Railhammer pickups

[ecmalmo]

I was trying to understand what made this Railhammer Hyper Vintage in my Explorer sound so good, really powerful but still with kind of a "PAF" profile. It doesn't sound like any other pickup I've tried. Hot PAF types tend to get really nasal when the output goes up and the resonance creeps down, but not this one.

The marketing says that the rails unde the wound strings will keep them tight (i e produce less bass I guess) and the oversized poles will keep the unwound strings fat.

The inductance and resistance is pretty run of the mill for a "hot PAF" type 5.8 H @ 100Hz and 8.7K (in circuit so it's probably closer to 6 and 9)
The Q factor at 1KHz sits at a very common 1.55 for humbuckers in circuit .

However, I get really high readings on the magnetism, especially on the rails, which peak at around 800 Gauss and also a pretty strong 430 Gs at the poles.

Could this be what sets these pickups apart from a normal PAF? The difference in field strength produced by the rails and poles respectively?
The magnet is supposed to be an Alnico 5 bar and the wire 42 AWG - I'm guessing poly enamel.

[antigua]

I'd guess the three wound strings have a weaker coupling than the three plain strings, so it would weigh more towards the treble in terms of the input. I'm not sure if the pole pieces will pull on the strings, more but I'd guess yes. The 5.8 H inductances is on the "hot vintage bridge" side of aftermarket PAF replicas, which favors the bass and mids, counteracting the stronger coupling of wound strings, so that it ends up being balanced out. I think if you took a regular "hot" PAF and tilted the bass side way down and the treble side way up, it would have a similar coupling profile and sound similar, but the three poles and the rail are abruptly different, where as tilting the pickup creates a gradient of strong to weak coupling from high E to low E, so it's still going to be different. 

Their marketing puts the idea in your head, "PAF, but better", I'm sure it sounds good but relating how it sounds to a PAF is probably just an arbitrary suggestion to perceive what you hear from it a certain way. This day and age, "modern" is a bad word, so it wouldn't surprise me if they just described all of their pickups as somehow being vintage with a special twist. 

I've done similar experiments with mixed magnetic strengths, like A2 or A3 under the wound strings, and A5 under the the plains strings, or vice versa, and it's definitely an interesting difference either way. Seymour Duncan had a "five-two" which was A5 under the wound strings and A2 under the plain strings, to mellow out the treble and "tighten" the bass, but I received some pickups from China that were the reverse, and it still sounded pretty great in it's own right.  The magnetic pull affects that harmonics or the string, and we're all used to hearing a pickup that is just type of magnet or the other, so having a mixture of the two creates a sound that's both vintage and new sounding at the same time. 

[ecmalmo]

Aug 30, 2022 23:47:03 GMT -5 antigua said:

I'd guess the three wound strings have a weaker coupling than the three plain strings, so it would weigh more towards the treble in terms of the input. I'm not sure if the pole pieces will pull on the strings, more but I'd guess yes. The 5.8 H inductances is on the "hot vintage bridge" side of aftermarket PAF replicas, which favors the bass and mids, counteracting the stronger coupling of wound strings, so that it ends up being balanced out. I think if you took a regular "hot" PAF and tilted the bass side way down and the treble side way up, it would have a similar coupling profile and sound similar, but the three poles and the rail are abruptly different, where as tilting the pickup creates a gradient of strong to weak coupling from high E to low E, so it's still going to be different. 

Their marketing puts the idea in your head, "PAF, but better", I'm sure it sounds good but relating how it sounds to a PAF is probably just an arbitrary suggestion to perceive what you hear from it a certain way. This day and age, "modern" is a bad word, so it wouldn't surprise me if they just described all of their pickups as somehow being vintage with a special twist. 

I've done similar experiments with mixed magnetic strengths, like A2 or A3 under the wound strings, and A5 under the the plains strings, or vice versa, and it's definitely an interesting difference either way. Seymour Duncan had a "five-two" which was A5 under the wound strings and A2 under the plain strings, to mellow out the treble and "tighten" the bass, but I received some pickups from China that were the reverse, and it still sounded pretty great in it's own right.  The magnetic pull affects that harmonics or the string, and we're all used to hearing a pickup that is just type of magnet or the other, so having a mixture of the two creates a sound that's both vintage and new sounding at the same time. 

Shouldn’t it be the other way around? The wound strings are over the rails, and the rails measure much stronger compared to the poles.

[antigua]

Aug 31, 2022 0:20:04 GMT -5 ecmalmo said:

Aug 30, 2022 23:47:03 GMT -5 antigua said:

I'd guess the three wound strings have a weaker coupling than the three plain strings, so it would weigh more towards the treble in terms of the input. I'm not sure if the pole pieces will pull on the strings, more but I'd guess yes. The 5.8 H inductances is on the "hot vintage bridge" side of aftermarket PAF replicas, which favors the bass and mids, counteracting the stronger coupling of wound strings, so that it ends up being balanced out. I think if you took a regular "hot" PAF and tilted the bass side way down and the treble side way up, it would have a similar coupling profile and sound similar, but the three poles and the rail are abruptly different, where as tilting the pickup creates a gradient of strong to weak coupling from high E to low E, so it's still going to be different. 

Their marketing puts the idea in your head, "PAF, but better", I'm sure it sounds good but relating how it sounds to a PAF is probably just an arbitrary suggestion to perceive what you hear from it a certain way. This day and age, "modern" is a bad word, so it wouldn't surprise me if they just described all of their pickups as somehow being vintage with a special twist. 

I've done similar experiments with mixed magnetic strengths, like A2 or A3 under the wound strings, and A5 under the the plains strings, or vice versa, and it's definitely an interesting difference either way. Seymour Duncan had a "five-two" which was A5 under the wound strings and A2 under the plain strings, to mellow out the treble and "tighten" the bass, but I received some pickups from China that were the reverse, and it still sounded pretty great in it's own right.  The magnetic pull affects that harmonics or the string, and we're all used to hearing a pickup that is just type of magnet or the other, so having a mixture of the two creates a sound that's both vintage and new sounding at the same time. 

Shouldn’t it be the other way around? The wound strings are over the rails, and the rails measure much stronger compared to the poles.

The rails are smaller, though, so you have to take into account both the strength and the size of the flux field. That's why humbuckers actually pull on the strings to a significant degree, enough to where stronger and weaker magnets make an subtle but audible difference, even though the strength at the poles and screws is only 250 to 300 G, there are two rows of poles and screws per pickup which results in a wider flux field. The same thing happens with Seymour Duncan Quarter Pounds, the density at any point is lower, but the overall field size is larger, so it's a wash, which just leads my to the conclusion that they're more a gimmick than anything else. My guess is the rails produce a weaker output than the pole pieces because even though the rail reads stronger, the overall coupling coefficient between the thin rail and the guitar strings is lower than with the wider slugs. The output voltage combines both the magnetizing the string and then sensing the string movement by the same pole piece, so it's "transmitter strength" plus "receiver sensitivity". The reason I think this is because of the fact that AlNiCo poled Strat pickups have a lower output than steel poled Strat pickups, and it's a similar dynamic, having a stronger transmitter but a weaker receiver. One possible reason is that the guitar string magnetically saturates, and becomes no more magnetized beyond a certain point. 

In that sense, the magnetometer is only telling half the story, but on the up side, we can get the other half just by looking at the size of the pile piece. In cases where the pole pieces can't be seen, like a EMG or Lace Sensor, magnetic film cab be used to see the magnetic flux lines through the plastic.