major pickup shootout- send your pups and be heard

[Possum]

...

In reality these are NOT typically who anyone's customers are. Ask Jason Lollar, ask ME. Forum sales of my total output of pickups is probably less than 1% if even that. The LPF is a clique, its a closed society, they are an organism that one month thinks someone's pickups are great, the next month they think something else. The person who runs that show has done some really strange things, I'm told. Its really hard to become a member, its really easy to be banned. Most people who buy pickups are not members of internet forums, sorry but this is the truth. I actually have sent free sets out for review, to STUDIO musicians who can play, and who have tried just about everyone's work out there, guys who know how to work an amp and work a guitar and don't have day jobs doing something else. Thats who's opinions I respect the most.

[jonson]

I don't usually respond to threads like this and sit on the sidelines and read.
My mind usually wanders a bit.( Dodgy as it's a bit small to be let out on it's own) Iv'e never been solicited for reviews or shootouts by magazines or any other forum and have had quite a few over the years by me sending a guitar etc in, but this seems odd. Pickups for charity. pickups for shootouts just don't gel with me but if thats the way MLP works so be it.
I concentrate on Harry's pickups but do make the rest or whatever is required so I could be in on this.
Do you need a complete pickup' or are the components I use ok. For analysis that is, of course.

[Spence]

I don't usually respond to threads like this and sit on the sidelines and read.
My mind usually wanders a bit.( Dodgy as it's a bit small to be let out on it's own) Iv'e never been solicited for reviews or shootouts by magazines or any other forum and have had quite a few over the years by me sending a guitar etc in, but this seems odd. Pickups for charity. pickups for shootouts just don't gel with me but if thats the way MLP works so be it.
I concentrate on Harry's pickups but do make the rest or whatever is required so I could be in on this.
Do you need a complete pickup' or are the components I use ok. For analysis that is, of course.

I think they're looking for humbuckers brah. Still, you know what to do so go for it..........

[Zhangliqun]

In reality these are NOT typically who anyone's customers are. Ask Jason Lollar, ask ME. Forum sales of my total output of pickups is probably less than 1% if even that.

If you don't need their business that's perfectly fine, and I'm not being sarcastic. Not sure what you mean by "forum sales" unless you mean having ads at a particular forum, but if so, it's a fairly small percentage of my business which is mostly word-of-mouth. On other other hand, if you're saying that only a tiny percentage of your customers ever hang out at a net forum and gab about gear, I'm not sure I buy that.

The LPF is a clique, its a closed society, they are an organism that one month thinks someone's pickups are great, the next month they think something else. The person who runs that show has done some really strange things, I'm told. Its really hard to become a member, its really easy to be banned.

People tend to say the same thing about forums they're not a member of, including this one. At the LPF it's true that they rave about this pu or that more than the other from month to month but I haven't seen many cases where they said last month's raver is now crap. (Not talking about a pickup is not the same as denigrating it.) In most cases Mr. Last Month's pu is still touted pretty well to anyone who asks about them, even if they aren't the one in vogue at the moment.

Most people who buy pickups are not members of internet forums, sorry but this is the truth.

I'm not trying to be nasty or stick a finger in your eye (seriously), but this is a little hard to believe. Everybody is internet-wired these days. Nearly everybody who owns or has regular access to a computer and the internet is a member of some interest-oriented forum, whether musical or not, especially if they are under 50. I can't believe that a majority of guitar players interested in buying a pickup haven't looked up replacement pickups on the net and discovered a gear-oriented forum that floats their boat. First time buyers, maybe. But repeat buyers in the Net Age?

Like I said, most of my business is not directly from my ads, it's still mostly word of mouth. But the word of mouth often originated from someone who saw the ad or saw my name kicked around a gear forum somewhere, even if there are several degrees of separation.

Again I'm not saying anyone had to participate. But it's not a good thing if we get perceived as a bunch of curmudgeons yelling at the kids to get off our lawn.

[jonson]

Yeah I know its Buckers bruv and no probs there as 2 of UK's finest showed me how. I'm just a cynical bastard and wonder what their motive really is.

[chevalij]

From what I've interpreted, it will be a WB's are better than everyone else's. Of course, I could be entirely wrong and this could be a valid way to showcase your wares. As for the flavour of the month, check out the FDP. A year ago you couldn't get a set of CS54's. Then the Fat 50's, then the 57/62's, now it's the 69's. Give it another few months and they'll be ranting over the pickups coming out next year! Still some good info over there...

[Possum]

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Where did that finger in my eye come from :-) No, I'm not kidding, Lollar told me the same thing, players who buy pickups mostly don't come from guitar forums. I'd say 90% of my sales come from emails that start "I found you on the web." The others are YouTube inquiries, and real rarely I'll get someone who says he read about me on a web forum. There are millions and miliions of guitar players, look at membership numbers of the LPF and MLP and they are nowhere near that. The shootout is the LPF not the MLP. I do occasionally promote on the MLP but sell almost nothing there. My currrent PAF bucker set is expensive and rightly so, so thats probably why.
Well, of course customers who buy stuff because there is a buying spree going on a forum aren't going to write about it 6 months later and say they don't play the pickups anymore. But I do hear from customers who tell me, yeah they bought some sets that were all the rage, they send me sound samples of them, and I don't hear anything that special going on with 'em, sometimes they don't either. There is a proven effect that with guitar pickups you can hear what you want to hear, mass hypnosis on forums :-) The Fender experiment they did proves that one hands down. I wouldn't enter that thing even if I could, don't you remember that link someone posted long ago where he played the same boring, over-distorted riff using a bunch of different PAF type buckers? He managed to make them all sound the same, I sure wouldn't want my babies to be represented that way. Heck, even if Duane Allman was still alive and a judge on the panel, all that would happen is he would make them all sound like Duane Allman :-) To me if you want to know what a pickup's characteristics are you need to hear a fairly extensive demonstration by a competent player through an amp like a vintage Deluxe Reverb, played, clean and distorted, in different styles, all up and down the neck. The amp needs to be unforgiving, not some deluxe printed circuit thing with master volume and 18 tons of gain. Even then, that is not going to represent whats going to happen in your guitar with your fingers, and whatever wiring harness and electroics are in your guitar. There are too many variables in that alone. So, handing pickups to a group of forumites with no stated standards or methods to come up with who's work is "best," the results are just going to be worthless opinions. My expertise is in PAFs, why would I let guys who mostly probably have never played the real thing make judgement calls on what I'm doing if they have no experience to go by? Anyway, thats my opinion, do it if you want have fun, and hope for the best, maybe your product will be the next buying spree, maybe you'll get a bunch of negative remarks that will hurt your business too, there's always going to be someone on forums who is going to take shots at anything put in front of them.

[Possum]

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If there was going to be some kind of sane "review" of say a genre of pickups like PAF reproduction pickups, done by a panel of professional and known recording and studio players, something more like a wine tasting panel than a shootout scenario, I would have no problem going with something like that. There would have to be published methods before I would, and there would have to be professional standards in place that everyone could agree to. Vintage Guitar's PAF shotout came real close to doing that, if only they hadn't ripped everyone's covers off their products, that would have worked.

[RedHouse]

...Ask Jason Lollar, ask ME....

Wow.

[salvarsan]

... The amp needs to be unforgiving...

Ah.


That would be something like an old 70's Ampeg with JBL's in it --
squeeky clean until it suddenly enters a horrible-sounding distortion mode.

Back when I was auditioning a bunch of AGI-Lace pickups, I used a
Behringer guitar preamp that had been modified for an unmercifully
clean sound. *It was great for showing up differences but not much
fun to play through.

-drh

[Zhangliqun]

Where did that finger in my eye come from :-) No, I'm not kidding, Lollar told me the same thing, players who buy pickups mostly don't come from guitar forums. I'd say 90% of my sales come from emails that start "I found you on the web." The others are YouTube inquiries, and real rarely I'll get someone who says he read about me on a web forum. There are millions and miliions of guitar players, look at membership numbers of the LPF and MLP and they are nowhere near that.

Yes but that assumes that LPF and MLP are the only gear forums out there. There must be hundreds, if not thousands. If you're saying this LPF thing isn't really going to get you much exposure even if you were convinced the judging was all on the up-and-up with very discriminating but objective (or as objective as can be hoped for) ears, fair enough.

Still, people who like your work on one forum will turn around and talk about you on several other forums they are often members of. I admit I'm a low-volume small fry even by 'boutique' standards, but one German member of the LPF talked me up on Aussensaiter (a German forum) and now I have about a dozen regular German customers and counting.

Well, of course customers who buy stuff because there is a buying spree going on a forum aren't going to write about it 6 months later and say they don't play the pickups anymore. But I do hear from customers who tell me, yeah they bought some sets that were all the rage, they send me sound samples of them, and I don't hear anything that special going on with 'em, sometimes they don't either.

Soundclips are a totally different ball of wax and here's where you and I totally agree. I have soundclips in my ads because they really, really sell pickups. As a winder, that's great. But as a player myself, I put ZERO stock in soundclips and I scratch my head when people still want them even after I explain the obvious -- different guitar, different rig, likely different gauge strings, different pick, different picking technique, and on top of all that run through a recording system that colors the sound further either through the biases of the "engineer" or the bias of the mics, mic placement, acoustics and recording techniques and equipment itself.

At least half, maybe 75% of a pickup's appeal is how it responds to your touch, how it FEELS. That's something you cannot get from a clip. To me the best guide to a pickup without playing through it yourself is a description by a guy whose ear you trust who is comparing it to a pickup you're already familiar with. That relativity is there pretty much regardless of the guitar/rig/playing technique/etc, because if one pickup is brighter or darker or more woody or whatever than the other, it will be so relative to that other pickup in almost any guitar/rig/etc. It's not a perfect system (what is?), but in my experience it is a vastly more reliable guide than soundclips to what a yet-unplayed pickup is like.

But the clips are in my ads because they work because they are sexier to customers than taking my advice to find a trustworthy ear who has heard this new pu and can compare it to one you know.

Anyway, though there are plenty of legit reasons to pass on this or any other shootout, I think everybody's overthinking the negatives of throwing your hat in the ring to the point of paranoia. If the forum audience is so small as to be negligible, what is there to lose?

[Possum]

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What is there to lose? A set of pickups thats what About 3 months ago I sent a set of my PAFs to the only publication that knows anything about them, and basically they disappeared down some hole or some desk drawer and I have little hope they will ever even try them out at this point. Thats $450 of my sweat and time that may end up being a complete loss. Oh well, tax write off I guess. Won't do that again.

Yeah yer right, you can listen to PAF sound clips all day but until you sit down and FEEL them you won't "get it." Sound clips are an absolute must, I keep mine totally unscrewed with, no effects, simple tube amp, never pedals or master volume junk. Then no one can say hey these don't sound like your clips, and they never have.

Sure there's money in guitar forums, but I don't put time in courting them anymore, except I enjoy the MLP some times and have friends there, but they don't buy stuff usually and I don't really care, the only forum I spend any time on is this one becuase trying to talk pickups with my wife sure doesn't work But my income, now that I am doing this full time, has precious little to do with the forum world. Ebay, YouTube, repeat customers, and customer referrals, Harmony Central, thats where my income comes from. I had to quit advertising in Vintage Guitar due to the economy, and it didnt affect my income at all that I can tell. The online audience, that buys my work doesn't come from forums; you also don't see the big makers spending ad money on forums either, the return is too small. You do see them marketing now on YouTube, they have finally caught onto that one. So, the LPF shootout thing, well like I said do it and have fun. I just have no trust in what will go down there, there will probably be big fights about the outcomes of the shootout

[JGundry]

One thing you may not have thought of is that forums have a huge number of lurkers. People view forums largely as a gear reference or resource. Makers like Seymour Duncan and Bare Knuckle know this and run their own forums. Players that are looking to buy a premium priced guitar or accessory are likely to get as much online info as possible. This is were forums come in. And pro players are just as big of gear hounds as the next guy. I have pro customers that found out about my stuff on forums. For the small maker, forums, high visibility dealers, youtube and word of mouth are all important.

[Possum]

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Yeah, there's alot of forums, but the guys I know who are selling alot of pickups, more than all of us combined probably, abandoned the forum world, you don't see them posting anymore, they're too busy, they tell me forums are small time stuff for them. Personally, I just don't have time to deal with the forums much, except here because I can share some of what I know and learn some too. I still wouldn't enter the LPF shootout thing even if I was a member, I don't believe in shootouts, and have never seen a really well done one ever. I do have guys who post their own reviews of my stuff on the LPF and everywhere else too, but it doesn't bring much business. The bulk of my sales aren't humbuckers and I find that the single coil guys I sell to aren't much into forums that I can tell, it seems the bucker players are more into that. There really is a difference between single coil players and bucker players, interesting....

[JGundry]

I see Jason Lollar and other guys post on the Les Paul forum. I'm sure it's because he is into the gear like the rest of us. But I think what really is going on is that at some point there is a tipping point in which there are enough satisfied customers on the net that a company like Seymour Duncan does not really need to have a focused presence on forums. Even at that though Seymour has a guy that posts on the MLP forum for them. The value of forums for specialized guitar gear is pretty big and I'm sure the bigger guys are fully aware of this.