timtam
Meter Reader 1st Class
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Post by timtam on Jun 1, 2024 22:11:41 GMT -5
Manfred Zollner was recently awarded the German Society for Acoustics (DEGA) Helmholtz medal for lifetime achievement, at the DAGA24 meeting in Hanover.
His associated keynote address is now online (in German; youtube's Closed-Captions translation to English is OK), as is the PDF of his presentation (Google Translate does a good job of translating the PDF). It covers a broad range of topics, but includes some of his more recent findings on pickups.
2nd attempt at link (should work by going to actual youtube if not here):
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Post by antigua on Jun 6, 2024 0:09:22 GMT -5
Thanks for sharing this news. Can you paste the YouTube link again? It seems to not be working.
That's really something, a big room full of acoustics professionals giving honors to a person who has studied electric guitar, and guitar pickups in particular, his entire life. It's a surprisingly niche area of study and interest, relative to the number of electric guitars that are made and sold every year.
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timtam
Meter Reader 1st Class
Posts: 59
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Post by timtam on Jun 6, 2024 1:14:52 GMT -5
Youtube link should work now ... although you may have to watch at the youtube site.
The European acoustics societies (eg German, French) seem to cover much more musical acoustics than say the US one (which is much bigger). Probably because there are more musical acoustics research groups/institutes in continental Europe. And of course a much longer history of musical instrument building.
But as you say it's a big award for electric guitar work, in which Zollner is unique in the breadth and depth of his work.
It's curious that guitar science researchers and the big guitar/pickup manufacturers have had very little contact with each other. There are a few such links on the acoustic guitar side (which is becoming more influenced by objective acoustic engineering approaches). But the US electric guitar manufacturers have only had a few brief flirtations with the few US guitar scientists. I think what it comes down to is that you can build a great solid-body guitar or a pickup without fully understanding their physics (although it helps). So manufacturers have seen little need to work with scientists (or even try to understand their work).
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Post by newey on Jun 6, 2024 5:02:36 GMT -5
I think what it comes down to is that you can build a great solid-body guitar or a pickup without fully understanding their physics (although it helps). So manufacturers have seen little need to work with scientists (or even try to understand their work).
Yes, that, plus also guitarists are enamored with "vintage" electronics, and when manufacturers do attempt to be more innovative, they get shot down in the marketplace. As one example, Fender has made many different guitar designs over the years. These have largely been ignored while Teles and Strats sell in droves. There is no incentive to innovate when the customers demnand the same things you've been building for 60 + years. |
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Post by kitwn on Jun 7, 2024 21:24:30 GMT -5
I think what it comes down to is that you can build a great solid-body guitar or a pickup without fully understanding their physics (although it helps). So manufacturers have seen little need to work with scientists (or even try to understand their work).
Yes, that, plus also guitarists are enamored with "vintage" electronics, and when manufacturers do attempt to be more innovative, they get shot down in the marketplace. As one example, Fender has made many different guitar designs over the years. These have largely been ignored while Teles and Strats sell in droves. There is no incentive to innovate when the customers demnand the same things you've been building for 60 + years. Timtam, All you really need to know is "wrap some wire round a magnet" and you can get started in building pickups. There are probably thousands of DIY variations on that theme in unknown guitars and many more that weren't that good lying around in peoples sheds that the rest of us have never heard of. Harmless fun for the geeky guitarist. Speaking of whom: Brian May's Red Special started out with home-made pickups, though I think he and his father knew more of the physics than many.
I assume even Leo fender and Seth Lover based their designs that basic principle plus a few experiments plus the need to have semi-skilled workers assemble them by the thousand at low cost. Those designs then created the tones that became iconic.
Dewey, It's interesting to see how conservative a generation of people who are seen as innovative and revolutionary can be. There's probably a PhD in it for someone who want to delve into the psychological and psychoacoustic origins of that. Even me, who has been toying with the idea of building a guitar with a microcontroller in it is currently lusting after a Player Plus Stratocaster in Sienna Sunburst but thinking that a Squire Classic Vibe '60s Strat in 3 colour sunburst is more bang for buck 😎
Kit
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Post by stratotarts on Jun 25, 2024 10:57:56 GMT -5
I hear you. But, orders for my integrator have steadily ramped up recently, such that I couldn't keep up with the builds. I halted production so that I could design a unit that could be manufactured in greater quantities. So there are lots of people who do care about the electronics. I never share details of my clients, but I can tell you that many of them are custom builders with a business model. Quite a few are just interested hobbyists. I also field a lot of email enquiries from people who have read about testing or theory, and just want some clarification of some aspects. In those I see some enthusiasm and curiosity for things beyond wrapping wire around a magnet.
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Post by kitwn on Jun 25, 2024 21:52:59 GMT -5
I hear you. But, orders for my integrator have steadily ramped up recently, such that I couldn't keep up with the builds. I halted production so that I could design a unit that could be manufactured in greater quantities. So there are lots of people who do care about the electronics. I never share details of my clients, but I can tell you that many of them are custom builders with a business model. Quite a few are just interested hobbyists. I also field a lot of email enquiries from people who have read about testing or theory, and just want some clarification of some aspects. In those I see some enthusiasm and curiosity for things beyond wrapping wire around a magnet. I didn't mean to suggest that careful measurement and developing an understanding of the physics is not valuable, and am pleased to hear that there are obviously plenty of people wanting to buy the instruments needed to follow that route. I spent my working life as an electronics engineer, much of it teaching fundamental theory and advanced practice in the broadcasting world where accurate performance measurement was a key requirement. If I didn't already have more than enough rabbit holes to dive down (current investigations revolve around whether an Arduino can be trained by a GPS receiver to drive an accurate clock) I would be building dedicated test gear and investigating pickup design and performance myself. The science of electric guitar tones and how people relate to them is a fascinating mixture of physics, psychology and psychoacoustics which could easily take up every waking minute of somebody's time. The GITEC website, founded by Manfred Zollner, is full of detailed research notes and The Book (most of which is downloadable in English as series of PDF files) is worth an entire university course on it's own.
What I am suggesting is that even the most revered designs from the past were probably designed in a much more pragmatic way, based on experimentation and using readily available materials and tools at the time. Plus a very real desire to design an effective pickup that was not an infringement of somebody else's patent. Those instruments, and the amplifiers they were connected to, then created the sounds we have learned to love.
I would encourage anybody who is interested in studying pickups to have a go at making something, however rustic in construction, and testing the result. It will almost certainly make some kind of a sound and teach you something.
Kit
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Post by ms on Jun 26, 2024 7:19:36 GMT -5
--- What I am suggesting is that even the most revered designs from the past were probably designed in a much more pragmatic way, based on experimentation and using readily available materials and tools at the time. Plus a very real desire to design an effective pickup that was not an infringement of somebody else's patent. Those instruments, and the amplifiers they were connected to, then created the sounds we have learned to love. ----
Kit
Exactly. I like one of Zollner's examples: the strat pickup. The turns furthest from the strings contribute little to the output. But they contribute to the inductance to get the right tone. If you wanted a narrow pickup, inexpensive and easy to make, that was the way you found to do it. I doubt that Fender could measure magnetic fields to really know what he was doing. (Measurement was hard then, and I do not think he was so inclined in any case.) So he just did it, beginning with lap steels. |
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nuke
Apprentice Shielder
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Post by nuke on Jun 26, 2024 20:59:07 GMT -5
I hear you. But, orders for my integrator have steadily ramped up recently, such that I couldn't keep up with the builds. I halted production so that I could design a unit that could be manufactured in greater quantities. So there are lots of people who do care about the electronics. I never share details of my clients, but I can tell you that many of them are custom builders with a business model. Quite a few are just interested hobbyists. I also field a lot of email enquiries from people who have read about testing or theory, and just want some clarification of some aspects. In those I see some enthusiasm and curiosity for things beyond wrapping wire around a magnet. I'm one of those recent orders, happy with the results it produces, even though my Rigol MSO5000 scope has it's own sorta-weird way of doing Bode plots. I've noticed since getting mine, that they do show up time to time on youtubes and photos of some custom pickup builders. Seems to be some growing awareness that "how many K is it?" doesn't tell much of the story. I kind of think that though 'measurement was hard', the engineers of the past were quite clever and educated, perhaps more so than today's undergrads in some of the basic theory and physics. Inductors were more routinely used back in the day than perhaps in more modern times. Although the use of inductors have greatly in today's world of switching power supplies and electric vehicles. There was a sort of gap in the application of inductance in the electronics industry since it inductors aren't as amenable to fabrication on silicon as transistors, resistors and capacitors. |
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