humbucker - 600mv p-p?

[lowell]

That seems to be what my classic '57 pickups are putting out. seem right? just wanna be sure.

[black_labb]

seems about right.

[Robert M. Martinelli]

Hi lowell,
can you tell us more about the measurement conditions ? The mV reading alone makes no sense unless you specify the test conditions.

The load the pickup is connected to is a very important factor if you want to correctly evaluate a pickup's performance.

In a nutshell :

1 : pickup by itself in no-load conditions - rather meaningless because the guitar has to be connected to an amp, ( unless you want to play it really quiet, in which case your neighborhood will be grateful ).

2 : connected to a tube amp - in this case the load impedance would be in the 1 MOhm range, which is too high to significantly attenuate the pickup's signal. Nonetheless, this is a real-life situation, because you' ll also have to use a guitar cord and take the cord's stray capacitance into account ( 100 pF/mt in a good quality cable ) adding it to the pickup winding's stray capacitance, so the resonant peak will be less sharp and it will be moved down on the freq scale. The pickup will also lose some character due to the Q factor being somewhat lower ( the cord's DC resistance and inductance are so small they can be neglected ).

3 : connected to a solid state amp's input - in this case the load impedance can be way lower, this is the worst situation IMHO because the signal will be attenuated more heavily, the resonant peak will be even less sharp and it will also occur at a lower freq, and the Q factor will be even lower, stealing even more character to the sound due to the bandwidth broadening.

The above examples are of course incomplete, and I ( intentionally ) haven't thrown in any math, but I hope they'll be enough to point you in the right direction.

JM2CW

Hope this helps

Best regards

Bob

[lowell]

i'm using a scope on the grid stoppers of a tube amp, les paul guitar w/ I beleive 500k pots. So the load is just under 500k I believe.

[Robert M. Martinelli]

..Oh, Ok....I thought you were testing the pickup "on the bench"
I agree that the reading you're getting is fine! ( Though, AFAICR, the "original" '57 PAFs had a somewhat lower output ).
Cheers
Bob

[lowell]

cool thanks Bob.