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Post by antigua on Apr 26, 2023 11:07:32 GMT -5
Depends on the C rating of your guitar cable and how long it is. There's also how much internal C the pickups have, and if the input on the Neve unit has any C. 2.2M is higher impedance than usual, so that would increase the pickup resonance as well. gckelloch: I never got around to replying to this, but I meant to ask you: do you happen to know how I could calculate the frequency response of a passive guitar pickup when it is plugged into my particular DI box? I have tried to use this frequency response calculator, but I can't get it to work properly with the version of Excel I have on my (Apple) computer — and I don't know how to use Excel to begin with! I play guitar *exclusively* through this DI box, and I would like to be able to make use of antigua's database when purchasing pickups in the future. With novel noise-cancelling pickups like the Zexcoils, for example, I'd be interested to know — even if it's just a rough estimate — what happens to the Q and resonant frequency when plugged into the 2.2MΩ RNDI instrument input. I'd be really grateful if anybody could point me in the right direction, because my understanding of the science is not yet robust enough to work out what I ought to be looking for. The easiest thing to do is probably use the inductance as a baseline, so if you have a pickup you like or don't like, then figure out what its inductance is and then get a new pickup with more or less inductance. If the pickup seems just a little too congested sounding, try using a low C cable, or just buy a wire less unit, like Line 6 Relay, and you will very low overall capacitance. When you shed the cable capacitance, lots of pickups will end up having a resonant peak that is over 4kHz, and that's good for recording, because then you can shape the tone a lot with an EQ or software amp modeler. If the DI is 2.2 meg ohms, the Q factor will be about as high as it can possibly be, and it might sound annoying with quality headphones on, but the guitar's tone knob should be able to fix that. I'd mostly just avoid very high inductance pickups like the JB, Little '59, etc. I don't like recording because it's so stressful, but I find it's least stressful when I used the most generic off-the-shelf gear possible.
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Post by antigua on Apr 26, 2023 10:13:06 GMT -5
To return to the original subject: the Creamery in the UK have for some time made a single coil FeCrCo pickup that seems to behave very much like a typical strat pickup with a high Q and similar sensitivity but with adjustable poles.
Thanks for drawing attention to that, I had forgotten all about that, but it's definitely worth mention in relation to these pickups. The Creamery is a really impressive pickup maker. They seem to have no problem fabricating lots of custom parts for very unique and vintage style pickups, and you see other pickup makers talk about what great lengths they had to go to in order to accomplish the same thing, including in this case, Tim Shaw saying he had been working on CuNiFe single coil designs for three years. I mostly try to stick to cheap pickups, or pickups that have a lot of interest in the forums, because it is a lot of fun comparing notes with other guitar players about how much they do or don't like pickups. The Creamery looks like a really amazing company, but for some reason they seem to fly under the radar on guitar forums. The fact that Fender made these pickups is a big reason I did buy them, because spec-wise I expected not to like them very much. Everything Fender does gets a lot of press. One of these pickup broke when I was installing them, and Fender customer service sent me a prepaid return label within minutes, and new ones should be here pretty quick I imagine, but when dealing with a company in the U.K., I figure we're probably talking a month turn around time minimum. Having the $300 spent on the pickup set hang up in the air until it gets sorted out is kind of nerve wracking. I actually had to return pickups to Bare Knuckle Pickups back in 2015 or so, and that was a rather unpleasant experience, they threatened not to refund me because they claim the pickups were damaged in transit because I hadn't packed them well enough, after having eaten the cost and wait time involved with shipping. I don't think I've ordered any pickups from the U.K since.
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Post by antigua on Apr 25, 2023 11:02:00 GMT -5
It may also just be a convenient way to ground the poles. Yeah, I think the good doctor is assuming more about Mr. Lover's intent than was there. The wide bobbins are probably just because his PAF's had wide bobbins. I'm pretty sure Dr. Lawing knows inductance doesn't correlate to output. The paragraph above fig. 6 explains how the Steel plate increases efficiency via strengthening the field and drawing lines more into the coils, as well as increasing inductance. Fig. 8 shows that very high core permeability could actually eliminate any signal generation within the center coil sections. Tim Shaw claims Seth Lover made the bobbins more substantial in order to offset the fact that CuNiFe had low permeability, because the PAF had high permeability steel slugs. Don't know if that's true, but it's a claim. The coils didn't have to be larger by that logic, they just have to have more turns on them, so if you figure 42AWG was cheap and available, they'd have to have a larger bobbin to get more turns of 42 AWG on there.
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Post by antigua on Apr 25, 2023 10:39:06 GMT -5
I've heard the original WRHB base plate called a 'reflector' plate (can't recall where, or whether that might have been a notion from the time the pickups first appeared, or a more recent descriptor). It's just called a 'base plate' in the original drawing below (from Duchossoir tele book p61, where the copy is just as bad as it looks below).
It doesn't seem to perform any obvious structural role in the pickup (original WRHB below), so seems to be there for other reasons. Thanks for those details. Tim Shaw said in the interview that he was trying to imagine CuNiFe single coils as Seth Lover might have designed them at the time with the tools on hand, and that's reason enough to have put the steel plate on the new models. The thing about CuNiFe or AlNiCo having a low permeability is that the reluctance across those allows will be high. The steel base plate would have a low reluctance path, but it doesn't seem to be helping to connect the strings to the coil, given the high reluctance in between them. It's being thin and having holes for the CuNiFe to pass through makes it look like it wouldn't be very effective as a keeper, but keepers are not necessary either, as Strat pickups and a lot of others, do not have a keeper. It's a real mystery to me. It's possible that not much prototyping was done, and that the steel baseplate was added to the spec for good measure, without testing to see if it made an impactful difference on the output or not.
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Post by antigua on Apr 25, 2023 1:24:34 GMT -5
This is good stuff right here. I can't find any permeability or resistance values for FeCrCo, but his plot indicates that FeCrCo 5 has a rather high resistance, and a low permeability, but FeCrCo 2 has a low resistance and an especially high permeability. I don't know much of anything about FeCrCo 2 and 5, but based on the fact that the Tele bode plots show ordinary Q factors, it's looking more like the FeCrCo 2. Tim Shaw says the FeCrCo was a "proprietary blend", so it might not conform to either of the FeCrCo's shown in this plot. I guess the foundry that makes the magnets can give the customer any frankenstein alloy they might want. I didn't know the WRHB has a steel base plate, that explains why Fender added them to these CuNiFe single coils, even though they seem superficial. As for the baseplate, he says " The results are shown in Figure 3. As the data show, the single biggest influence on the pickup inductance (other than the coils themselves) is the steel plate, increasing the inductance of the assembly by almost 25%." He seems to be under the impression that inductances causes output, so that if you increase the inductance 25%, then you get some bump in the output, but the voltage is determined by flux change though the coil, as caused by the guitar string, which is a fact that he even mentions in his article. Even though the coil itself is close to the base plate, the moving guitar strings are not close to it. It's the same thing as mentioned above regarding the Fender single coils, a tall Strat bobbin might give you 2.5 henries of inductance, but a lot of that bobbin is physically far away from the guitar strings, so the 2.5H inductance becomes a broken promise in terms of equating the inductance with the resulting output. Those base plates are in effect the same as having a portion of coil that is far from the guitar strings; it's there, it makes the inductance higher, but it doesn't contribute to the output with equal proportion. Put another way, if inductance increased output by itself, you could put an inductor in series with the pickup and it would increase the voltage, but that doesn't happen, it will instead lower the frequency at which high end roll off occurs. The more likely reason, I'm 95% certain, that Seth Lover put the steel base plate there is it increase the stability of the CuNiFe, they called those "keepers", and it's what the PAF has one, but it's not a bar, it just abuts the bar magnet, but since the CuNiFe pole pieces stand on end, the steel keeper has be attached to the underside, like a Tele bridge pickup. And in that sense, any extent to which the base plate increases the inductance is more of an unwanted side effect, it's killing high end while giving you nothing in return.
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Post by antigua on Apr 25, 2023 0:20:47 GMT -5
Maybe BL's conclusion just pertained to pickups with high permeable poles, although he did think a lot of the coil in most pickups is wasted. If the coil is tall, and the core is not highly permeable, then the bottom portion is wasted. That's the case with AlNiCo single coils, because it has low permeability, so not much flux change is carried to the lower reach of the coil, but if the coil has steel poles, like a cheap import single coil, then the steel pole piece carries the flux change down throughout the entire coil, and that's a more efficient design, even though it's associated with cheap import guitars. I don't think Fender made their singer coils tall for electrical performance reasons though, but because the AlNiCo poles had to be a certain height relative to their diameter, it also allows the pickup's heights to be more adjustable, and probably make winding the bobbins by hand much easier. Gibson pickups benefit from steel poles and screws, but they also tended to use flatter coils. All around it seems that Seth Lover, Bill Lawrence and whoever was working on pickups at Gibson had a better understanding of all that than Fender. Gibson also had a big machine to wind their coils, instead of hiring Latina seamstresses to do it by hand. Ray Butts of Gretsch also seemed to have a great understanding of pickup design as well. Leo Fender seemed to be more inclined with amplifier design. The Strat and its vibrato system are still industry standard to this day, but several people worked on that besides Leo Fender. He tried to improve on the Strat with the Mustang, Jaguar and Jazzmaster, and largely ended up with guitars and pickups that perform worse.
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Post by antigua on Apr 24, 2023 21:52:27 GMT -5
What? It's common knowledge that magnetic force weakens with distance. The outer flux lines from the string generally traverse more distance b4 going through the coil. Would they then not contribute less to the total output? Am I misunderstanding something? I think what he's describing is that if you have so much flux through a loop, it will create the same voltage regardless of whether the loop is narrow or wide, because the voltage is proportional to the change of flux through the area of the loop, no matter the size of the loop. Imagine the flux is a fish and you have a fishing net, you capture one fish no matter how big the net. From the perspective of a guitar string, it doesn't matter much if the coil is big or small, because the guitar string's return path is very wide, wider than the coil. But that's just the guitar strings, they are a distance away from the coil, where as steel pole pieces are also magnetically active, and they're particularly close to the coil, and pole pieces have a tighter return path than the guitar string. A P-90 or Jazzmaster's wider coil might actually have a better efficiency, because they might capture more flux of the guitar string that is of just one polarity. In the case of a P-90 though, it has steel screws that are magnetized, and it seems to me that the P-90 coil is so wide that the flux change from the screws is probably cancelled out over the wider area of the coil, but they still serve a purpose of magnetizing the guitar string. It's probably the case that the two things counterbalance; as the coil gets wider, more voltage comes from the guitar strings, but less voltage comes from the screws, and vice versa.
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Post by antigua on Apr 24, 2023 19:57:28 GMT -5
All the flux change inside a loop of wire counts. The wire does not have to be close to the flux. However, if a certain field line is to count, the loop must not be so big that it includes this line returning to the string as well as coming from the string. (This is to avoid cancelation.) Setting aside the string, there's contributory flux change in the pole piece also, if you have a wide coil around the pole piece, then its width will cause an increasingly greater proportion of return flux to be captured and cancelled out.
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Post by antigua on Apr 24, 2023 19:17:14 GMT -5
I have these pickups in a Tele, I played with them for about an hour, a few different genres with a drummer. The low resonant peaks, and huge gap between the neck and bridge inductance is very audible. The bridge pickup is quite a bit louder than the neck, with both set about the same distance to the strings. If you are someone who always thinks a Tele is a bit too bright, you'd like these pickups, but if you leave the tone controls at 10, you'll probably miss the top end clarity. I'll admit, I expected them to sound outright bad based on the inductance values, and I'd say they're unique and peculiar, but definitely not outright bad. This makes me curious why Fender made the inductance values so high, I get the feeling the pickups would have worked well enough with lower inductance values / less wire. I've never been a fan of the Little '59 Tele bridge pickup, the inductance seems way too high to me, but my brother loves it, and I've seen them in a lot of Teles. I think the bridge Tele FeCrCo pickup's sound is somewhat similar to Little '59 sound, but not nearly has dark guitarnuts2.proboards.com/thread/7905/seymour-duncan-little-analysis-review , the Little 59 bridge has an inductance of 8 henries and a loaded peak of 1.7kHz, where as this pickup is 6 henries with a loaded peak of 2.2kHz, so this pickup represents something in between the Little 59 bridge and a stock Tele bridge pickup. The Seymour Duncan Quarter Pound for Telecaster set guitarnuts2.proboards.com/thread/7728/measured-electrical-popular-telecaster-pickups is similar in that it's very high inductance single coils, but they're even higher inductance than these, 10H / 1.9kHz bridge and 4H / 2.4kHz neck, and I really did not like that set. This FeCrCo set with its more modest values is much more in keeping with what you'd expect a Telecaster to sound like. ~~~~~ As for the Strat set, I accidently broke the bridge pickup by tightening the mounting screws too much. I somehow caused the PCB base plate to flex, but the bobbin itself is a separate piece of plastic which is held to the base with two screws as seen in the pics, so what happened is that one of the solder joints between the coil's end in the coil former, and the base plate, broke. The screw mounting holes are a tall eyelet style, so when the screws are in there, they wont flex around like they do with vintage fiberboard, they're held rigidly upright. So if you have it in pick guard using both screws, and set it to an extreme angle, like you're tightening up one screw all the way before tightening the other at all, the difference in angles between the pick guard's screw holes and eyelet screw holes in the pickup will put a tension on the PCB base plate and snap the solder joint. The coils are likely 44 AWG, so the amount of tension required to snap that solder join is probably rather low. The really evil thing is, sort of like breaking the coil start on a vintage Fender pickup, is that it means the coil is toast, and the whole pickup becomes a paperweight due to a relatively minor mistake. In this respect the pickups are very delicate, because there's no other pickup on the market I know of where this vulnerability exists. I would bet it could easily happen to a Seymour Duncan Little 59/Rails if not for the fact that the mounting holes are part of the cover, and not the base plate as is the case here, but otherwise they're similar in that they have 44AWG around coil formers that are soldered directly to a PCB base. Not many other pickup designs use a PCB as their base. I called Fender though, and they agreed to exchange the set for a new one, which is great. It makes me wonder if this going to be a common problem for them or not. I think guitarists could possibly break these pickup in future, after they're in the guitar, by over adjusting them.
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Post by antigua on Apr 24, 2023 11:07:22 GMT -5
Regarding the use of thinner wire to get more winds in the same space: more winds of thinner wire are not required for improved efficiency if they are situated within the strongest part of the field from the strings. Evidence that the efficiency of a denser coil can supersede the DCR increase was shown in your V measurement of AlNiCo MC's compared to another AlNiCo core pickup of thicker wire and higher inductance. In my DI recordings of the same guitar with cheap A5 core 42AWG SC's and my original MC's with 46AWG wire, the difference in lower to upper harmonic strength is obvious, along with the slightly lower Q. Back to the topic, the large discrepancy in the given specs compared to the actual measurements makes me wonder if this pickup guru and/or Fender really know what they are doing. The relatively high inductance of the FeCrCo models makes me think he didn't know the alloy would increase inductance that much, and then he didn't think it was worth rewinding to lower the inductance, regardless that Tele bridge pickups don't typically have near that high inductance. Just what did he/they retain from their collaboration with BL on the Fender SCN design? You get more voltage when you have a higher concentration of winds in the most dense area of flux change, because those turns are connected in series. If you have fewer turns of wire for the same space, the voltage is less but the current his higher. This is the case with the Lace Alumitone, which is but a single turn of "wire", it's high current, which is converted to a higher voltage via transformer. What a normal pickup does with a single component, the Alumitone does across two components. In transformer design, what dictates the step up or step down ratio is the number of turns on one coil versus the others, so if you can cram more turns on one side, it will give you that much of a higher step ratio. What's really interesting about the Alumitone is that it can achieve a higher voltage despite using such a tiny transformer. As for the discrepancy of measured versus stated specs, I've seen that with a lot of their products. It could just be that they started making the packaging before the pickup design was set in stone. I think the Guru label and all of that is just marketing, or course. One thing that bothered me was he said, paraphrasing, - we wanted to see what Seth Lover would have come up with if given more time to experiment with the parts on hand -, basically suggesting that these are like Seth Lover single coils, but just as an example, we know Seth Lover wanted the original PAF to have a solid chrome top with twelve slugs, no screws at all. I think if they were really trying to channel Seth Lover they would end up with a solid topped chrome humbucker. If they said it had to fit in an existing pickup's space, he'd probably have opted for a single coil sized humbucker, enclosed in shielding.
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Post by antigua on Apr 24, 2023 10:34:16 GMT -5
The fact that the electrical values aren't controlled for kind of ruins the validity of testing for price point. Not only does the Roswell probably have a brass cover, but it appears to have a higher DC resistance and probably a higher inductance on top of that.
I'm surprised the DC resistance is disclosed for so many of those models, because increasingly they've been hiding all technical specs that are not of a practical nature, such as mounting dimensions. I feel like the best a consumer can do is find posts like this one that suggest pickups aren't really full of mysterious properties as they might have been led to believe, and be more selective as to the portion of their guitar budget is spent on pickups, versus other pieces of guitar gear.
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Post by antigua on Apr 23, 2023 0:52:55 GMT -5
...and I don't think Bill would have approved of the presentation. These pickups are almost on the level of the original Micro-Coils, but with higher inductance, lower efficiency, and the benefit of a much higher price tag . The advantage of the screws is for string output balance and lower to upper harmonic balance without the high freq loss from Steel screws. It makes more difference with thinner wire coils, but it even matters with my GFS P90. Lowering the coil and raising the pole screws sounds brighter. Not sure I understand the effect of reluctance, but given the large output difference of the Tele neck and bridge pickups (which seems much more than the inductance difference would cause), couldn't it just be that the wider Steel plate draws more of the string flux lines through the coil? Is the Steel plate also thicker? I just mod'd a pair of Filtertron Blacktops for my new build. When I first tried attaching the A4 magnet between and touching the pole screws on the bottom, it affected the field at the top of the screws so there was a null at the center of the screw heads. A screwdriver would pull to the outer edges of the head. I then tried attaching and touching one side of the Steel bars I got (which are thinner than the A4 magnet) to the pole screws in one of the coils. The null on the head also happened in that set of screws. That must have some effect. Maybe it widens the aperture window, if not also weakens the field at the top, which it feels like it does. Moving the bar off the screws decreases the effect. He may just be using the trendy terminology "slow attack" to describe how the weaker magnet affects the transient character. He may not understand what's actually happening, but it has become a common way to describe pickup sound, like the incorrect use of "compression". Bill Lawrence seemed to favor the use of steel poles or blades with a magnet on the bottom, his designs mostly avoided having magnetized pole pieces. I agree that he'd probably not love the design, but he seemed to appreciate diversity, he wasn't devoted to one particular design concept, as a lot of other pickup makers seem to be. You make a good point that these are essentially like AlNiCo poled single coils with adjustable pole pieces, which is a first for the pickup market AFAIK. I tend to prefer flat profile pole pieces to such an extent that I overlooked that benefit. The big difference in output between between the Tele neck and bridge is that one is about 3 henries inductance, and the other is 6 henries. Doubling the inductance from neck to bridge is a huge leap. Similar to a JB Jazz combo, 4 henries with the Jazz, close to 8 henries with the JB. Just as a reminder, the inductance is not the cause of the output, it's just a corollary, as is DC resistance, but it correlates much more closely than resistance, because the cause of high output and the cause of high inductance are closely related, where as the cause of high DC resistance is not closely related. The main reason the base plates don't assist the reluctance path very much, no matter the size, is because the magnetic gap is mostly air. Even with a Jaguar pickup, which has a "claw" shaped steel base plate, it replaces a lot more air than do these base plates, but still, it does not displace enough air gap to have a substantial effect on the reluctance. The best you can do is replace air in the core of the coils, which is what the slugs or screws do, or replace the air between the guitar strings and the coil, and the way to do that is to just have the pickup set very close to the guitar strings. This subject matter relates to inductor design, so if you read about the significance of air gaps in inductor enclosures, it's informative. I understand that he might use incorrect terminology to be relatable, but he's been called a "pickup guru", I think it's fair to set a higher standard here.
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Post by antigua on Apr 23, 2023 0:30:43 GMT -5
There was a question on the old Harmony Central product reviews, "if lost or stolen, would you replace it?", that question really cut through the noise, either you would miss the piece of equipment, or you would be indifferent to losing it. I think if you're doing as Gitec is doing, and trying to see if there's any sort of value in spending $600 for a PAF clone versus $100, then they just have to keep the subjective judgement as open ended as possible, and say, rank the pickups in terms of which one you would give away first / which you would most like to keep.
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Post by antigua on Apr 22, 2023 17:08:00 GMT -5
Here's a video by Andertson Music in the the UK, interviewing Tim Shaw
This is the first time I've ever seen an interview with Tim Shaw. All I knew about him is that he was associated with a lot of claims about guitar pickups, by way of Fender marketing materials, which seemed dubious based on all that I've come to learn about how pickups work. This video is no exception, he makes a handful of claims that seem at odds with the facts as I understand them.
It starts out with a story of how he learned to make pickups with the help of Bill Lawrence at Gibson in the 70's. He notes that the top is open, so the damping is not as substantial as a closed top, that much seems to be a true statement based on experiments presented in this forum.
He says in video that the open top Tele neck style cover was chosen to make room for all the parts in the pickup, he says there are lots of parts involved here. Maybe this was true in an early version of the design, but as the picture above shows, there's quite a lot of space remaining between the coil and the edge of the cover. Certainly they could have fit a plastic cover over the final version of the coil. Maybe they weren't originally planning to use 44 AWG wire, which would have resulted in a fatter coil for sure.
He says at 13 minutes "because the pickups doesn't have a whole lot of iron in it, it's a pretty quiet pickup in terms of sixty cycle hum", but I can't think of any physical reason for how that could be a true statement, and if it were true, pickup makers would have exploited that fact a lot sooner, like maybe seventy years ago.
Several times he talks about the CuNiFe or or the FeCrCo imparting a different tone, he says at 20 minutes that in the context of a Tele that the CuNiFe was too polite, and he even makes a funny voice, mocking a polite guitar pickup that is able to speak and describe its own politeness. The guys at Gitek did a pretty deep analysis of the Wide Range Humbucker and CuNiFe screws, and did show that it had a lower permeability and a higher resonant peak, and tweaked the sound for that reason. He notes that Seth Lover made the WRHB coils larger to compensate for the lower inductance of the CuNiFe, that seems like a reasonable explanation, and maybe it relates to why they gave these single coils such a high inductance through the coil design.
The idea that the lower permeability can change the sound is probably more limited than how he describes, because all that's really happening is that the reluctance between the coil and string is increasing or decreasing. But... he says in the video at about 19 mins 30 seconds that CuNiFe and AlNiCo have different transient profiles, he uses the words "onset transient, rise time", saying the CuNiFe has a slower attack. As far as I know, guitar pickups do not have unique transient properties, which is to say, they don't do something in the beginning of their operation that is different during the duration of their operation. There are issues of hysteresis in the metal, possibly causing distortions in the output signal, but that is not specific to the transient, because the effects of hysteresis are always in play, not just at the first string pluck. What I've found is that what makes an electric guitar transient unique is the spike in high frequency content that you get when you pluck a stiff steel string with a stick, pointy plectrum, and that the frequency response of the pickup can make the transient of the string pluck see very different through the fact that it's filtering out the burst of high frequency content, but the pickup itself doesn't have something like a "slew rate". I suspect that confusing tube amplifier slew rates, and the filtering action of transient harmonics is what leads to a mistaken idea of pickups having a unique attack characteristic.
I think a lot of Tim Shaw's commentary about these pickups lacks technical merit, but I'm glad Fender made these pickup because they look cool, they're conversation pieces, and they might end up sounding unique or pleasantly surprising once I can make the time to install them.
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Post by antigua on Apr 22, 2023 16:17:07 GMT -5
If you want, or at least are willing, to use a pickup with a low resonant f, you would expect it to be hum bucking, because it is possible and desirable. So what are these pickups for? Surely they are not making the claim that the electrical shielding can reduce magnetic hum any where near as much as the cancellation obtained with a humbucker. I bought them for the looks and the novelty mostly, I don't really expect that they will surprise me sonically, and I think that anyone at Fender really thought they would sound different, they wouldn't have waited this long to make use of it in more of their pickups. In some of the marketing videos, Tim Shaw says Seth Lover used CuNiFe in order to get around the Gibson PAF patent, and I think in truth that's the extent of it's utility. Shielding is an issue I don't understand 100%, but what I gather is that full shielding is ideal, although partial shielding is still beneficial. Interestingly the base plates are steel, so they're not just shielding but also factor into the magnetic circuit. Some people believe the steel shield on the bottom lowers the reluctance to a meaningful degree. I don't think it does, but a lot of people seem to believe it does, maybe Tim Shaw does.
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Post by antigua on Apr 22, 2023 14:16:37 GMT -5
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Post by antigua on Apr 22, 2023 13:49:10 GMT -5
With real PAFs, there was no neck or bridge pickup, they were the same, with the exception that the base plate was oriented differently to make the cable wire as short as possible, while still having the screws face away from the center on the top side of the pickup. But despite the fact, you see that PAF clone makers have obvious neck and bridge versions, so the question is when and where did that start?
I was born in '79, so I was a little kid when the aftermarket pickup companies where starting out, so the exact timing of things is unclear to me, but it looks like the SD 59 neck and bridge, the JB/Jazz combo, and the DiMarzio Super Distortion / PAF Pro neck and bridge combos were all on the market around the same time, informing guitarists of the idea that you want a hot bridge pickup and a clear sounding neck pickup. I suspect that most of the PAF clones are basically copies of the SD 59 formula, or that the idea for they call a "balanced set" came from these 80's pickup sets.
From having analyzed pickups that are popular versus ones that are not, it seems to me that familiarity is the most important value. Whatever sounds most like what is heard on the radio will be ranked the best most of the time, and that seems to be true of all guitar products, not just pickups. So a PAF clone bridge around 8k and a neck around 7.5k has become the familiar sound that guitarists want, and while they say they're making perfect PAF clones, in reality it seems they're making SD 59 clones.
I think the Roswell has a brass cover, and the others all have nickel silver. There's no other likely explanation I know of to explain the difference in response curve. I think the idea that the Roswell would be ranked dead last in a listening contest, but ranked higher in real playing might have a parallel to Coke vs Pepsi, where Pepsi tastes better if you're sampling a Dixie cup portion, because it's sweeter, but if you buy a whole case of Pepsi, the sweetness becomes overwhelming and Coke becomes preferable when you're drinking many cans of it. The treble roll off of the Roswell caused by the brass cover might make the guitar easier to mix, or "sit better in the mix", with the flatter EQ profile.
I appreciate that Gitek is doing this, because these subjective experiments are a hundred times more labor intensive than just capturing the bode plots, and they must realize on some level that if the bode plots say the pickups are all the same, the painstaking experiments to reveal bias are just going to reveal that there is a bias, but not much else.
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Post by antigua on Apr 19, 2023 20:22:12 GMT -5
I wonder how the output and tone of a C8 or C5 core pickup would be affected by a Steel plate under the coil? Not much, the high reluctance is in the space between the coil and the string. A steel plate only fills out a fraction of the air path. Ceramic can be thought as being like air in that neither works to propagate the magnetic field. There are permeable ceramics also, such as the type that is used for inductor pot enclosures, but here we're talking about non permeable ceramic magnets.
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Post by antigua on Apr 19, 2023 11:33:54 GMT -5
After all this talk about wiring, I ended up putting the Duckbuckers in a different Strat, and I wired it very similar to my original guitar from twenty years ago, all three knobs are push pull 500k, each toggled series/parallel with parallel being down. The volume is global, the middle tone is for the neck and middle, and the end tone control is for the bridge, and then I couldn't help myself, I ran a little toggle button to the trem cavity to allow bridge + neck and B+M+N pickup combos. I almost never use that option, but I hate not having it. Reviewing my notes, Duckbuckers are electrically about the same as a Little '59, but wired in parallel. My first impression when playing it for a little while was just to remind me what I realized about Little 59's in the past but had sort of forgotten; that they're on the hot side for single coil sized humbuckers, they have a low resonant peak, especially the bridge pickup, and they want you think think you're hearing a PAF, but that not what I envision at all when I hear the bridge pickup, but the neck pickup? Maybe, sure. I like the parallel sound though. I set them pretty close to the strings.
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Post by antigua on Apr 19, 2023 11:13:56 GMT -5
So if I make a pickup by winding a coil directly around a ceramic magnet without needing any pole pieces, what might it sound like?
Kit
The permeability of ceramic is at or near zero, so the reluctance path between the coil and the guitar strings is as high as possible, and that means the output voltage will be lower. Steel pole pieces have the highest permeability, and just by acting as a magnetic go-between between the string and coil, the output will be higher even if the overall magnetic strength is a lot lower. The magnetic domains in the steel move around as the guitar string moves around, so it's acting as magnetic tether. AlNiCo has a very low permeability also, but the permeability of a ceramic magnet is nearly nothing. Subjectively, a magnetic with a ceramic magnet as its core will sound weak and harsh.
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Post by antigua on Apr 19, 2023 11:08:49 GMT -5
Is my understanding correct in that, in the case of magnets for full-size humbuckers with steel polepieces, whether they are alnico or ceramic will NOT make a difference? The ceramic magnets are usually stronger, the steel pole pieces don't saturate so you see a higher flux at the tops of the pole pieces. For a humbucker, I usually measure 200 to 250 Gauss with AlNiCo, and around 400 to 450 Gauss with ceramic. As far as the secondary effects, like eddy currents and inductance, it doesn't a functional difference.
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Post by antigua on Apr 13, 2023 19:24:07 GMT -5
FYI, I ordered those reverse tapered pots from Mouser, and even though the picture showed splined shaft, I ended up receiving straight shafts, the kind that require the knob to be fastened with a grub screw from the side, like a Telecaster knob. Looking closer I see it says, "Shaft Type: Smooth / Slotted" I assumed the picture showed what I would get and I didn't look close enough at the specs. I think this is the correct pot www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Alpha-Taiwan/RV16AF-10-15K-C1M-3LA?qs=8%252Br4Hz5Xir%2FXbg1IgSnjZg%3D%3D , but according to the picture the knurled shaft is taller than a typical control pot's shaft, so it would have to be cut shorter with a small saw or a dremel. I've done that once or twice.
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Post by antigua on Apr 11, 2023 18:27:39 GMT -5
I checked your previous post regarding the wireless unit's capacitance, I remember it was around 100pf. I used LTSpice for some test and found out that 100pf can decrease the resonant frequency from 10k to 7k for a single coil, which is kind of significant. And comparing it to the active tone control from EMG, which doesn't decrease resonant frequency much, I wonder if the buffer's input is significantly different from a wireless unit. My naive thought is that a wireless unit is basically an amp with ADC and encoder. The amp input should be a pure resistant input. So why a buffer can maintain the resonant frequency so perfectly but a wireless unit less so? Could you share any thoughts on this? Thanks! I forgot that the Line 6 unit brought down the resonant peak so much, having approximately 120pF capacitance, but it's possible that they designed it to add capacitance on purpose, or its possible that the parasitic capacitance is just very high because of how they designed the enclosure and circuit, if they were willing to tolerate what might usually be bad circuit design for the sake of making it smaller and cheaper. 10kHz to 7kHz isn't real significant insofar as the guitar amp speaker's range drops off around 5kHz, which you see if you look at specs on the Celestion or Jensen sites. Even if you could hear it, it would be a difference of very high sibilance, but once the frequency gets below 5kHz, it starts making a noticeable difference in the transient sound and the overall sound. Like the difference between Texas Specials and 57/62's, or 500 ohms worth of wire added or removed, has guitarists preferring one or the other. It's not just the frequency alone though, if the Q factor is high it will draw a lot of attention to the resonant peak, but if the Q factor is low, it will emphasize a broader range of the treble frequencies and have a softer roll off, and so a lower resonant peak with a lower Q factor might end up seeming as though it sounds clearer. I think I'm sensitive to the resonant frequency, because one by one I've been swapping in pickups with higher resonant peaks, and working the tone control to flatten the response out, and when I plug in a guitar with pickups having lower resonant peaks, I notice I'm fighting with it more, if I turn the tone control up, the higher Q lends to shrillness, but going the other way can make it too dark. When I first got into pickup swapping I was mostly using solid state modeling amps, I also noticed that when I started using more vintage style Fender tube amps with less sensitive speakers, pickups that once seemed very different, became harder to tell apart, like the amp and speakers were providing more of the color and overriding the curve inherent to the pickup. It's a series of successive filters after all.
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Post by antigua on Apr 11, 2023 0:08:09 GMT -5
Do you think a buffer or a wireless units will have similar capacitance? A buffer that's built into the guitar would have the lowest capacitance most likely, since there's such a short distance between the pickups and the buffer. Fender pickups usually have unshielded wire, the added capacitance is effectively zero in that case, but Gibson style guitar usually has a shielded cable connecting the pickups to the switch, and the switch the control pots, I measured 75pF for 1 foot of Gibson style braided wire, so if you assume 1 foot from pickup to controls, that's 75pF, but if you have a Les Paul, there's a three way trip from pickup to controls, controls to switch , switch to jack, that's probably about two and a half feet, or ~200pF capacitance just between the pickups and the output jack. Usually when I've had to account for capacitance in a buffered input for the sake making a calculation, the capacitance is between 10pF and 20pF, due parasitic capacitances in the circuit which can't be eliminated, I think you'd see about the same range with a wireless unit that plugs into the jack of the guitar. If it's the type of wireless unit that runs to the unit you hand off your pants / belt, a two foot patch cable from the jack to the wireless unit probably adds 60 to 80 pF capacitance, depending on how thick the patch cable is.
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Post by antigua on Apr 7, 2023 16:32:08 GMT -5
Position 3: Volume with tone bypassed and A smaller fixed capacitor or resistor/cap combo instead. I know some mod turned this into a "cocked wah" sound. Im trying to more or less trying to emulate what would be a neck pickup and creating a "faux neck" position here rolling some high end off the bridge pickup but not turning it to mud. Any idea what capacitor or capacitor/resistor combo values would get me the closest to the ballpark of a neck pickup sound? Yeah, a faux neck sound works pretty good, but you have to have a high Q, high inductor inductor. The Bill Lawrence Q Filter is probably the best bet, worth the money if they're still selling it for under $50. And then you basically wire it like a Veratone control, but with one fixed capacitor value instead of having a selection. The value of the inductor determines the depth of the scoop, I think, and that can be shaped / reduced with a resistor, and the frequency where the scoop occurs is determined by the cap. I'd play around with different R and C values with alligator clips until you like the fake neck pickup sound, and then solder it in. This is called an RLC network. The reason the neck pickup sounds the way it does is because the harmonics are notched out there due to the pickup's position along the length of the string. The RLC network / filter fakes the neck pickup sound by making a notch in the output signal, one that is comparable to what happens physically based on the relationship between the pickup position and the string's harmonic nodes.
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Post by antigua on Apr 7, 2023 16:22:18 GMT -5
For PTB, the regular tone control can be anything, the treble cut is a parallel control where as the bass cut is a series control, so when they're both on interacts poorly, similar to "50 wiring" when you try to roll back tone and volume at the same time, so you probably will use one or the other at any given time. For the bass cut, the components are more exotic, for that you'd want a reverse log tapper pot, in order to get the right sweep, otherwise you have to use a regular pot and wire it so that "0" is full bass and "10" is bass cut. The pot value should be as high as possible, preferably 1 meg, I think this fits the description www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/BI-Technologies-TT-Electronics/P160KNP-0EC15C1MEG?qs=56eeD6vBg8izWncDClqKdQ%3D%3D , with 500k you get leakage, and bass is lost just by having the control present, and 250k is worse still. The value of the cap is subjective and depends on the pickups, I'd use alligator clips to audition different values, the smaller the value the more low end that will be rolled off. If you use a small value like 100pF, you might find that it makes the sound utterly gutless, but if you do 300pF or higher, then maybe it just takes the "mud" out, and that might be more useable. When you combine the caps in parallel, the values add together, so if you have a cap assortment, you can just keep adding on more capacitance until you like the sound.
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Post by antigua on Apr 7, 2023 12:20:45 GMT -5
That's an impressive diagram. You even depicted the underside of the pickups accurately. Maybe make sure the toggles will clear the edges of the control cavity, it might be close. You can cut away some of the wood of course, but I don't love the idea of doing that to my guitars, I'll go out of my way to contain everything with the existing route.
1 meg pots are effectively "no load", without the detent. I'm not a fan of no load pots. I use 1 meg sometimes, but a maxed out Q factor rarely seems to be real pleasing to my ears.
I have tone toggles, I put a bunch of them in my Strats, but I don't anymore, because I don't use them often enough, and I have trouble with them coming loose, because it takes so much finger torque to turn the dial. More recently I've done push pull pots to switch between a .047 and a .0047 caps, to just get the fake humbucker sound really quickly, that seems to be good enough. But in this guitar, aside from the Duckbucker, the pickups already have a low-mids disposition.
With mini humbuckers, a bass cut control might be nice, because there's often a problem of the neck or middle sounding heavy in the bass end, or install a Bill Lawrence Q-Filter to knock down the inductance, and of course split or parallel options, and the cool this is that they all sound a bit different. Some just take out the bass, some move the resonant peak upwards, splitting changes the pickup aperture, parallel doesn't.
I set up my boss' Strat with "Vintage Rails", the rail version of Duckbuckers. He asked me to put something noiseless and batteryless in it. It has an good modern look to it. For his guitar I did the usual global volume, then a tone for the neck and middle, and a tone for the bridge, and the bridge tone is a push pull, which when pulled up changes the bridge form parallel to series, so you get SSS or SSH, in essence, the two most popular Strat configurations. I was pretty happy with that setup, I might require my Duckbucker guitar to work the same way.
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Post by antigua on Apr 6, 2023 17:29:58 GMT -5
I would use 500k pots with any pickup that is mostly made of steel parts, 250k is best paired Fender AlNiCo poled pickups. The Q factor of rail pickups are on the low side due to eddy currents, and this is true regardless of whether the pickup is wired series or parallel. If you start with 500k pots, you can get the same sound as with 250k pots by rolling the town down to around 8.
If you find that parallel mode is always too bright, 250k pots might be more idea in that case, but if you have a series/parallel DP/DT push pull, I don't think there's a way to have 250k only in parallel mode, using a resistor. Although something else I didn't mention is that my three '59 bridge Strat used three Fender S-1 switch knobs, and those are 4P/2T, so you could have it to where a resistor knocks the 500k pot down to 250 with a Fender S-1 switch, but they cost about $55 a piece when you add up the switch and the plastic knob. One of those things where you have to spend the money because there's no cheap version from China. That I know of.
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Post by antigua on Apr 5, 2023 21:19:00 GMT -5
Antiqua, Great info as usual! 1. I happen to have a Strat copy set up with the 'Everything Axe' pickup set, so can certainly rewire it to have parallel/series for each pickup. No, it will not be as perfect as your 3 x Little 59 bridge pickup wired parallel/series, but may approximate what you uncovered, albeit it more imperfectly -- plus give me more reasons to use that guitar! 2. I can also (another guitar) buy 3 higher output blade pickups (example from Fleor) and do parallel/series to better replicate your 3 x Little 59 bridge pickup guitar experiment. If so then I ask: -Is it better to get the version with the ceramic magnets (like the Little 59) or the Alnico version they also sell? I think there may be trade-offs when shuttling between series and parallel depending on the magnet type in terms of harshness/sweetness, and since the resonant peak is not listed...and since I worry about harshness that is the reason for the question -The 'strongest' Fleor is listed with a K value between 13-14K, so higher than the 11.7K listed for the Little 59 bridge pickup, so JB jr territory. The other Fleor option is 9-10k which would 'clean up' the sound a bunch in series but would reduce parallel to somewhere between 2.25-2.5k, so that would be the second possibility. The question would be, "which would make the more convincing "Strat" sound in parallel while not being terrible in series?" I was just reading your Chopper review, and it seems you had some success in doing series/parallel there too, and that the Chopper may have been more the 9-10K resistance range. Not sure if this is a good example in terms of this discussion, but I throw it out there as it might be and you can throw that into the mix as needed in terms of how it might guide selecting a Chinese knockoff with the right balance of resistance and magnets to be workable in parallel and series (a compromise I know) guitarnuts2.proboards.com/thread/8502/dimarzio-chopper-analysis-reviewEMG: I had to do an install for a friend (and routed the battery box too). Yup, I think you are right, it can work in both Strat/PAF territory. I think rewiring an everything axe to allow for series parallel on the bridge and neck would be great, maybe even the middle pickup as well. I love the sound of a higher inductance humbucker in the middle of a Strat, it's a lot like the Lindsey Buckingham Turner Model 1 sound. Get the ceramic, no question in my mind. I've tried a couple sets with AlNiCo bars, and it's just too weak. AlNiCo is supposed to have a length to width ratio of about 4:1 for optimal residual flux strength, but with those pickups, the little bar magnet is only about 2:1, so the strength is even weaker than what you'd expect with a full sized AlNiCo PAF. A pickup with an overly weak magnetic field tends to sound / feel weak and mushy, it's a feel thing because it will feel like you're plucking the strings hard and not getting as much bright snap as you come to expect with a regular strong pickup, and part of the "Strat" sound is the snap you get with the strong AlNiCo 5 pole pieces. It's subjective, you might like it that way, but I think there's a reason why most all the blade HBs on the market use ceramic, going all the back to Barden and Bill Lawrence models. If they're cheap enough, it might be worthwhile to buy both and try both, that's the beauty of Chinese pickups. You might be right that a weak magnetic field in the weaker parallel wiring sounds better than when wired in series, but I would doubt it myself, I haven't liked any pickups with especially weak magnetic fields. My pickup journey started when I had to replace some Texas Specials that had somehow become demagnetized in storage. I have a Strat with the DiMarzio Billy Corgan set, and those pickups are really hot, I think 15k-ish, and they sound the most Strat like in parallel. It's a pretty versatile guitar in that it could sound like a typical Strat or a very hot Strat, it just doesn't do the in between thing too well, but I can play a lot of repertoire between "Strat" and "super hot Strat", especially Smashing Pumpkins and other 90's era bands. The split or parallel Chopper was good also, but the Billy Corgan set just comes that much closer making me believe I'm playing a regular Strat. I was playing the Duckbucker Strat tonight, 80's pop and 90's grunge, and I was reminded that if you have an array of pedals, especially a Tube Screamer or a Timmy clone or an optical compressor, you can punch up the signal such that the parallel tone of a mini humbucker sounds perfectly thick. A lot of the cork sniffing only applies when you're plugging directly into an amp like a Fender, without a pedal or anything to push the mids and the gain. I also keep the tone control rolled back a bit, if not for that, the brightness would be much.
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Post by antigua on Apr 5, 2023 9:56:14 GMT -5
Thanks Antigua! Of all the brands you checked, or can extrapolate from, which others might give a reasonable Duckbuster (imitation single coil) sound in parallel mode yet still perform in series mode without getting too dark and wooly, or is that asking too much due to the vastly different resistance and 'H' values when flipping from series to parallel? GFS: - I like their Strat sized lipstick set VERY much and have used these on 3 builds to date. Using the Free-way 10- position switch I find 2 pups combine in series fine too. - Gold Foil Single Coil Pickup set: I tried one set, did not fall in love, but it seems fine overall (the metal foil version may be more lipstick sounding, but who knows) - the Lil Killer Strat pup(6K/6K/10K setup) I like, but due to the Kwikplug, parallel wiring split is not available. In other words I could not try the Duckbuster/parallel setup. - I have a set of the mini humbucker Gretch look "MINITRON" but have not mounted them or tested them yet. Fleor: - I mounted high wind Strat sized rails on a customer's Squier (neck and bridge), but too brash/harsh sounding for my taste. I suspect a lower wind or different magnet (Alnico) would work way better in series mode. In terms of knowing in advance which wind would be most effective in the parallel mode... It may be one of the heavier winds which conversely may not sound so hot in standard series mode.... Do you have an opinion on that? (balancing act for a reasonable outcome in both settings) Donlis: - I like their P90 set. I should play it more to get an idea how much I like it.... I used the Oak Grigsby 4-way switch and the 2 pups in series sound fine too. - I have not tried their traditional single coils (yet) but I liked what you wrote (in another one of your write ups) so I may buy some soon. - Their Twin Blade Rail Strat sized pickups, or their Dual Coil Strat size With 12pcs Pole Screw have mostly really high K and H values, so may sound really dark/muffled, though may open up in parallel mode (any opinion?). The possibly most open sounding of the lot could be the DB01 (7.4K, 4.9H) though it may suffer then in parallel mode and be too thin (but maybe you have an opinion on that) Waah: I have them marked up for purchase in my Aliexpress account, I have not pulled the plug, but thanks for the recommendation. In Strat size, they only have the traditional pups, but I still like those too... The Tele tapping set sounds quite intriguing. Oripure: I don't mind modern production look, but I have not tried these yet. I guess at this point my only question is if a reasonable difference exists between them and the Fleor besides in price. Homeland: Ah a good visual knock off of the everything axe pickup set... Thanks for the warning, I'll stay away from those! My favorite single coil sized blade humbuckers are the lower inductance ones, like the DiMarzio Chopper, or the models that Seymour Duncan and other would designate as a "neck pickup". It's just a sad fact with pickups that in order for the parallel tone to remind you of a good Strat pickup, that you have to have a high inductance in series, seems to be true for full sized and mini sized humbuckers. I have Strat with both hot and cool rail humbuckers, and even the Duckbuckers, in fact I brought the guitar pictured at the top of the thread out of storage to play in our jam later, and I just try to pair up the guitar with songs that will compliment its strength and weakness. I have to admit the Duckbucker is probably more weakness than strength, but I like the variety, it lets me have multiple Strat that don't all do the same thing. I find the Strat with the higher inductance blades that split will to be the most useful, because it can sound like a Strat in parallel or a fire breather in series, it works for a lot of music. The DiMarzio Choppers, and the lower inductance neck pickups, some closest to making good on the promise of a PAF like tone in a Strat, IMO, so I have a good time with that guitar, but to be honest when I want a PAF tone it usually just makes more sense to grab an Epiphone, I have to show my HH guitars some love too. I find those "hot" Strat pickups usually do sound harsh, because they have a lower resonant peak, somewhere between 2kHz and 3kHz depending on the guitar cable or lack of one. It can be remedied by rolling back the tone knob to soften the knee, but then it ends up not being a very clear pickup. Over time I've moved to Strat pickups with a DC resistance of 6k ohms or less, because it ensures that the resonant peak will be upwards of 4kHz, and it feels much easier to control, and sound more like the Strats I'm used to hearing on the radio. It sounds like you bought one of these www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Donlis-High-Output-dual-coil-single_60614681728.html , I bought a fake "everything axe" set with three of those, I made a post about them here www.strat-talk.com/threads/analysis-of-chinese-knock-off-of-seymour-duncan-everything-axe-set.502390/ , I didn't get along with those for a few reasons. One thing you might like is something I did in the early 2000's purely by accident. I went into a guitar store, and they only had three Little '59 bridge pickups, but I was after a bridge and two neck pickups, so I just bought all three bridge pickups because it was what they had in stock, and I wired my Strat so that the bridge pickup was in series, and the neck and middle were parallel, and I had push pull knobs to reverse the series/parallel of any of the three, and that actually worked pretty good. I used that guitar and that pickup config the one time I ever recorded in a legitimate big name recording studio. The Little 59 bridge pickups in parallel were perfectly find neck and middle pickups, but I thought of the pickup situation as a hack since it had three bridge pickups. So, about ten years ago I gutted that pick guard put different pickups in it, which I though should be more ideal, but now I kind of regret taking it apart, because it actually was pretty ideal already. I think it sounded more Strat like than Duckbuckers. All in all Duckbuckers and Little 59's are meant to look more traditional, the sound quality takes a hit due to the poorer magnetic coupling. The closest I've come to having single coils and humbuckers in a Strat is with EMG single coils and the SPC mid boost, it starts with a pretty genuine single coil sound, and turning up the SPL control bumps up the mid range to sound a lot like a single coil sized humbucker, but super quietly. The sound quality is definitely really good, the upside to dealing with a 9 volt battery and more circuitry in the guitar.
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