNiCo as compared to steel. The sound is weaker than what you get with the larger round AlNiCo pole pieces. I made a post about the pickups a few years ago. For Zexcoils, the individual magnets don't mean much other than to control the polarity pole by pole. The Q factor would be higher because the potential for eddy currents is lower with those thin steel blades. I'm not familiar with the idea that they use different steel grades to get different sounds, but I think all an all it would just mean a weaker pickup instead of a stronger pickup when you opt to use a steel with lower permeability. The steel has just one role to fulfil, which it either does well or it does poorly.
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Post by antigua on Mar 12, 2024 10:12:37 GMT -5
The comb filtering due to adding two pickups is usually shown as continuing right up to the highest harmonics. The impulse response of such a filter would be two time spaced identical impulses for one input pulse. That may nearly be true for a humbucker pole spacing but we know that the travel of the wave on the string is dispersive, i.e. the impulse changes shape as it travels. So the two output pulses in the impulse response will have different shapes. The pure cancellation at short wavelengths seems unlikely.
Another factor I forgot about, if we're talking about higher frequency harmonics, they don't last long after the transient. So if you say the comb filtering only effects higher harmonics, then it will be limited to a "pick attack" modification of the sound. I think low harmonics are definitely filtered as the math describes, because you can fake the sound of "notch positions" with a graphic EQ by copying the comb filter, but not only that, if not for the comb filtering, the notch positions would sound more like a true blend of constituent pickup signals.
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Post by antigua on Mar 11, 2024 16:03:34 GMT -5
With an eBow you can get a string to put out a constant waveform. If you were to record a humbucker, and each coil by itself, I think the effect of comb filtering should be the difference between the humbucker recording, and the recording of the two coils overlapped. Maybe it's more complicated than that though.
I think the comb filtering between neck and bridge pickups is audible in the fact that it doesn't just sound like a neck and bridge pickup overlapping, which I've heard in the past with guitars where I had wired each pickup to send to different amps. I would suspect that you wouldn't heard a difference in timbre from the comb filtering of a humbucker, just a slightly reduced treble on the lower frequency wound strings. It wouldn't be a hard cut off of treble, just a thinning out, like what happens with combined pickups in the mid frequencies.
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Post by antigua on Mar 9, 2024 4:01:18 GMT -5
Could the Ilitch sized dummy coil be made a lot smaller with a high permeability ferrite core? The air core dummy with a lot impedance has to have a lot of area, but I'm thinking with a ferrite core, maybe if could be really small and still have low impedance.
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Post by antigua on Mar 9, 2024 3:02:31 GMT -5
Yeah, but one reason why the Micro Coils have less noise is in the small internal radius of the coils. The larger the radius, the more inductance all other things being equal, and also a reduced degree of coupling to external magnetic fields. I'm not sure if Bill came to that with a full understanding or by experiment but it certainly works that way. I know of no other designer that recognized that opportunity and leveraged it. At the end of the day, he was doing the right things to minimize the noise - both electric and magnetic - at least in the Micro Coils and I think with the others too.
EMI is a general term that could apply to either electrostatic or magnetic interference. It can also refer to interference from electromagnetic waves, but as ms mentioned, it's not applicable in this case.
The topic is not restricted to pickups. Many, many electronics devices have needed some kind of protection from external fields and so the field is pretty full of solutions. For example, toroidal inductors, which offer exceptionally good isolation from external fields and also contain their internal fields from outside circuits very well. Some early humbucking pickup patents reference existing patents for humbucking transformers, inductors and so on that were for general electronic use. It was not a new idea.
The Lace Sensor also seems to be low noise because of the very small coil located right near the top of the pickup, and the ferrite magnet probably invites less noise than the pole pieces of regular passive pickups. I'm not sure if the Lace Sensor or Micro Coil came first, but the Lace Sensor seems to take the innovation a couple steps further. I think EMI and RFI all being used interchangeably is why the difference between electrostatic and magnetic noise isn't common knowledge. But the other reason is that magnetic interference seems to be specific to lower frequencies, because if the magnetic noise is a high enough frequency, it will be blunted by thin shielding. The same shielding that blocks electrostatic noise would block magnetic, and they dont have to be addressed separately in most applications, I would think.
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Post by antigua on Mar 9, 2024 2:26:44 GMT -5
Thanks! That makes sense, that the magnetized area of the string would be continuous but the distance between the string and the coils would differ slightly and introduce comb filtering. Am I understanding that correctly? The string moves up and down in a broad movement, that's the fundamental, it represents the lowest bass frequency. But then all the treble you hear is harmonic movement. In the vibrating string the harmonics are all moving up and down at the same time, at different points along the string, in intervals based on the harmonic number. You can get an idea of this from this graphic: As an aside, when you do a harmonic at the 12th fret, the fundamental, the largest one at the top, gets snuffed out, but all the higher harmonics keep on going. For all the harmonics, if the string is moving up over here, they it has to be moving down over there. The comb filtering happens when you have two coils, and a given harmonic is moving up over one coil, but down over the other, that particular harmonics cancels itself out. The distance between the coils determines what harmonic intervals / frequencies will cancel, because this is a geometric situation between the placement of coils and the physical string width of the moving harmonics. When you combine two pickups, like neck and bridge, the pickups are so far apart that there is significant audible comb filtering, and that's a defining aspect of that sound, but with a PAF style humbucker, the coils are so close together than comb filtering is only at high frequencies and is non existent for all intents and purposes But there's also just the fact that you get more treble harmonics nearer to the bridge, regardless of whether you have one coil or two or four, so if you have a a pickup like a Lace Dually, of course the coil that's closer to the bridge gets more treble than the coil that's further away. With a PAF style humbucker, you get a combination of the bridge sound that is both near and far from the bridge, which gives it a richer sound, having more base and more treble and a single coil, as well as more overall output.
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Post by antigua on Mar 7, 2024 0:59:48 GMT -5
So if I slide a sheet of mu-metal between the strings and the pickup, the sound should go dead quiet? I can try it, I have some stashed away in a tote with experiment supplies. If it fails, then I think the idea that it or aluminum can block magnetic noise is off the table, and vice versa. From what I've read, in order for a conductor to cancel magnetic waves, it needs to be several inches thick, thickness depending on the frequency, and then all that is really happening is that eddy currents are repulsing the magnetic wave.
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Post by antigua on Mar 7, 2024 0:52:47 GMT -5
Since there isn't a separate thread about the similar DiMarzio Cruisers I figure here might be as good of a place as any to drop info I got from DiMarzio. According to them, both the neck and bridge Cruisers have an inductance of only 1.38H! Goes a long way to explain why people find them so anemic, and is significantly below even lower output Strat single coils. Also antigua are you still adding data to your table at www.echoesofmars.com/pickup_data/viewer/ ? I didn't see the Fast Track data in there so I assume you're not I forgot to add it, but I will. It's a bit of a pain to add because I have to edit the spreadsheet, then export it as a CSV file and upload it to the web server.
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Post by antigua on Mar 7, 2024 0:46:46 GMT -5
I've been looking at a lot of stack and rail Strat-sized pickups and notably they almost all have higher winds/inductance than vintage single coils for a darker and higher output. Many guitarists prefer this result, but for those that want a brighter lower output a common recommendation is to wire them parallel instead of in series. It made me wonder: what is the difference in result between achieving a given inductance via coils in series versus coils in parallel? For example, two 3H coils in parallel should be around 1.5H,or two 0.75H coils could be out in series for about the same 1.5H. How would these two configurations sound or behave differently? I think coil tapping is a good way to get two choices of inductances. The most popular tapped coil on the market are Seymour Duncan's offering, tapped SSL-3, SSL-4 or SSL-5 but they split the coil 50% and 100% which IMO are far from idea choices. The 50% would be weak and the 100% would be dark and dull, no middle ground. I bought a Chinese Tele neck pickup with tapping of 3.1H or 2.3H www.tdpri.com/threads/waaah-music-stores-red-colored-tele-pickups.1093066/ , and the split is about 75% and 100% This gives me an idea though, a Rail style humbucker could be designed more around the idea of being a two tone single coil, where you have one blade/coil with an inductance of 2 henries, and another blade/coil with 1 henry, which could be split to 2h or series to 3h, and then you'd get a choice of vintage or "hot" single coil tones. In series it would humbuck partially also. The Fender Fireball pickup in the Meteora model works on this basis, but in a full sized PAF form factor. I think in a single coil sized rail humbucker it could be a killer single coil stand-in product. Regarding the coil size and sensing area, my understanding is that the coil has almost nothing to do with the sensing window. It's acting as an antenna, which if placed far away, pickup up little sound, and if placed close, it picks up more sound. Having the coil be wrapped around the pole pieces is just the most idea place that it could be, but in fact there are pickups that place the coil outside, such as the TV Jones / Gretch HiLoTron. Suppose that you magnetize just the bridge pickup, but you activate the neck pickup, and also suppose that the neck pickup has no magnetization at all. Very faintly, you would hear the sound of a bridge sound from the neck pickup, because that's where the string that is being magnetized. The magnetized portion of string is broadcasting a signal. Although, if a coil is arranged in such a way that it receive both positive and negative flux at the same time, which must happen to some degree, since the coil and the guitar string are not in the same exact place, then you get some proportionate cancelation. That cancellation shouldn't be especially frequency dependent, unless the part of the signal that cancels and the parts that does not are of difference frequency profiles. To some small extent that would happen, because the guitar string's harmonic output varies along its length. If more content from further down the string cancels as opposed to content at the bridge, then more high end treble will have been preserved and lower harmonics will have cancelled out.
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Post by antigua on Mar 1, 2024 16:51:17 GMT -5
Oh, RW/RP will do it, that must be how they make their HBs. Rotating a coil wouldnt change the north south orientation of the magnet.
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Post by antigua on Mar 1, 2024 11:08:40 GMT -5
Sharing a tidbit here I stumbled across that I think is relevant to the discussion: In this thread Gclef posted seeming confirmation from Lace that all of their newer humbucker models are simply different (now vintage) Sensor designs under the covers. This would, in effect, make their humbucker model line-up essentially a bunch of different Dually's. The magnetic fields would have to be reversed to get humbucking, so I guess they have to be difference in that respect. that's would be more complicated since they don't use the bar magnet design, which makes it very easy to end up with opposite polarities through the coils. I'm grateful to Lace for making the Alumitone. It's not very popular, but it's probably the most interesting passive pickup design since the Filter'tron / PAF, if not more interesting than those. Especially in how it involved low impedance and high impedance in one pickup that, humbucks, weights almost nothing, and is mostly air where you would expect a big coil to exist. It's a futuristic design.
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Post by antigua on Feb 27, 2024 13:14:51 GMT -5
Suppose that you have a 10,000 turn single coil pickup, using steel cores or blade. Now make a pickup with two 5,000 turn coils in series. An important difference is that the output levels could be similar, but the inductance of the two coil pickup would be lower. This is because output level varies roughly with the number of turns while the inductance can vary as quickly as the square of the number of turns. If so, the inductance of each of the two coils is one quarter of that of the single coil, and the series combination is one half. Now try four coils. Output level should stay about the same, but the inductance should drop further. So it seems to me that a quad rail pickup is a way of keeping the output level high and lowering the inductance. Another way of putting it is that it lowers the proportion of parasitic L and C relative to the amount of voltage generated, not unlike spacing out the circuit on a PCB for the same kind of reasons.
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Post by antigua on Feb 27, 2024 13:12:09 GMT -5
I didn't live in America in the '70s, but their claim is (if I understand his claim correctly); if you saw a guitar on stage in the '70s and even '80s with cream humbuckers, that was a DiMarzio. They didn't take aesthetics into consideration back them, that came up more in the 80's and 90's, but this is like saying that if a guy wears a green shirt, then you know his shirt from REI, no green shirts for any other company.
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Post by antigua on Feb 27, 2024 0:10:35 GMT -5
> There was almost no love for the Strat middle pickup solo, which was kind of surprising to me.
I'm not too surprised, it isn't heard a lot in popular music, I don't think. I often use it for a clean rhythm tone that is less bassy and more plucky that that neck, but not as harsh as the bridge. I guess that's a statement of the obvious, but I would say I value its utility more than its tone.
> When people talk about series combination tones (a lot of folks like a Tele neck + bridge in series) I don't really understand those to be distinct "tones" in the way that I think of them, but more like a way of manipulating the wind and therefor the output/resonant peak/etc (although as you pointed out, series-vs-parallel does affect the balance between the coils).
The tone is fine, my issue is mostly that it's so much louder than the bridge or neck alone. I still think the parallel sound is a prettier sound.
> I think it also helps to keep in mind how dynamic the positioning considerations are. For example, we think of a single coil at the 24th harmonic as having the fullest or "sweetest" tone, but in actuality once you play above the 12th fret then a single coil placed where it is on a 24-fret guitar gets closer to the middle of the vibrating length. So it's all dynamic and interacting with the playing.
That is true, I notice that with my 24 fret guitars, but playing past the 12th fret is almost a special occasion, for most music.
> Not to veer to far off topic but I'm curious where your current opinions are on rails vs stacks given your long journey so far. And, completely unrelated, would also be curious about where active and shielded (i.e. Lace) land in the scheme of things for you.
I think lower inductance rails are the best, with steel blades - with the full rails in place. The Seymour Duncan Vintage Rails would be cool, but they cut the rails in half, probably for looks, and sabotage the magnetic coupling, which I think was a misguided design choice. I have some very hot rails, the Bill Corgan DiMarzios, with those run in parallel I think you get a really killer Fender-like quiet single coil sound. SD Hot Rails in parallel probably work as well, but I've never bought or tried them out. Amazon sells rails of this sort for as little as $12 so there's no need to buy DiMarzio or Seymour Duncan rails. I would go so far as to say the <$20 rails you get on Amazon are the pinnacle of pickup design, for this reason, and for all their flexibility. These quad buckers are the best thing, times two. I just haven't had the urge to experiment with them yet, mostly because I felt that I retreated to the standard tones when I spent some time with the P-Rails.
The Seymour Duncan Little 59, Little JB should be killer for the fact that they're like rails, but the screws, which seem to be mostly decorative, lower the magnetic coupling by a lot, making them sound softer than proper rails. They sound decent in split or parallel, but again, a little soft.
On paper, the steel blades should cause eddy currents that soften up the sound more than you'd want with Fender single coils, but with 500k pots the Q factor is retained well, and you get a sharp sound from the narrow aperture, and I think the two steel blades have a strong coupling with the guitar strings, especially if they protrude up out of the pickup, creating a reasonably strong magnetism at the strings.
The Mojotone Quiet Coils are rails that use AlNiCo bar rails, like a miniature Gibson Firebird pickup. They seem killer in concept, AlNiCo blades instead of AlNiCo pole pieces, but they had a weaker coupling with the guitar strings, and a weaker sound. The AlNiCo blades are not as strong as Fender's AlNiCo pole pieces, and they have a lower permeability than the steel blades, two strikes against them. It's the kind of thing I thought would have worked out well until I tried them and discovered it didn't. Mojotone had fake looking pole pieces in the pickup cover, I think they were on the right track but they didn't look very realistic. Maybe steel blades with a neodymium base magnet would be worth trying instead, that's almost what a Zexcoil is.
Stacks end up having a mushy sound because the dummy coil is co-axial with the primary coil, and the dummy coil is high impedance. They're kind of a stupid design when you think about it, when you consider that a PAF humbucker uses the same basic parts, but gives you *more* output rather than less. A stacked humbucker is a tacky compromise of a pickup. I tried several but as of now none of my guitars have any installed.
The Lace Sensors aren't bad, not humbucking, but just single coils with an improved S/N ratio, by having a small coil places very close to the strings, and decent grounded shielding. I think the main reason they don't sound like regular Strat pickups is because they used rubberized ferrite magnets, it's a weaker type of magnet intended to fill odd shapes, but isn't very strong. Companies like Lace try to turn lemons into lemonade by saying it reduces string pull and sound more natural, but guitarists don't want that, they really want are Strat pickups that sounds unnatural and magnetically sucks at the strings, it's "the sound". The rails with steel blades have low magnetism also compared to AlNiCo pole pieces, but to my ears, Lace Sensors sound softer than rails. I think that's a bit of a plus with the Lace Sensor Blue or Red when they're faking a humbucker tone, but a drawback for the Golds, when you want the Fender single coil bite of a stronger magnetic field.
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Post by antigua on Feb 26, 2024 15:05:54 GMT -5
Because "marketing" is everything Similar "things" happen on other major manufacturers, too. Just swap the magnet, voila! You have a new hb model. Change the pole piece, another model comes in. Tell the world some of your hb coils are wound on a vintage PAF winding machine that gibson once has. Okay. So what do you achieve with them? Consistancy? Precision? Or mambo jambo? It's okay to have but the opposite is okay, either I feel like the patents are more egregious, because it's bringing legal mechanisms into the marketing effort. It asserts that the patent office looked at the innovation and agreed that it had merit. Two different manners in which, in my opinion, DiMarzio abused shortcomings in the USPTO. It upsets me also that some people on the Internet write it off as a clever business maneuver, as if what could possibly be an immoral abuse of public institutions should be considered clever. It would be on the same moral plane as "swatting", tricking the police into breaking down the door of someone you dont like. The other big pickup maker, doing magnet swap = new product, would be as bad, had they patented the practice somehow, but as its stands it's just a liberal interpretation of what makes a distinctive product. I think you could call that "clever marketing", and no more immoral or unethical than what is generally common in the field of marketing. On the "SDUGF" forum, the company employees tend to be very honest about all of these things.
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Post by antigua on Feb 26, 2024 1:52:43 GMT -5
Have you ever measured a dimarzio with and without so-called scret slugs within the bobbin? How much can they affect the total inductance of the humbucker? Yeah I tested them here guitarnuts2.proboards.com/thread/7771/dimarzios-embedded-slugs , in the screw coil they somehow made a good difference, added 600mH (like I wonder if I made a mistake somehow), but in the slug coil and full assembled, they made a small difference, less than 100mH. I don't think they have much technical merit. As a means of increasing inductance, that's not something that is desirable in the first place. As a mean of improving the coupling coefficiency between the coil and the guitar strings, the slugs are off-center with the guitar strings, and DiMarzio could have made them extent all the way down to the magnet, but instead they allow for a substantial air gap between the magnet and the secret slugs. This is one of several patents they hold for guitar pickups that make virtually no difference in how the pickup sounds or performs. I think they believed it would be a marketing win, but almost nobody on the guitar pickup forums ever talks about DiMarzio "air bucker technology" or whatever name they come up with to go along with these pointless appointments.
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Post by antigua on Feb 25, 2024 21:12:16 GMT -5
Yea, there are three "layers" in which there are opportunities to either go series or parallel, so I suspect some combination of series and parallel will be best for most tones. Will only know by testing! Thanks for the breadboard links! I think it'll actually be pretty fun. Now I just need to go ahead and get the pickups. The funny thing is I went down this rabbit hole because of frustration with noise on PRS TCI "S" pickups, and chasing down that issue also lead me to these fiberboard humbucker baseplates that might be ideal for mounting, say, pairs of Strat-sized DiMarzio rail humbuckers: www.mojotone.com/Fiberboard-Humbucker-Frame-50mm_2On those newer PRS pickups on the SE Paul's Guitar model and SE 24-08 model I've seen a lot of complaints online about noise. I believe what's going on is that Paul Smith (or his team) made an engineering error in trying to convert the USA TCI pickup design to the import line. From what I can tell, the USA TCI pickup has a plastic/fiberboard baseplate to improve the single-coil sound, and when designing the imported TCI "S" version they used an intentionally ungrounded metal baseplate instead. It also appears the earlier years had a nickel baseplate and more recent revisions have brass, which maybe exacerbated the issue? Anyways I was thinking about buying fiberboard baseplates to see if it helps these PRS pickups and realized they might also be a good mounting solution for Strat-sized pickup pairs in a humbucker route. I'm not familiar at all with the PRS pickup situation. An ungrounded conductive metal part will for sure cause noise, as it basically acts as an amplifier of RF if it's not grounded, as it couples with noise sources and become a noise source itself. Another thing I notice after trying lots of combos, is that by and large, there are six obvious sounds, and a Strat covers five of them, B, M, N, B+M, B+N, and M+N. I mod most of my Strats to add in B+M+N and B+N, but I've stopped doing that so religiously with some newer Strat I've bought, because I can often use the middle pickup to do the B+N sound that Tele's and Gibsons are known for, and the B+M+N tone is very pretty but not all that much different from the Strat M+N tone. I had a guitar equipped with Seymour Duncan P-Rails, and it was good and offering some sounds that other pickups can't, because it had a single rail coil hanging off the end. With the rails on the inside edges, you would get and off-center middle pickup sound, which was also very pretty, especially for finger style work, pseudo acoustic guitar tones, but again I didn't feel like I'd miss them too much because they were still in throwing distance of the Strat middle pickup, or the B+N tone of a two pickup guitar. I think part of the reason I'm close minded about the possibilities is the same reason everyone else is; 98% of popular music was recorded with a Fender guitar, or an HH from Gibson or Gretsch or Rickenbacker, and so I think too much in terms of what is familiar. The resonant peak of a pickup combo can have a lot of influence over how it's perceived too though. For example, many when people talk about how a Strat pickup that is 2 henries differ from one that is 3 henries, the say the 3 henry pickup has a bolder attack, more mids and bass, more compressed sounding... lots of adjectives to just describe a lower frequency shelf. Its a small technical difference but a big psychoacoustic difference that leads to lots of pickups on the market with only a minor spec difference. The same is true for the individual pickup combinations, especially because they're so rich with harmonics, if you trim it at a given frequency, it changes the perceived sound a lot. Where I notice it the most is the Strat middle position, by itself at 2H it sounds sort of thin and wimpy, its a running joke that it doesn't get much love from Strat players, but you drop the resonant peak (with a cap, or with high inductance, or an EQ pedal) it will sound almost identical to Lindsey Buckingham's Turner Mark I, a thicker middle tone that is upfront in the mix and distorts really nicely. It's a hidden gem that guitarists often don't find. I might not have appreciated it if not for Lindsey B making so much great music with the Mark 1 though.
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Post by antigua on Feb 25, 2024 14:09:03 GMT -5
I think the parallel options are the best, because the higher resonant peaks help ensure you don't lose the interesting harmonics that come from the comb filtering, the "notch positions", but I did the math and if all 8 were in parallel, you'd drop all the way down to .33 millihenries, I don't think you would hear any sound at all. Maybe allowing any combination of the individual pickup's coils in series, but then having the two pickups only combine in parallel, would ensure you can have a lot of coils active and never reach rock bottom inductance. You could do that with eight on-on two-way switches with have all the coils on or off and in series, and one on-on-on for the two pickup (a regular Gibson style pickup toggle) two choose one or both of the pickups. 1 henry per coil in the neck pickup is pretty low, I'd suggest maybe using two bridge pickups so that every coil is 2.6H, and then mitigate the volume difference by setting the pickup heights differently. The difference of 1H to 2.6H is actually a huge difference for a neck and bridge. Even the JB and Jazz are not that far apart in terms of inductance. > My original thinking was to use alligator clips to try things out, but a breadboard may be much better. I wonder if it would be practical to cut one to the shape of the cavity plate and tape it to that? If you really wanted to get crazy with it, the breadboard could have a bunch of push-button switches so the guitar could be reconfigured after just taking out two screws. For initial experimentation. something like this www.amazon.com/HiLetgo-SYB-170-Breadboard-Colorful-Plates/dp/B071KCZZ4K/ , the slots in each row are connected to one another, so you would have two rows per coil, one row for the start and finish of each coil, a total of eight rows, and you could connect them any way you want using the jumper wires www.amazon.com/Elegoo-EL-CP-004-Multicolored-Breadboard-arduino/dp/B01EV70C78/ I would just mount it to the face of the guitar for the time being, nothing that can't be undone, but you might need a whole to get the eight wires from the humbuckers from inside the cavity to the outside. I'd solder the jumpers to the pickup leads and tape them up. Definitely label them somehow to know where all sixteen wires lead to. > I've struggled to better understand the relative influence of pickups in parallel versus in series. Is there some kind of formula that could describe the proportional contribution? Regardless, in my spreadsheet mock-ups I've been trying to get the contributing pickup sets around the "right" induction level prior to being combined at the final switch (i.e. for the "Tele middle" mock-up I'm having the neck group at 2.07H and the bridge group at 4.08H prior to the final parallel for 1.37H output). This kind of thing becomes more intuitive with the experiment when you hear surprising volume drops due to changes in the impedances. The match is complicated by the fact that in a circuit analysis, the voltage sources will be assumed to have a fixed value like a battery or AC generator, but in practice the voltage varies, the neck pickup produces more voltage than the bridge and the pickup height and pole piece type changes the coupling coefficient. It's a good argument for trial and error, but not at the exclusion of circuit analysis.
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Post by antigua on Feb 25, 2024 1:57:30 GMT -5
I appreciate that you added in the mutual inductance co-efficient. I'm not sure if it's 100% accurate, being inferred from the Chopper values, but it's better than having no estimation at all.
It is crazy to think about all the possibilities, I'd be tempted to have some sort of patch board or bread board to try various arbitrary combinations. I'd have to figure out what the most usable sound were in order to chooses a particular scheme that ends up only offering a fraction of what is possible. In general, the problem tends to be that so many of the combinations will sound like other combinations. I think in general I'd favor parallel over series. Maybe have eight on-off-on toggles to bring any into parallel with all the others, with phase control for each. A tightly loaded Strat pickguard is the only guitar I can think of that would work as a platform. I wired up a red Strat to work like Brian May's Red Special, that was six switches in the place of a Strat selector switch.
One thing to consider is that aside from the final inductance, when you have imbalanced impedance between two or more coils, the amount of voltage you get from each coil will depend on whether the impedances are in series or parallel.
If you have one coil that is 2H and another that is 1H, in series, the coil will 2H will contribute more signal, so if the 2H coil is the bridge and the 1H is neck, you will get more "bridge" sound than "neck" in the mix, as would be expected. But in parallel, the opposite happens, the 2H bridge will be made weaker than it otherwise would be. This is because the 1H coil will load down the 2H coil more than the 2H coil will load down the 1H coil. The 1H coil won't necessarily be louder, it will just have a boost relative to the 2H coil. The actual end result still factors in the voltage produced by the coils as voltage sources.
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Post by antigua on Feb 24, 2024 1:02:07 GMT -5
The consensus is that 42AWG and 43AWG don't produce different sounds, aside from the negligible added series resistance. The capacitance tends to be a little higher with 43AWG, as a result of the coil being taller and thinner, but this is also a small difference, no more than 50 to 100pF. Speaking of capacitance, if you have the DE-5000, you can set it to 100kHz "Cp" mode and get the pickup's inductance. It might be interesting considering is uses 43AWG but draws comparison with traditional PAF specs. Keep in mind that the value will be different depending on whether the shielding is included in the measurement. With vintage braided wire, you can't omit the shielding, but with 4 conductor wire, you can choose to leave it out. > On the Dimarzio part, i asked this to Steve Blucher on our interview once and what he told me was "DiMarzio never produced “historically accurate pickup clones”, because we never wanted our pickups to be used as counterfeits or duplicates for the pickups of other manufacturers. If anything, the exact opposite is the case" and i find this is true. Funny thing is they are releasing vintage accurate pickups last couple of years The most plausible explanation I can come up with is that DiMarzio justifies the concept of aftermarket pickups by somehow "improving" them. I put that in quotes because almost if not all their patents for improving humbuckers has very little technical merit. For example, one of their patents is to have coils with different gauge wire, such as one having 43AWG and the other 42AWG. As mentioned above, there's no technical upside or downside to using one size or the other aside from space considerations. If you have room on the bobbin to spare, it's a waste of more expensive fine gauge magnet wire. Steve Blucher seems like a nice guy, but I think DiMarzio has exploited the ignorance of guitar players for decades, and have exploited patents and trademarks as well. Whether they refused to make an accurate PAF due to ego, or because they felt the customer deserved something better than an accurate PAF clone, nobody really knows, but I can take a guess.
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Post by antigua on Feb 23, 2024 13:47:32 GMT -5
Thanks a lot of the info. Without knowing what your test device is, I see you measure the inductance at 100Hz, which is good, and I'm guessing you have a DE-5000 most likely. One thing that's sort of interesting to look at with a DiMarzio, is to unscrew the base plate, and see if they put slugs in the coil and/or used rubber washers in place of a metal keeper bar. I'm guessing that particular model has both of those features, like the PAF Master guitarnuts2.proboards.com/thread/7765/dimarzio-paf-master-analysis-review . For some reason DiMarzio trademarked the term PAF, and then it seems did everything they could think of to avoid making an authentic PAF replica, until very recently. With an inductance of 5.5H I'd say it's an average PAF, neither over or underwound. A bode plot would probably show a typical PAF type pattern, a low Q factor, with just a slight bump at the resonance.
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Post by antigua on Feb 21, 2024 16:33:25 GMT -5
I looked at the Barden jbepickups.com/products/two-tone-humbuckers/ , it's too bad he doesn't say what method it uses for getting the clearer sound, or offer any other specs. It mentions that it comes with "high-quality 6 conductor shielded cable and are supplied with treble bleed and tone capacitors" so many the trickery is outboard. I'm not sure that a low ratio of metal to plastic plays into the dual sound modes in any particular way. It's a shame that pickup makers aren't more forthcoming with technical details.
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Post by antigua on Feb 21, 2024 1:32:56 GMT -5
I get kind of blurry eyed by all the combinations. I have a Tele and a Strat with super switches that offer series combos of the stock pickups; personally I have a hard time using a bridge+neck sound that is hotter than the neck or bridge by itself. The bridge+neck has a nice bell-like tone to is that gets a bit lost in series. High inductance works good with distortion, but I dont think the bridge+neck is the best distorted tone, so for me, having several pickups in series is effectively unusable. I would opt for parallel combos.
The Red-Red shows a DC resistance of 30k, while the Red by itself is just under 15k, which suggests it really is two reds side by side. The inductance of 14.8H is less than I expected but still off the charts. It might have the highest inductance of any pickup made by a long standing pickup maker. The resonant peak of 1,450Hz is presumably without a guitar cable load, so the actual resonant peak must be even lower. This is a pickup I'd have no interest in placing in a guitar. I'd do it for a laugh if not for the time and cost involved.
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Post by antigua on Feb 20, 2024 20:42:51 GMT -5
That spreadsheet with the built in calculations is cool. What are the types of Lace Sensors in the Dually? I thought all the Duallies were two different pickups, like the Blue-Gold lacemusic.com/products/lace-sensor-dually-blue-gold-humbucker , which would be like humbucker or single coil, nice choices. But I see "Red Red" and "Gold Gold", is that really just the same single coils two times lacemusic.com/products/lace-sensor-dually-red-red-humbucker ? Two Red Lace Sensors by themselves would have a combined inductance of 18 henries in series, which seems totally insane. I can't imagine that's what you really end up with. I wonder if they're called Red coils but are given special specs for the Red-Red Dually. Lace doesn't even offer the DC resistance values for these pickups, so they're trying to keep us in the dark about their true nature to the best of their ability.
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Post by antigua on Feb 20, 2024 14:21:07 GMT -5
Thank you so very much. Not in your level but i measure the pickups as much as i can do as a hobbiest and non-electrical background person I ask that in order to have same kind of methodology by measuring. So what did i do is pretty much like you. Take the middle values, calculate the arithmetic mean but i don't round it up. 250G and 260G may not mean anything by hearing but as an engineer i can't control myself I'd say I hear the softness in a APF clone that measures around 200 versus the bite of one that measures 400 or higher, but beyond that I'm not certain if I hear a difference in magnetism, or a difference in resonant peaks. One time I did do the magnet swap test, this was almost ten years ago now. It was one of things I tested, because magnet swapping was (and is) all the rage in the PAF woowoo scene. To me, AlNiCo 2, 3 and 5 were all the same, but when I switched in the AlNiCo 8 and the ceramic, it definitely took on a sharper sound. I think the specific Gauss values are mostly trivial, especially when you consider that nobody will have their pickups set to an agreed upon height. If a pickup has an especially low Gauss, it just means that it will not offer that "close" sound, but if the pickup has a higher Gauss, then you have a range of choice by lowering the pickup away from the strings. Most guitarists probably wouldn't admit it, but the pickup height has aesthetic value to it, it doesn't look right to have the pickups too high or too low. A specific Gauss can let you achieve a certain degree of magnetic strength, while also having the pickup where you want it for the picture perfect look.
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Post by antigua on Feb 20, 2024 14:07:45 GMT -5
The influence of higher string pull really seems to be important. Do they emphasize higher order harmonics? String pull and magnetic saturation in the guitar string both happen with stronger magnetism, and both promote higher harmonics. The string pull does this by moving the energy from the fundamental into the partials, just like a pinch harmonic. In the case of saturation, the magnetic polarization of guitar string becomes increasingly acute towards the centers of the pole pieces, making higher harmonics more magnetically visible to the pickup.
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Post by antigua on Feb 20, 2024 13:54:06 GMT -5
The Lace Sensors are not humbuckers, they're single coils that presumably have a better signal to noise ratio than Fender type single coils. I say presumably because it's apparently true but I never did a test that would prove it, as that would be a bit complex. The design places more of the coil closer to the guitar strings, and for that reason alone, it should have a better S/N ratio than a traditional Fender single coil pickup that places more of the coil away from the guitar strings.
Zexcoil is marketted heavily by Zexcoil, but I personally don't have reason to believe they're superior to a rail style single coil sized humbucker. I don't see any particular problem with rails that Zexcoils will solve. They look more expensive to produce, and cost more money.
The Dually in parallel sounds like a good idea. I think in series it would sound muffled.
To get the resonant peak, you can use online calculators, to avoid doing the math work. First, you would add in the inductances in series with an online calculator, easy to Google. Then find another calculator to calculate a peak frequency from a given L and C, and set C value to about 500 picofarads. The peak frequency in series will be really low, probably approaching 1kHz.
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Post by antigua on Feb 20, 2024 1:54:12 GMT -5
Hi Antigua. I have a question about the approach on the flux measurement. I have recently bought a gaussmeter so that i can use that data on my pickup evaluations & my reviews. How do you get only one value like "screw250G/slug 280G" because i read more non uniform values. For example last night i measured those data from my 8,5K Pearly Gates; Slug=from low-E to hi-e 234 - 268 - 270 - 248 - 253 - 227 Screw=from low-E to hi-e 272 - 248 - 250 - 279 - 265 - 265 So do you calculate the arithmetic mean like 250G for slug and 263 for the screw coil? Or measuring on spesific point like "data of the pole piece top of G string only"? Thank you so very much Nothing fancy, I just measure the center of the D and G poles and come up with an average, to the nearest 25G. The edges of the pole pieces often show a higher Gauss value, but I stick with the centers. Based on what you measured I would round it off to 250G. The flux density with a PAF / P-90 sized bar manet is a lot less consistent that people realize. Not only do you get a random assortment of values from the pole tops, but if you remove the magnet, and run the probe along the long edges of the magnet, you will find that the Gauss varies along the magnet itself, sometimes even more than the pole and screw tops do. The screws and poles actually serve to even out inconsistency in the magnet itself, by combining the flux density of weaker and strong parts of the AlNiCo bar into the steel, which has a higher permeability, and better metallurgic consistency than AlNiCo.
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