Newbie question about resistence

[thendrix]

How does resistence affect a pickups tone, or does it at all? For instance, will two single coil pickups in the same guitar and the same position in the guitar, have a different sound if the only thing different is their resistence? And how does resistence affect tone? Does more or less resistence cause the tone to have more treble or more bass? Thanks in advance.

Tyler

[David Schwab]

Resistance isn't the thing. People think a higher number automatically means the pickup is hotter. This is only true if both pickups are wound with the same gauge wire. The thinner the wire, the higher the resistance per foot. The reason pickups with higher numbers are often louder is they went to a smaller gauge so you could wind more wire on the bobbin. So 6,000 turns of 42 will read lower than the same number of 44.

And that's where your output comes from. More winds=more output.

However, you can wind two pickups with different gauge wire, and the same number of turns, and they will indeed sound different. Heavier wire has less mids and a rounder tone, and thinner wire has more mids with a different kind of high and low end.

I have wound two pickups to similar specs, but with different wire, and they were similar sounding, but the thinner wire was a little brighter and tighter sounding.

Now if you are just sticking to a single gauge, the more wire you wind the fuller the pickup will sound. At some point you will have a lot more bass and will start to lose the highs. Right before the highs drop off, you will have a big midrange peak. You can hear this tone in over would pickups, like the Duncan Invader.

That's my experience anyway.

[thendrix]

Thanks for the info. Now let me ask a more specific question. I have two strats, one is an 82 american strat with Suhr vintage 60's. The other is a squire with a Fender Noiseless setup. I love the way the Suhrs sound. The Noiseless seem to be a little hotter, but have a lot more treble. By a lot more I mean A LOT more. Is this due to the pickups, the guitar itself, or a combination of both? Also, is there an easy way to tone the Noiseless pickups down a little, or would it just be easier to change these to Suhr vintage 60's to get a similar tone and output? I know I can do it with the tone and volume knobs but I had rather not.

[David Schwab]

The noiseless pickups are stacks, and they tend to cancel some low end, and accentuate the highs. To compensate they wind them hotter.

I've installed some DiMarzio virtual vintage Strat pickups, and they sound just like single coils and they don't hum. The Duncan and Kinmann stacks also sound good.

There is also this: Suhr Backplate Silent Single Coil (BPSSC) System.

[Xaar]

David, do you have any idea of what kind of shielding gimmick is used in this BPSSC system?
It seems there's a small pcb hidden under some goop or black tape according to the pics...or just an impression?

From having seen the guitar shapes available on his site, his pickups, a few schems (riot for example) , it seems there is nothing revolutionary AT ALL from JS's products, rather some consistent handcraft quality (classic shapes slightly revisited and classic electronic circuits ) ...so this is why I'm asking if this backplate system is based on anything already existing, since I've never had it in my hands to examine it.

[Mark Hammer]

It is a dummy coil. All the dummy coil has to do is pick up 60hz interference. That can be done by a variety of coil shapes, sizes, circumferences, etc. As long as the hum detected by the dummy coil and that of the coil that senses the strings are close, in terms of the amplitude of the hum they pick up, then they can be wired to cancel the 60hz hum, or at least cancel a lot of it.

I've tinkered with dummy coils a bit, and you need to think of them as being like antennas. Two antennas can not occupy the same physical space, but if they have relatively similar sensitivity to hum, even as you move around, then hum-cancellation is feasible. The advantage of the Suhr system is that the coil essentially surrounds all 3 pickups (or at least is in the vicinity of all of them), such that it does not pick up a lot more (or a lot less) hum than any of the 3 pickups.

Sadly, there aren't many other SC-equipped instruments that would be compatible with that approach (wouldn't work on a Tele, or any P90-equipped instrument). Happily, Strats and clones constitute a VERY large segment of all SC-equipped guitars.

Re: Resistance

Although what David says is absolutely true (i.e., you can't necessarily infer tone or even output from DCR), the DC resistance starts to matter when it comes to things like volume pot choice, tone cap value choice, and other things where the resistance of one thing, relative to the resistance of another, produces loading effects and unintended tonal changes. Higher is not necessarily better, nor is lower. It's always a question of goodness of fit and matching.

[David Schwab]

Sadly, there aren't many other SC-equipped instruments that would be compatible with that approach (wouldn't work on a Tele, or any P90-equipped instrument).

They do make one for P-90 equipped Les Pauls.

I don't see why it wouldn't work on a Tele.

Ilitch Electronics [www.ilitchelectronics.com] - pickups

[Mark Hammer]

Neat!

My comment about it "not working" on other types of instruments was not so much that it could not work electronically, as much as a comment that there was no pre-existing spot/location for an analogous backplate/coil on either of those two instruments. The Ilitch site notes thata system for P90-equipped guitars would be a "custom solution". When it comes to th Suhr system, it is relatively close to plug-and-play (with some tweaking).

This morning, on another forum, I was responding to a post inquiring about noise reduction. In discussing ways to eliminate hum at the start of the chain, it occurred to me that the function of the Suhr and Illitch systems, or indeed ANY dummy coil, is to let the location of the coil do some of the heavy lifting in terms of achieving approximately equal-amplitude hum and anti-hum signals for cancellation purposes. As you are well aware, matching of signal levels is important to effective hum cancellation, and level matching in a purely passive system can be tricky when the sensing coils are at disparate distances/orientations from the EMUI source.

In mulling it over, I got to thinking, why couldn't you just have a box on the ground in front of the player with an unshielded "antenna" on top, and an active mixer/buffer stage inside that let you actively tune the hum/anti-hum balance?

Or am I missing something critical?