Lollar book, time to republish!!!!

[DrStrangelove]

I couldn't care less.

Then...don't reply.

Thanks in advance,
-drh
--

[DrStrangelove]

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]

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]

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.

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.

[DrStrangelove]

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/...s/FuzzMeasure/

-drh
--

[Possum]

not software

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]

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]

no set measurement methods is the problem

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]

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]

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]

amp load

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]

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]

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]

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]

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.