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Post by ourclarioncall on Jul 17, 2020 16:41:45 GMT -5
I just bought a Bare knuckle pickup single coil boot camp old guard
I did a bit of research and settled on this one .
It’s Alnico 2. Supposed to a bit less powerful than Alnico 5 and a bit warmer on the treble side of things. I wanted a low power pickup for less string pull, and also as I remember reading on the old guitar nuts website that experiments done with coils in series has better results with two low powered coils.
It was close to £50 for one pickup. Can’t remember if it’s hand wound or scatter wound. British company that seem to have a good reputation. It was either that or a Seymour Duncan ssl-2
I did a bit of research and settled on this one .
In a way it’s a bit of an experiment to see how much if any it improves the tone of my mule which currently has some of the cheapest basic single coil bar magnet pickups money can buy.
At the end of the day a pickup is a pickup right ? What are you really paying for and how much variation is there really in Alnico single coils ? I remember listening to a bunch of the high end single coils years ago and thought they all found pretty much the same. Obviously overwound pickups will sound fatter and more distorted but all that type of thing can be compensated by changing setting on the amp or pedals .
It seems the big difference is between genuine single coils and noodles variations which some report as a bit flat and lifeless in comparison to a noisy single coil.
Other pickups like lace sensor or Emg will certainly sound very different , but I’m specifically talking about basic bar magnet or Alnico rod magnet single coils.
At what price point are you paying more for asthetics , better quality wire, better packaging , better marketing etc
Will my sub £10 single coil sound just as good as my approx £50 bare knuckle ? I hope so ! And I hope it’s significantly better , but at the same time I’m more interested in the truth of the matter . Maybe a £20 pickup will genuily sound as good or maybe better ! Than these high end high priced offerings out there today 🤔🤔🤔
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Post by b4nj0 on Jul 21, 2020 12:16:14 GMT -5
Bareknuckle pickups are really good on construction, attention to detail and subjectively- sound, but you know so are a great many others. I have one at the bridge in my Yamaha Pacifica 904 (I guess that makes it a 912 now?) Better not to ask why because it's a touch embarrassing! I think my example is a "Crawler" so I imagine it's a posthumous Kossof Signature? There is no marking on it to indicate provenance and BK were not forthcoming in that arena beyond confirming that once it's left the factiry, only the cardboard box hints to the model designation. Tim will work with you and if you (eg) do or don't want wax potting, he'll provide (unless his business model has changed over the years.) That could be so because I once made a mildly desperate plea to him for ond of his Tele base plates and was shown the door!
Antigua's research tends to indicate that you really don't need to hemorrhage beer tokens on pickups. However, cash sunk into rice bowl economies is lost forever, and paying someone like Tim could conceivably see him (or one of his army of winders) rocking up at one of your gigs. That cannot be said about Mao's clan. That said- I'd still vote with my wallet because most of the time I find the differences between this and that for comparable architectures more measurable than discernable. Sorry Antigua!
Would a hand winder go out of his or her way to avoid scatter winding? That reveals my ignorance I guess, but the concentration required to layer wind thousands of turns of approximately 42 gauge wire would send me dopey in about two minutes. I would kind of expect to encounter at least some measure of scatter winding in any hand wound pickup.
How do you find the Bareknuckle OCC? Was there a model indication engraving or sticker applied to your single coil?
e&oe ...
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Post by ourclarioncall on Jul 22, 2020 10:09:54 GMT -5
b4nj0I guess my £50 bare knuckle is still cheap in comparison to some of the high end pickups like the Seymour Duncan antiquity 2 for example , which comes in around £115 per pickup 🙂 i haven’t actually tried the BK yet as it hasn’t arrived in the post yet , it should come this week. Hand wound /scatter wound - im showing my ignorance there, I don’t have a clue about pickup winding , just parroting terms I’ve heard so what was Antigua’s findings /research pointing to? I’m assuming that it’s that’s there is not much difference between low end and high end pickups so save your cash? id be interested to know what the difference would be between a super cheap bar magnet and a cheap Alnico 5. A while back I went through eBay looking at the price points for all the cheapest pickups until the price went up to Alnico 5’s. Wish I had lots of time and money to do all these experiments 😁
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