Lollar book, time to republish!!!! [Archive]

Possum

06-04-2006, 11:17 AM

I wonder how many of you actually did all the work in that book? Well I did and to be honest I never would have made it out of that book alive without Jason's personal help. I owe him big time for all the emails to my frustrations and money thrown down a hole in trying to make it all work. There are alot of mistakes in that book and not enough information on the actual procedures in building the winder, that unless you're a a serious woodworker, you'd never get past. There are some parts in there and tools that I never got to work right. I'm not offering this as criticism, the book is a marvel for it's time, but needs serious updating. Jason a year or so back asked for suggestions etc. for what the new version should have in it and I don't think anyone responded, probably because no one had actually built those winders, spent weeks scouring Goodwill Stores for old sewing machines etc. I sure did and it was one of the most frustrating episodes in my life. At the time I was way too busy with my "day" job to offer my honest thoughts on how it should change and believe me, he spent a couple years getting it to where it is now, updating and making it more user friendly etc. is probably another year or two project; since then his public image has hit the big time, so he has no time for that. Plus there's the downside that there now are way more hobby winders than there ever were who probably have visions of making a business out of it, so a new book would just produce more competition in the field. So the book is now a cult classic. All it really is , is a push to get you started, its not going to tell you a thing about how to make GOOD pickups, its mostly a mechanic's book. The designs in it are good pickups but understanding WHY they are good pickups isn't in there. Probably hanging around the forum you'll learn more, and of course making hundreds of pickups and actually breaking a sweat to figure out WHY things work the way they do will get you further down the road. Just following recipes and cranking out mindless stuff with no understanding goes nowhere. I don't think you're going to see another book about pickup making for a long time to come because the guys who know the real stuff make their livings at it and worked hard for that knowledge and that's only right and just. I had some guy offering me bootleg recordings of some of my favorite guitar players in the jump blues scene in trade for copying Jason's book, I never did........

DrStrangelove

06-04-2006, 05:26 PM

HI, Dave.

Jason's book certainly requires some interpretation and effort if you aren't
comfortable with basic woodworking and lack a drill press. He can't do the
reader's work for him. As you say, it's a call to action, a book of ideas, and
a blueprint for getting started.

Understanding what makes a good pickup requires more Science than most
of you want to acknowledge, and needs a longer book than Jason wanted
to author. It isn't miserably difficult, does not require genius -- one must
WANT to understand instead of throwing up one's hands and declaring pickup
quality as unquantifiable except solely by human ear. Unfortunately, there are
too many people who want to believe in magic.:jason2:

(For anyone interested, magnetic permeability and recoil permeability are the
profoundly neglected topics of pickup design.)

Miraculously, some actually do quality control by testing pickups' DC
resistance and inductance. More power to them.

Reading this and the other pickup makers forum, I sadly feel that TESTING
is where pickup makers are, on average, 50 years behind the times. The
pickup is a transducer and not only a passive component. Since, historically,
NOBODY wants to listen about tests using a magnetic field with swept frequency
and pseudo random noise, I won't belabor it. :mad:

At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if Jason and folks like him have commercial
automated winding systems and have learned how to simulate their hand winding
technique on them. It's the man, not the machine.

-drh
PS, Dave can you bust your longer posts into paragraphs? Paras are easier to read.

Spence

06-05-2006, 09:14 AM

Calm down gentlemen.

Jason's book is still highly regarded. Most people reading it will actually use the plans to make their own design of machine. I had a journalist call me once asking for help in building Jason's design for a magazine article. In the end the journo decided it was too much for him.

So I'm suggesting that anyone who is making pickups could write their own book with their own design of machine and give Jason a break.

And Dr. Strangelove said...

Reading this and the other pickup makers forum, I sadly feel that TESTING
is where pickup makers are, on average, 50 years behind the times. The
pickup is a transducer and not only a passive component. Since, historically,
NOBODY wants to listen about tests using a magnetic field with swept frequency
and pseudo random noise, I won't belabor it.

Did Leo or Seth test using magnetic fields with a swept frequency? No he didn't so what's the big deal. Some of us have excellent testing methods using guitars. It works so I for one will not be requiring a Tricorder for christmas.

Possum

06-05-2006, 01:16 PM

I had to laugh my ass off on that paragraph break thing. My wife who is an ad agency pro like me (barf, barf, puke, puke....on both of us) is always telling me to quit writing in looooong thoughts with no breaks. Uh oh...paragraph break....

Dude, I HAVE messed with frequency response charts and all that, those things lead nowhere. Guitar pickups by their very nature all fall into a pretty narrow range of what can be charted on a graph. The problem is you can can graph a wide range of pickups and on a frequency response chart they are all so close, it doesn't tell you crap about what the character of the pickup really is. the pursuit of nailing down a pickup's character in meter readings has always been a fanatic pursuit of mine, stymied by my lack of funding for expensive gear. But, really you cannot nail a pickup's true character in any kind of plotted, or measured numbers. OK, paragraph break.....

As an example, I am working on some blade pickups, thin blade versus thick blade, two different gauges of wire. Using the Extech LCR meter to guide me and of course my EARS. I posted on the Ampage forum to Joe that now I got a 4 henry coil versus a 6 henry coil, both with different gauges of wire, and they sound the same, the AC resistance is very close so now I'm thinking the AC resistance is really a more true indicator of what we hear instead of matching inductance readings. So, my ideas about what works and doesn't is always changing. Now I'm t hinking inductance is a rough guide, AC resistance readings are the fine tuning that are more close to what our ears are hearing. So, anyway, pickup knowledge is always in flux, no one can say for sure one thing is true and as soon as you do that, you find out it isn't. Bottom line is ears.........

Possum

06-05-2006, 01:21 PM

"(For anyone interested, magnetic permeability and recoil permeability are the
profoundly neglected topics of pickup design.)"

Well no they are not, we've been over that one alot and Joe Gwinn helped us understand it. My take on all that went on is that what was discussed boiled down to pretty much what we get from inductance readings. Meaning that like A5 gives really bright readings in henrys and AC resistance, but is also a quick responding magnetic field. So yeah premeability and recoil permeability are good things to look at but to me they are pretty much the same as AC resistance and henry readings. The alnicos like A5 react quick, the A3's and A2's dont reacti quick and you can use the henry and AC resistance readings to infer that information rather than have exact numbers to refer to, its a matter of ears and experience. Anyway just wanted to address that...

DrStrangelove

06-05-2006, 03:38 PM

Did Leo or Seth test using magnetic fields with a swept frequency? No he didn't so what's the big deal. Some of us have excellent testing methods using guitars. It works so I for one will not be requiring a Tricorder for christmas.

No, they didn't.

It's 50 years later, Leo and Seth are dead, and we are not them.

More acute tools for pickup measurement have become available
to the hobbyist in the last half a century, but if all you want to do
is make replicas of 50 year old designs...

-drh
--

DrStrangelove

06-05-2006, 03:51 PM

"(For anyone interested, magnetic permeability and recoil permeability are the
profoundly neglected topics of pickup design.)"

Well no they are not,

Are too, are too.

If you had a handle on those properties, you wouldn't ask if inductance was all there is to it.

Here it is one more time:

A pickup is a transducer and not merely a passive inductor.
It is a distinction with a difference.

By analogy, a loudspeaker has a coil of wire in it, but manufacturors
spec them with a frequency response curve and a pulse response.

In fact, everyone BUT pickup makers spec transducers with an
input-output response.

"It's magic, I tellya."

-drh

Spence

06-05-2006, 04:09 PM

Dr. strangelove said:

More acute tools for pickup measurement have become available
to the hobbyist in the last half a century, but if all you want to do
is make replicas of 50 year old designs...

Well, for a start, I'm not a hobbyist. I make pickups for people who appreciate what Fender and Gibson did in the good old days. I'm a boutique custom builder.

I appreciate the views of those who say a CD recording is better than vinyl as an example of improved technology but I don't accept that view in it's entirity. In the same way, I appreciate the pickup desires of modern players. I cater for modern players too but most players haven't any idea of how a pickup works. That's why they go to people who do.

I'm curious to know what sort of testing equiptment you think is necessary other than a DCR, an inductance meter and a Gaussmeter. Do you atually make pickups? What is your experience? What have you developed that's better than my vintage rubbish and where can I hear them in action?

DrStrangelove

06-05-2006, 05:42 PM

Well, for a start, I'm not a hobbyist. I make pickups for people who appreciate what Fender and Gibson did in the good old days. I'm a boutique custom builder.

Relax. The point is that inexpensive test tools, diagnostics that far surpass what could be had 50 years ago, are available to hobbyists. Even better stuff is out there for the professional who has a handle on quality control.

I'm curious to know what sort of testing equiptment you think is necessary other than a DCR, an inductance meter and a Gaussmeter.

An audio range signal generator and spectrum analyzer, much like a lot of loudspeaker analyzer applications, only set up for pickups. That sort of thing will compute inductance for free and, from pulse reponse, tell you if the coil is wound too regularly instead of scatterwound. In fact, something called an MLS signal test gives all those things from the same single test.

One such application for loudspeakers, for free, is Speaker Workshop over on the Audua.com site. It's a little hard to use for pickups, though.

Do you atually make pickups?

Hell, no. The money in software engineering is too good.

What is your experience?
The question is irrelevant and so is the following information:
The family racket is physics, my degree was chemistry despite my having been an electronics hobbyist since age 9.

I've built the somewhat finicky Lollar winder, done a wood lathe winder conversion like SK did, designed and built a magnetic revolutions counter for it using my own variable reluctance sensor, built a gaussmeter using the last generation of Allegro's hall effect sensors, wound a bunch of telecaster bridge-style pickups, done magnetic simulations of pickup geometries, researched magnetic materials and magnet wire, grown disillusioned by the extraordinary subjectivism that dominates pickup testing, and here we are.

What have you developed that's better than my vintage rubbish and where can I hear them in action?

I didn't call them rubbish, you did, but I will stipulate that it was sarcasm.

And, no, I don't sell pickups so please take a moment to feel smug.

I'm an interested amateur with some technical expertise to offer.

I've tested a lot of different stuff, enough to know that there are good tests, bad tests, narrow tests, and tests that give genuine insight.

Pickup making needs better tests.

Most pickup makers are perdurately resistant to the idea in public but, since the inception of the old Pickup Makers Forum, I've noticed quite a few people move from compasses to gaussmeters, from nothing to multimeters, from multimeters to inductance meters, and from hand winds to commercial automated winders.

I assert that whatever pickup you build or design, you can build it better and more consistently when you have better tests to inform you.

What a concept, hey?

-drh

DrStrangelove

06-05-2006, 05:55 PM

As an example, I am working on some blade pickups, thin blade versus thick blade, two different gauges of wire.

I forgot to add: congratulations on nailing down a new design.
Hope it goes very well very soon.

You have the opportunity to compete directly with Joe Barden on the basis of pure merit. (Joe's a good guy, but while he was a long time getting back on his feet, the hype that built up around his pickups got pretty deep and steamy. Because of his production methods and demand, Joe's pups cost $170.)

Using the Extech LCR meter to guide me and of course my EARS.

Ears are the final judge but they aren't the only one.
While your ears can tell you that something is wrong,
they don't usually tell you why.

We need better tests for why.

-drh
--

Spence

06-05-2006, 08:41 PM

The point is.......what's wrong with 50 year old pickup designs? Please don't start off mentioning 60 cycle hum as I've yet to hear a noiseless pickup.

You can design a near perfect transducer and I promise you it will be souless.

Now, may I just mention that I have an instrumentation engineering degree and I had to do some fairly heavy physics and chemistry to get on that programme so I know the value of test equiptment.

I do agree that people on the the old forum graduate from a compass to a gaussmeter etc as you say. But that's more because of finance than anything else. Everyone would have those tools if they could afford them straight off. I'm certain you don't need them other than a DCR and a compass. They are aids to a product type as far as I'm concerned, not an essential.

David Schwab

06-05-2006, 09:23 PM

(For anyone interested, magnetic permeability and recoil permeability are the profoundly neglected topics of pickup design.)

I'm interested! I'm actually learning as much as I can regarding the underlying science of it all... (magnets are really weird!) I have an avid interest in quantum mechanics, and I read as much as I can on the subject. :D

Miraculously, some actually do quality control by testing pickups' DC resistance and inductance. More power to them.

I can only do DC resistance at the moment, but I check every coil I wind to see how close it is to spec. I'm always interested in being able to repeat what I make.

Reading this and the other pickup makers forum, I sadly feel that TESTING is where pickup makers are, on average, 50 years behind the times. The pickup is a transducer and not only a passive component. Since, historically, NOBODY wants to listen about tests using a magnetic field with swept frequency and pseudo random noise, I won't belabor it. :mad:

I'm quite interested in testing... I would like to know what my magnetic field looks like and the pickup's frequency response, inductance, etc. I'm unable to do those tests at this time however... :(

At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if Jason and folks like him have commercial automated winding systems and have learned how to simulate their hand winding technique on them. It's the man, not the machine.

Well we know Wolfe has a really nice winder!

I would just love to have an automated setup to wind coils. To me, it's all in the design of the pickup.. at least for what I do. I think my hand winding is more of a detriment than a magic ingredient! At least at this point in time. :D

DrStrangelove

06-05-2006, 09:34 PM

The point is.......what's wrong with 50 year old pickup designs?

That is abstracting a singular piece from the entire discourse and is just a tad tendentious and argumentative. My point is about testing.

There's nothing wrong with 50 year old designs if that's what you want to build and
that's what your customers like.

If you want to make them like Leo and Seth did (BTW, they're dead),
they had better be artisanal pickups because there's no justifying
an expensive handwind when the technology and craft is producing
good commodity pickups more cheaply.

How consistently would you like to make them?
How large a demand do you plan to meet?
What if you could determine from purely instrumentational
means why two seeming identical pickups sounded different?

That's where a well-designed test is important.

You can design a near perfect transducer and I promise you it will be souless.

Straw man argument.

Everyone would have those tools if they could afford them straight off. I'm certain you don't need them other than a DCR and a compass. They are aids to a product type as far as I'm concerned, not an essential.

Take care that your knuckles don't get scuffed.

-drh

David Schwab

06-05-2006, 10:03 PM

The point is.......what's wrong with 50 year old pickup designs? Please don't start off mentioning 60 cycle hum as I've yet to hear a noiseless pickup.

Nothing... if you are just copying Fender (or Gibson) style pickups. I think it's quite restricting that we are stuck with those form factors for the most part. We have to make a pickup fit into existing shapes and sizes. I'm glad soapbar shapes are popular with bass players now, because trying to do something new with a Jazz or P-bass pickup shape is very restricting.

As far as noiseless pickups... EMG pickups are pretty damn quiet. And they sound good too... if you like that sound.

Also a single coil pickup does not have to sound like a Strat or Tele... but that's what we get. I'd rather have DeArmond gold foil pickups. It's clean and bright, and does what a pickup should do, yet doesn't sound like a Strat. I'd rather have a clean bright humbucker personally. Sounds like the guitar, doesn't hum... that's it.

I'm trying to get away from pickups that have a certain sound... but that's me.

You can design a near perfect transducer and I promise you it will be souless.

"Soul" is very subjective, isn't it? To one person it's a vintage Tele, to another it's a Les Paul. To someone else it might be a Teisco Mayqueen!

I dislike the Lace Sensors... I think they are bland sounding. I don't think it's because they are perfect transducers either... just that they are lacking something somewhere. I think it's harmonic content. But some people like them, and make good music with them. On the other hand, Bartolini make very clean pickups have have a lot of tone. Listen to Tuck Andress. Immaculately clean tone... and very soulful.

Soul is in the players hands, not the pickups. I have heard what I consider toneless pickups, but even those in the right hands (and with enough gain) can be magical.

I think the big issue is everyone wanting to get familiar sounds. If they can cop that tone from some old record that has meaning to them, then they think they have a soulful tone. Actually they have a familiar tone, but it's comforting because it makes them feel like they can play well... since it matches the recording. ;)

An example that I find amusing is the latest fad amongst bass players... the trend now is toward using a tube amp, such as an Ampeg, that pretty much masks the tone of the bass, and then using a big pile of over drive. You can be assured that getting a "good" tone from your bass is unnecessary, because no one is going to hear the bass anyway... just the amp. It also covers up sloppy playing. The irony in it is back when many of the recordings were made in the 60's and 70's there weren't really any good bass amps. Everyone I knew, including me, wanted a clean sound, with a nice tight bottom. This is why so many recordings are done with the bass direct.

But what we had were crappy amps that distorted far too easily... but now that's considered a "vintage" tone!

I'm certain you don't need them other than a DCR and a compass. They are aids to a product type as far as I'm concerned, not an essential.

I guess it depends on what you are trying to make. I think for anyone working on new pickup designs, it's real handy to make tests.

:D

Spence

06-05-2006, 10:09 PM

Proof is in the sales figures.

Why are you posting here Dr.Strangelove ?

So far, we've established that you hide behind a pseudonym, talk others down and don't actually make pickups yet you think you're something special and a benefit to us all.

I'm interested in advances in technology and a gadget freak like a lot of others here but I'm losing interest in your rambling pretty rapidly. It's not like you've invented something new now is it!

I've got nothing to prove here because I'm already doing just fine thanks.

It's a shame that things can't be a little less patronizing 'round here.
I'm starting to think these forums are a total loss.

David Schwab

06-05-2006, 10:18 PM

If you want to make them like Leo and Seth did (BTW, they're dead), they had better be artisanal pickups because there's no justifying an expensive handwind when the technology and craft is producing good commodity pickups more cheaply.

Interestingly, in an interview with Seth Lover (by Seymour Duncan), Lover said:

SWD: Where the coils wound by hand or was the magnet wire guided by machine?

Seth Lover: Only the experimental ones were wound by hand. Once we decided to make a bobbin and got our coil forms molded, then we set it up on the machine and I’m trying to think just how many; there was one machine that wound just four coils. I know there was one little machine and then we had a larger machine where we would wind more.

SWD: Was the wire guided on by hand or did it have an automatic traverse.

Seth Lover: It had an automatic traverse. (the machine automatically layers the magnet wire on the bobbin)

SWD: I read an article that someone said earlier humbuckers sounded the way they do because they were wound by hand and the newer ones were different because they were wound by machine.

Seth Lover: I can’t recall that anybody wound any by hand except people who were repairing. I wound sometimes, and if an old pickup was sent back in and they didn’t have a machine for winding it then it would be rewound by hand.

So... who was hand winding old Gibson pickups we keep hearing about? :confused:

I love this one too:

SWD: How did you figure out the number of turns for the type of frequency--if you put too many turns on, when do you start loosing your high end?

Seth Lover: Well, I was just simply using # 42 plain enamel magnet wire. I put as many turns as I could satisfactorily fill the space available. And that’s where we stopped right there.

Wasn't much of a magic formula! I guess after a few trial and errors, they settled on a design.

Possum

06-06-2006, 07:59 AM

OK, I did a quick example to show you that at least this one type of measurement is kind of pointless in alot of ways. Here's the chart I did: well I tried to attach a jpeg if it doesn't work go here:
http://ur.pair.com/shrapnel/chart/chart.jpg

The blue graph is a 74 strat pickup about 5.4K 3/16" magnets, the red sweep is a stagger strat pickup 5.9K 5mm magnets. So what can you infer from this comparison? the old strat pickup has more output probably because less inductance, and a very slightly higher peak resonance. But generally the shape of the curves are almost identical. So it doesn't give you much useful information, its cool to mess with for awhile but then it gets boring. I'd be more interested in something that shows harmonics in detail. For me the LCR meter is more useful with detailed numbers when fine tuning a pickup design...Dave

David Schwab

06-06-2006, 04:14 PM

Proof is in the sales figures.

I'm not arguing with you Spence, and I know you were talking to Dr. S... but think about this statement.

Popular doesn't always equate to good. I'm not talking about your pickups now.. just making a point.

DiM sells more pickups than we can make in our lifetime.. and so does EMG.

And Britney Spears sells more albums than Allan Holdsworth.

Personally I appreciate the more technical posts by people like Dr. S, Joe G, and the others.

And saying they don't matter because they don't make and sell pickups is like saying Leo Fender didn't matter because he couldn't play guitar!

I think we can agree to have different views. :D

DrStrangelove

06-06-2006, 05:07 PM

OK, I did a quick example to show you that at least this one type of measurement is kind of pointless in alot of ways. Here's the chart I did: well I tried to attach a jpeg if it doesn't work go here:
http://ur.pair.com/shrapnel/chart/chart.jpg

Dave, thanks for going to all the trouble.

That's a passive component test, not a transducer output test. It demonstrates how much signal gets lost through the pickup and not how much signal it produces when you jiggle its magnetic circuit with a guitar string or a drive coil.

Get my drift?

You can drive the pickup magnetically with a small speaker coil cut from a media speaker. (That way, you know it will handle a sound card output.)

If you drive pickup that way, you'd get a constantly decreasing output up to the resonance point. Above the resonance point is mainly where all the harmonic details happen, the stuff that makes a pickup distinctive (and good or bad).

The slope of the output would be proportional to the inductance and can give you confirmation on what the LCR meter says.

-drh
--

DrStrangelove

06-06-2006, 05:22 PM

Why are you posting here Dr.Strangelove ?

So far, we've established that you hide behind a pseudonym,

Kid, you can contact me any time through the private mail mechanism on this forum or by getting my email address from the old pickup makers forum. I don't guarantee that I'll answer.

On the old pickup makers forum, the Dr.Strangelove moniker fell out of a humorous exchange with Wolf after he said I was being too much of a german scientist about it, as you would know if you looked a little closer or were there from the beginning.

-drh
--

Spence

06-06-2006, 10:02 PM

You've clearly set out to annoy me Dr. S. The thing is, you'll never succeed because you've achieved nothing in the World of pickups. It really doesn't make any difference what you think, comments about dragging Knuckles, calling me 'Kid', or if you're pally with Wolfe. I couldn't care less.
I don't need to be on this forum as I'm not here to learn, especially from fantacists like you so I'll just let you get on with it.

Possum

06-07-2006, 02:55 AM

DrStrangelove

06-07-2006, 03:13 AM

I couldn't care less.
Then...don't reply.

Thanks in advance,
-drh
--

DrStrangelove

06-07-2006, 03:57 AM

Uhm, actually that frequency chart was done with a drive coil, using a log sweep, the program also does MLS, the program was designed to test coils and audio frequencies for speakers and cab in rooms. Its a Mac OSX program called FuzzMeasure. Drive coil is low impedance very low. I've used a PC program also and they all generate the same kinds of charts. They are a bit useful sometimes as you get used to comparing two different charts on top of eachother like the example I did.

Now, that one's good and confusing.

Here's what I don't understand:

When I magnetically drive an inductor, I get an output that *decreases* with frequency according to the inductance. The chart you posted *increases* with frequency. What's going on? Is FuzzMeasure doing some data massage in there and not telling you?

If the app does MLS signals, it may be able to give you a pulse response from the same test. I've seen this one distinguish two otherwise identical speakers. After a glance at the FuzzMeasure site, that feature is the "quasi-anechoic response" one.

$125 isn't exactly a convenient pricetag for that crittur.

You mentioned that we don't have good enough tools to tell us when things go wrong, and I disagree with that in part.
Okay, so I'm a jackass. Bust my chops a little and then we'll stop for beer.

The Extech LCR meter is real good at spotting a coil with shorts in it once you've been exposed to what those readings look like. The recoil thing isn't something that we're all unconscious about, I still view it as being paralell to the inductance AC readings thing. High inductance, high ACR and the recoil dynamics are slow, they just seem to work together even if they're not the same thing.

The recoil permeability is about how stiff/elastic the magnetic field is under load.
You can push it around by the amount of steel you put in the magnetic circuit.
Still, as you and Jason have said, different alloys have a signature sound regardless of how much you tweak them.

I don't know how you would even measure that kind of thing anyway. What would you do, pulse a white noise signal for a milisecond or what? You just get used to how the different alnicos sound in general, they have "sag" just like tubes do....measure it, sure I'm up for that but no one has explained how to do that, especially with a budget of zero :-)

You can drive the pickup with increasing amplitude. It gets to a point where increasing the drive makes no difference in the pickup output. Some alnicos (like A2) top out sooner than A5 or A7.

You know this stuff about pickup 'sag' from years of working with it, but a reasonable test will let you put a number to it instead of only describing a pickup as having good snap or spank ... or harsh like the first ceramic PAFS in the '70's.

Giving it a useful number is how you do a smackdown on vague/misleading advertising copy.

-drh
--

ken

06-07-2006, 06:38 AM

Hello...

I've been reading this thread, and I have some questions.

1)About the chart...

You said that this chart was generated with two different pickups, one of 5.4K, one of 5.9K. The graphed traces from each were basically identical, just one had slightly increased general amplitude.

Can I conclude that since these pickups 'graphed' so much alike, that the main reason that these pickups did react much the same way was because they were not driven with a set of strings, but instead with a coil of wire? If you simply use the coil of wire, aren't you removing whatever influence the magnets' varying lengths and the strings' masses would have on your coil? I would expect that even with a noise generator, one coil of wire close in turn count or DCR would look much like another one to an analyzer without the influence of strings or your instrument's body resonance.

2) Making pickups is to me as much an artistic statement as anything else.
Some of my customers like 'vintage' style, others like postmodern Alumitone type pickups, and I find that trying to define a 'good' pickup is much like defining 'art' itself. For example, if Spence, for one, makes a popular pickup that sounds good but he doesn't have or need much gear to do it with, that is good. If someone else wishes to measure his own pickup's final inductance to three or four decimal places using an ISO 9002 type process, more power to him. Me, I let the market decide. I have all the toys too, but it doesn't matter what I have if nobody likes my pickups. In the end, the best distortion meter is the buying musician's ears - if he or she doesn't find your pickup's tone pleasing your pickups won't sell.

In short, any pickup's beauty is in the ear of the beholder, and their opinion is the only one that really matters.

3) I love to experiment with designing various pickups, one of my favorites was a active hex pickup with two coils on each magnet, sort of a HB coil for each string with preamp that fit in a Strat cover. I like the DeArmond pickup too, but there unfortunately is a limited market for new ideas. I agree that anyone making a Fender or HB pickup today had better be really good to compete with the thousands of others doing it too, especially since most everybody doing HB's is basically using the same few vendors' parts. Sooo.... what is wrong with making singlecoils and humbuckers anyway? It pays the bills and gives you the $$$ to R+D with.

One last thing...

How consistently would you like to make them? (snip)
Hand guided pickup winders with rudimentary tensioning systems are not the way to go if you intend to make perfect clones of your pickups. If you require major consistency, you need at the least a winder like Wolfe has and maybe an entire automated manufacturing system.

What if you could determine from purely instrumentational
means why two seeming identical pickups sounded different?
That's where a well-designed test is important. (snip)

Pickups are as individual as people simply because they are made of parts designed by people, made by people, assembled by people, and randomly wound by people. If you could refine your testing process to this extent, it would be only useful for your own product, not useful for 'reverse engineering'. This is because you can try to reverse engineer another maker's pickup all you want, but your findings would be pointless beyond the general LCR values. Why? because you cannot buy exact copies of his actual parts, wire, or his specific machines or processes.

A 'well designed test' series may be able to tell you where in your own process your pickups are varying, but to me, who randomly winds my own pickups with the coil wire between my fingers, it's kinda like killing a mosquito with a machine gun. I document every pickup I make in disgusting detail including serial number, so my processes don't vary very much. If they did for some reason, it's either because I varied it on purpose or I got a bad batch of materials from somewhere. Either way, since I am also the 'final inspector', I will catch the error and repair it.

Ken
ohmwiz@yahoo.com

David Schwab

06-07-2006, 06:49 PM

DrStrangelove

06-07-2006, 10:13 PM

I'm no expert on this stuff... but those graphs do look very different from the ones I've seen before, such as the ones in the Animal Magnetism book. They seem too smooth, and there's usually a resonant peak and then a rapid drop off.

I'm thinking it's the software.

Me, too.

Since FuzzMeasure was designed for loudspeakers, it may be tilting the graph to compensate for coil inductance,i.e., to flatten the overall graph. If so, high frequency responce would be exaggerated and require a lot of smoothing.

FuzzMeasure homepage:
http://www.supermegaultragroovy.com/products/FuzzMeasure/

-drh
--

Possum

06-08-2006, 03:40 AM

I got pretty much the same kind of charts using a PC and some German MLS software. Those two pickups are completely different types of tone, one is very brigth the other isn't . Hand wound pickups don't have sharp resonant peaks. On the PC software its much more useable software, I used a seperate frequency generator and had to sweep by hand through four different button settings to get the chart, very boring to do. All I'm doing with fuzzmeasure is driving a really low impedance drive coil, putting the pickup poles down over the drive coil and pickup back into the sound card. This is a high end Mac G4. We've had endless arguments on how to do a cheap easy setup for this kind of testing and the guys who know how to do it right can't seem to explain it to a dummy like me. Being on a Mac I'm limited to what software I can use for free. There's Mac The Scope I've messed with but its $800, keep hoping to find a boot of it but not so far. So if you geniuses want to tell me exactly how to wire this thing up I'm all ears and would appreicate the info. The Animal Magnetism book I'm sure he used some HP piece of test equipment that cost a couple thousand bucks.

Also if you look at the two charts you need to look at it closer. There IS a noticeable differecne betweent he two. Notice that the brighter pickup's peak is shifted to the right because its brighter. The brighter pickup also shows more output due to the higher frequencies not being clogged by inductance/ACR. Joe told me once I need to use guitar cables when doing this stuff, I did on the PC and it made no difference at all. The PC is taken down so don't have access to that right now and no place to set it up.

soundmasterg

06-10-2006, 02:58 AM

This is all very interesting to me, but then I'm an engineer at heart but not in title or qualifications yet. I'm still not quite clear on how it would be setup or what equipment is necessary to be able to get an accurate resonant peak test as you're describing Dr. Strangelove?

I have several 100Mhz dual trace scopes, a distortion meter or two, an audio frequency generator or three, and even some speakers I could junk to setup something like this. Moreover, I count Dave Stephens, Wolfe, and Jason as personal friends and live close enough to all of them to be able to setup a meaningful testing setup and have them use it if they desire to. (Have to take a mild road trip to get to Jason and Wolfe) I don't wind pickups myself yet but have the desire and lots of ideas to do it some day. If you can elaborate on the setup a little and what is required, I may be able to help out here. If you'd prefer to go through email we can do that too.

Very curious.....

Greg

Possum

06-10-2006, 01:53 PM

I was trying to find a website from a college that did very extensive pickup measurements in a physics course and it was discussed on the forum a year or two ago. Well do you measure a pickup as a passive piece of equipment or a generator? Everything I've read from all my scrounging on the net is that its always tested as a passive piece of equipment, a magnetic coil and its either driven with a low impedance coil placed on top of it or its fed the signal directly, I have never seen anyone ever test a pickup by playing the strings. How would you even standardize string motion? What guage strings, what tuning, how much strum energy applied? I did have a customer tell me in ProTools or some program he was seeing 6K resonant peaks recording direct to the board, but then the pickup is IN the guitar, do you test the pickup IN the guitar or out of the guitar by itself? The problem is there is no agreement by anyone on what the proper method is. By some methods a strat pickup has a 10K peak by another method the same coil has a 4 or 5K peak, so which is right? There's plenty of educated people who know how to test coils but they all get in arguments about how it should be done. FuzzMeasure measures it one way, so in my thinking if all I use is FuzzM for my purposes and all my pickups are measured with it then I have established a base from which to comparatively judge allt he pickups I measure, and since there is no correct way to do this it works for me. I'm open to any method that produces results that have alot of information that is viewable easily so if anyone has better ideas that isn't some theory, but something they have actually tried and used and got good results from then sure I want to hear it and see if I can replicate it, but I'm not going to spend $800 on Mac The Scope or something that costs alot of bucks because in the long run its not going to be as useful as putting the thing in a guitar and taking it out to play live. Its a matter of how much real useful information that can be gained without spending a fortune to help design a good product in the end. AFter all the opinions and discussions on this stuff no one has really told me in understandable terms a set up I can do on my stock Mac computer, so I use a drive coil out from the sound card into the pickup and back to the sound card and the softare tells me what frequencies have more output than others and graphs it for me. Is this the right method? I don't know...show me something better is all I'm saying........

ken

06-11-2006, 05:38 AM

I've been thinking about this, and we really may need a 'unified' way to measure pickups. There is too much confusion about how to measure, what to measure, and what to measure with.

Remember audio amplifier power and distortion output measurements years ago? One manufacturer would use the RMS method, another used a 'peak power' scale, a third used a "music power"(?) method, and it was almost impossible for buyers to choose the amplifier that was right for them.

I think we need a way to do it that many people can afford, is reasonably accurate, and is repeatable. A person shouldn't have to buy a new computer
and learn how to use it just to test their products, though.

Ken
ohmwiz@yahoo.com

DrStrangelove

06-11-2006, 05:58 PM

I've been thinking about this, and we really may need a 'unified' way to measure pickups. There is too much confusion about how to measure, what to measure, and what to measure with. A set of standard pickup testing methods would make <b>me</b> very happy and render useless a great deal of advertising copy.
Remember audio amplifier power and distortion output measurements years ago? One manufacturer would use the RMS method, another used a 'peak power' scale, a third used a "music power"(?) method, and it was almost impossible for buyers to choose the amplifier that was right for them.
I also remember how a 'subjectivist' trend took hold of the 90's Audio biz and made possible a great deal of charlatinism and delusional pricing. Consider BS like "directional" cables for a moment.

Fortunately, guitar players don't have a huge amount of disposable income so insane pricing has seldom been a problem in the aftermarket pickup biz. Guitar collectors are a different matter and are seldom interested in 'new' pickups.

What that leaves is the subjectivism and unquantifiable claims.

I think we need a way to do it that many people can afford, is reasonably accurate, and is repeatable. A person shouldn't have to buy a new computer and learn how to use it just to test their products, though. Just for starters, let me suggest that, whatever tests we come up with, the pickups should see a standardized load, one load for single coils, a different load for PAF styles. The load would simulate the combined impedances between the pickup and the amp front end.

Here is one possible load (assuming the link is not parsed out of existence):
http://www.salvarsan.org/images/SCdummyload2.png

Standardizing how to drive a pickup is more difficult. We will need to agree on something like a +/-10 to 50 gauss drive level from a standardized coil size,
like 12.5mm diameter, single layer wind, 6 ohms DC resistance (a small speaker coil, maybe).

-drh

Possum

06-12-2006, 03:00 AM

if you're simulating an amp load, that worries me a bit, WHAT amp are you simulating, tube, solid state, modern tube amp, vintage tube amp. are you trying to simulate something generic, esplain please. What are the "pad" notations on the schematic? This testing scheme needs to be OUT of the guitar, no way am I going to install prototype pickups every time I want to test whats going on. Lemme's testing rig falls apart for me on that one. He uses a drive coil, and note that to drive a humbucker the drive coil is stood up on edge inbetween the two coils to work both coils, so there's another thing to consider, how do you drive a humbucker pickup? What software is going to be used to plot all this stuff, needs to be mac and PC and cheap or free, I'm not buying an oscilloscope and don't think anyone else will either. Keep it real please.......I'm very interested in what you guys come up with here.....

jason lollar

06-12-2006, 07:09 AM

Simply put- I just dont want to deal with it anymore- I sold around 3 or 4 thousand copies of that book over the course of what 5, 6 or 8 years (I think the first edition was printed in 1996 and it took over a year to write in my spare time), they typically sell for over $100 on ebay now, sometimes double- I do check every week to make sure people are selling actual used copies- not illegal reprints. Ebay caught one guy and shut him down before I even saw it. It is registered copyrited material.

I have a collection of almost 200 photos people sent me of winders they made to that pattern. The book was really intended for guitar makers so they could make thier own pickups. The intention was if you can build a guitar you can build the machine, if you can build the machine you can assemble a pickup.

The book really does need heavy editing at this point and I dont have time to do it. there are several mistakes that were overlooked during editing and it needs rearranged, added to and to get some parts cut out. It could use several weeks of re-doing!
The purpose of the book was to show all the mechanical details of making a winder- even if you didnt follow the plans it discusses what features a winder should have and how to cut out, assemble and wind a functional pickup of several designs.It also discusses small details about manipulating wire that you wont figure out for a long time- lots of little details that might seem unimportant or insignificant at the time you read them
The purpose was not to tell you how to make the best sounding pickups or to discuss the physics behind the details- only the basics to get you going into a lifetime of experimenting. The title and introduction spells it out so all in all it was succesfull relaying its point which was to discuss all the details you could not find in any other book- it filled an obvious hole.

Another book could be written- I can tell you its alot more work and time than you can imagine untill you do it.

Summary, I made only a couple dollars off each copy so the income from it was minimal, I enjoyed helping people for several years, for every book I sold I got probably 20 questions or more occasionally extending into years of contacts.
As I became backlogged with work, some aspects of what I did had to go and the book was one of the first on the list of items to cut so I could maintain an acceptable backlog of work. I went from making 12 guitars + a year down to an average of 2.
If anyone else attempts writing take my advise and use a pen name- do not put your name on the cover unless you want people calling you to chat all day long 7 days a week. If thats what you want youll get it.
Like I said I enjoyed it but things change and sometimes you have to move on.
If you knew the names of some of the people that got started winding from that book you would be amazed, I wont say them because they obviously dont want you to know- they have some other story.

DrStrangelove

06-12-2006, 08:10 AM

if you're simulating an amp load, that worries me a bit, WHAT amp are you simulating, tube, solid state, modern tube amp, vintage tube amp. are you trying to simulate something generic, esplain please. The idea was to design a dummy load that uses generic parts so everybody could build it with stuff from Radio Shack. It doesn't need to be perfect, only good enough.

I tried to account for volume and tone controls, cable capacitance, and the amp front end resistance. After looking through a few hundred amp schematics, I realized most of them present around 1Megohm as a parallel load. Cable capacitance is highly variable; I measured short and long cables ranging 250pF to 1000pF, compromised at 500pF. 470pF is a more common value and would work fine if everyone agreed on it.

What are the "pad" notations on the schematic? Those are solder "pads" where you hook in your test leads. It's a convention of the schematic drafting software (Eagle CAD).
This testing scheme needs to be OUT of the guitar, no way am I going to install prototype pickups every time I want to test whats going on. You got it.

Lemme's testing rig falls apart for me on that one. He uses a drive coil, and note that to drive a humbucker the drive coil is stood up on edge inbetween the two coils to work both coils, so there's another thing to consider, how do you drive a humbucker pickup? What software is going to be used to plot all this stuff, needs to be mac and PC and cheap or free, I haven't figured out a good drive coil that will do both SC's and PAF's. Maybe a simple oblong coil that would cover 2-3 poles on an SC but also cover a PAF's screw pole and slug would do it. A 1" by 3/16" air core would do the trick (and be simple to make). As for test software, I don't know. It has to be cheap or free, that's certain.

Grindell

06-12-2006, 07:28 PM

Jason,

I just sold my copy today on Ebay for ~$150. I do have to say that the book rocks..... I know that it helped me in my winding, but I never set out to be a big time pickup winder, I just wanted to be able to wind my pickups for the guitars I built.

I can see what your saying, too, about the number of pickups cutting in to the number of guitars you build. I started getting people asking me to wind pickups for them. I did a few, but I always tell people that I'm not really a pickup winder, I really build guitars. The pickup winding was just my way of trying to be more anal retentive....

I guess if I wanted to really focus on guitar building, I should maybe find a pickup winder and see about getting a custom line of pickups made, but at the cost for them it doesn't really make sense. I did check in to becoming a Duncan OEM whatever, where I would use Duncan pickups in my guitar, and the cost breakdown wasn't bad, but it would really cut in to a small time winder's profit margin if they had to compete with Duncan. Plus, I had to build about 12-24 guitars a year, and i'm building about 8 right now, and trying to make it while doing my real gig of IDS monitoring for a large company....

Someone once told me if you wanted to make a little money in the guitar business, to start with a lot of money.....

But, anyway, thanks for writing the book in the first place.

David Schwab

06-12-2006, 07:49 PM

I never got a copy of this book, but I always wanted to.

When I started seriously building I wanted to make my own pickups... but didn't. I went with EMG pickups at the time.

Now 12 years later I decided I must make my own pickups! I just wasn't getting the sound I wanted.

I would prefer to make everything.. with the exception of the tuners. I do plan on making my own bass bridges in the near future.

I don't there's anything cooler than making all the parts on your guitar. :D

Sweetfinger

06-13-2006, 09:18 AM

It also discusses small details about manipulating wire that you wont figure out for a long time- lots of little details that might seem unimportant or insignificant at the time you read them

That's the stuff I'm looking for...I'm perfectly capable of making a winder that will fullfill all my fiendish plans, I just don't want to spend the rest of my life discovering stuff when I could browse a couple pages of info- Its like trying to bake a cake without knowing that the flour needs to be sifted and the pan needs to be greased!

ken

06-14-2006, 04:44 AM

I'm not proud...

I tried to wind pickups long ago with indifferent results, but it wasn't till I bought Jason's book that I figured some of it out.

Thank you Jason L!

Ken
ohmwiz@yahoo.com

Possum

06-14-2006, 02:21 PM

Uh oh, driving a single coil with only 3 poles with an oblong coil? That sounds bad. If we're going to use a drive coil at all I'm sticking with what I got, a really low impedance humbucker bobbin, it fits over any single coil, or blade pickup, fully engages the pickup its driving, engages all the poles in the test pickup, works on humbuckers if you tilt it up and place between the two coils. An oblong coil is going to hit some poles real good and miss some others because of its shape, and isn't going to work well with a bucker at all. At least Lemme had a good idea there, but he only used it IN a guitar which I don't like. then there's the issue of 500K pots and 250K pots, how does that play into this? Why are we even trying to simulate an amp load to begin with? The idea to me is just to get a consistent , stable measurement platform that will show small differenences in frequency response accurately in a plot or digital readouts across a spectrum of frequencies (would actually prefer that to a chart myself). Guitar players don't know diddley about resonant peaks anyway, all I'm looking for is a constant measurement base as a platform to judge pickups against eachother, not how they are going to work in a simulated amp load. Once you have some kind of measurement base, you then use your ears as to how they affect whatever your favorite type of amps are and then can make judgements on comparisons.

What I think would be the most valuable of all would be the simple drive coil, some really simple way to sweep the coil then pick a bunch of frequencies you want to see where the output is affecting each and maybe a chart of the full spectrum. It doesn't have to be more complicated than that, unless you want to get into different harmonics and I think that would be hard to comprehend whats going on with that kind of thing, maybe. My two cents....

David Schwab

06-14-2006, 02:44 PM

then there's the issue of 500K pots and 250K pots, how does that play into this? Why are we even trying to simulate an amp load to begin with?

The pots and other loads affect the response of the pickup. You can hear this if you take a high impedance pickup, like a humbucker, and run it into a buffer amp. Buffered, the tone has more highs and lows, and the resonant peak of the pickup is higher. This is because the pickup is being isolated from the impedance loads of the pots, cable, amp, etc.

Loading the pickup will lower the resonant peak, and of course right after the peak the response curve drops off rapidly. This is why 250k pots sound warmer than 500k or 1M.

If you want an accurate picture of the response of the pickup as it would be in the guitar, you need to simulate these loads.

This is not to say doing tests without the load are meaningless, but the "real world" response will be different... unless you are making an active pickup and have it in the circuit you are going to use.

DrStrangelove

06-14-2006, 05:37 PM

Uh oh, driving a single coil with only 3 poles with an oblong coil? That sounds bad.

It's no worse than driving a humbucker at half strength (or less) because you must turn the drive coil on its side.

Those gaussmeters will measure AC gauss, too, and can be used to calibrate the drive coils. Once you know the drive coil output, then its size and shape are less important.

...but nobody has calibrated the drive coil, have they?

Easy. Putcher hall effect sensor in there and measure the AC voltage with a cheap multimeter. Expensive gear not needed.

If we're going to use a drive coil at all I'm sticking with what I got, a really low impedance humbucker bobbin,

How low is it? Meselfs, I'd use a speaker coil as a starting point.

it fits over any single coil, or blade pickup, fully engages the pickup its driving, engages all the poles in the test pickup, works on humbuckers if you tilt it up and place between the two coils.

Why not wind a drive coil that does the same for a PAF style pup?

An oblong coil is going to hit some poles real good and miss some others because of its shape, and isn't going to work well with a bucker at all. At least Lemme had a good idea there, but he only used it IN a guitar which I don't like. then there's the issue of 500K pots and 250K pots, how does that play into this? Why are we even trying to simulate an amp load to begin with?

We are not simulating only an amp load. The amp input stage presents enough of a load to change things more than 10%. I ran the numbers.

The idea to me is just to get a consistent , stable measurement platform that will show small differenences in frequency response accurately in a plot or digital readouts across a spectrum of frequencies (would actually prefer that to a chart myself)....like, from a dummy load.
Guitar players don't know diddley about resonant peaks anyway, all I'm looking for is a constant measurement base as a platform to judge pickups against each other, not how they are going to work in a simulated amp load.

That's an oversimplification of what I suggested.

The dummy load's purpose is to let you test an uninstalled pickup under conditions similar to actual use, only more easily. A dummy load must account for the volume + tone controls, the cable, and the amp front end. If you build a stomp box or 6, you get a feel for these things.

Anything less and you'd complain that it wasn't "real world" enough. (probably a good place to put a "smiley")

Once you have some kind of measurement base, you then use your ears as to how they affect whatever your favorite type of amps are and then can make judgements on comparisons.
With that same measurement base, you'll be more immune to when your ears start to fool you because they are tired.

What I think would be the most valuable of all would be the simple drive coil, some really simple way to sweep the coil then pick a bunch of frequencies you want to see where the output is affecting each and maybe a chart of the full spectrum.

We can have it simple or we can have it realistic.

Adding in the amp load is realistic, easy, and not even a big deal -- the dummy load reduces to 2 resistors, 2 caps, 2 pairs of clip leads, and a 2x2" square of perf board.

-drh

Possum

06-16-2006, 05:14 AM

OK, I'm still with ya so far. My dummy coil is wound with 36 gauge wire 5.6K or so. Joe recommended highly keeping the drive coil at real low winds/impedance or it will screw up the results. A speaker coil I think will have its own effect on the frequency response than what I made. I think Lemme mentions that also. That article has fallen off the forum links so here it is again:
http://www.buildyourguitar.com/resources/lemme/
I probably should reread it again, I get different things from it every time I do.

So, ok, have you built this simulated load yet and done any experiments with it yet? I don't have much time to rig this stuff up, and for me it would really be helpful to have digital pix of how to wire this thing, I'm not an amp builder and not great at building stuff from schematics but I can follow a simple, wire this to that diagram or photo.

As for calibrating the drive coil, well with Fuzzmeasure the software only has a static volume level it uses so the output from the card is always the same. FuzzMeasure kinda falls apart in getting specific numberical readings at certain frequencies, it does make a pretty looking chart and does give one an idea of whats going on.