major pickup shootout- send your pups and be heard

[Stevenson]

so if you were in the market for a car - you would not want
to see how it faired in reviews against other cars ?

what if Honda did not want to submit a car for review
because the same arguments you guys have given ?

If the people doing the tests were friends with Honda, and were partial to those cars I could see other companies refusing to send in their models. There is quite a bit of political crap in the pickup world.

[salvarsan]

so if you were in the market for a car - you would not want to see how it faired in reviews against other cars ?

what if Honda did not want to submit a car for review
because the same arguments you guys have given ?

Apples and oranges.

What if an Alfa Spider enthusiast club asked aftermarket engine
manufacturors to compete for accolades when one of the club
members was also a manufacturor?

The venue is too narrow and socially inbred
for outsiders be given a fair shake.

If a narrowly focussed socially inbred group wants to piss all over
a dozen boutique PAF-style pickups, they'll have to buy them first.

-drh

[Spence]

so if you were in the market for a car - you would not want
to see how it faired in reviews against other cars ?

what if Honda did not want to submit a car for review
because the same arguments you guys have given ?

Reviews are not shootouts. To give you an example, if you read a review of a Land Rover and a Willys Jeep in 1956 you would probably believe the Jeep was the better vehicle. After all, it came first and helped to win the second world war blah, blah, blah...
However, no vehicle has covered as much terrain and reached more parts of the world than Land Rovers. Would you now choose a Land Rover over a Jeep? Maybe, but never forget the power of the brand label. In the real world Land Rover would win hands down every time but one man doing the shootout may not agree.

[Stan H]

Sorry, I don't have any pups to send...I'm a cat guy

[Possum]

...

A car and a guitar pickup aren't even remotely related. With a car you want comfort, gas mileage efficiency, safety.
With pickups if you are a Roy Buchannan fan you want pickups that are so shrill they will make your ears bleed, if you are a heavy metal fan you want pickups that sound good tuned down to D and little treble :-)

Comparing pickups in a competitive shootout is like a bunch of artists comparing the merits of different brands of red paint, which red is better?

[David Schwab]

Sorry, I don't have any pups to send...I'm a cat guy

lol "pups"... when did that crap start?

[Stevenson]

A car and a guitar pickup aren't even remotely related. With a car you want comfort, gas mileage efficiency, safety.
With pickups if you are a Roy Buchannan fan you want pickups that are so shrill they will make your ears bleed, if you are a heavy metal fan you want pickups that sound good tuned down to D and little treble :-)

Comparing pickups in a competitive shootout is like a bunch of artists comparing the merits of different brands of red paint, which red is better?

Precisely. And that's when the agendas and preferences come into play. Everybody has affiliations so unless they're doing double blind tests, it's useless. I've only perused that forum a couple of times but the bias towards certain makers is quite apparent.

[Mark Hammer]

The problem is that there is no benchmark for ranking them other than how close something presumably comes to sounding like a dyed in the wool PAF. But even there, tastes vary. Some people like those, and some don't.

So, it's not that anyone is afraid of such competition/shootout, nor even afraid of anyuntoward bias in ratings/rankings. Rather, all these pickups are wound/made to correspond to different uses and purposes, and even to complement different amps or guitars, so on what basis would they be ranked?

As for the car/pickups comparison, again it's off the mark. Can a formula 1 car go faster than my Focus Wagon and handle high-speed turns better? You betcha. Can I grocery shop and drop my son off at his friend's house with a Formula 1 car? Not on your life. So which is the "better" car, and can either compare to a Mac truck if I haul heavy machinery for a living?

[David Schwab]

Right, and car magazines don't do car shootouts. They review a car. They might compare two hybrids or something, and say one might have some features the other doesn't, but there won't be a best car. There can't be.

Same with guitar magazines. Now there may be an "editors" choice given, or some type of rating system, but there is no winner or loser. Is there a best guitar in the world? How about a best pair of pants? No best, just favorites.

And it also comes down to the credibility and intent of the reviewers. I'm more than happy to submit my pickups to magazines for review, but not some web forum. I mean look at the stooges at THIS web forum!

[Zhangliqun]

I think everybody's being wussy and anal about all this. If you don't have time to wind and ship out an extra pickup, that's one thing, you're running a business and ya gotta do whatcha gotta do.

But being so overly concerned about the fairness of the judges, heck, folks like these perfectly fit the profile of our ideal customers -- gearheads obsessed with tone. And as Spence said, if your pickups are good, they will sell themselves, to which I would add, even at a dreaded "shoot-out".

I wasn't going to send one in due to lack of time to wind extra, but if it's not too late, I think I'll join in...

EDIT: Well it's too late to get in now, I've been told. Maybe next year.

[David Schwab]

I think everybody's being wussy and anal about all this. If you don't have time to wind and ship out an extra pickup, that's one thing, you're running a business and ya gotta do whatcha gotta do.

I sent out a free set of pickups for a bass builder to evaluate, so I have no problem with that.

But being so overly concerned about the fairness of the judges, heck, folks like these perfectly fit the profile of our typical customers.

Yes, and no. If someone is running a web forum, and they have a bunch of people around them agreeing with them, and I think we have witnessed this on this forum, then you have a mob mentality on one end, and someone who's more than just a customer on the other, since he's treating this like it's a magazine article, but without the control placed on a real article like that. On the internet, anyone can pretty much say anything and think of themselves as an expert.

I have no problem with real customer's reviewing my work on web forums. Even if they don't like the pickups. I wouldn't even have a problem if a forum wanted to do a review of let's say all the available Jazz bass pickups on the market. Some people might even call that a "shootout".

But it's all about the intent. Am I a person who wants new pickups for his instrument, or a person looking to try and bunch and knock some of them down, while building up other brands? Customers don't do that.

It was the original poster's attitude of what a shoot out is all about... the "I dare you" kind of thing. It's juvenile and makes the "shootout" come off as seeming that there's a agenda at work, where their minds have been made up as far as what constitutes a "winner" pickup from the "losers".

Just saying they want to compare expensive pickup to cheap pickups shows that for one thing, people will expect the expensive pickup to sound better than the cheap pickup. And they might even hear a difference that might not be there! That's human nature. People can be told they are tasting beef while they are given tuna, and they will think it is! I just saw that on TV.

So it's not a bad idea, as long as it's not done looking for the "best" or a "winner" since that's just stupid.

And as Spence said, if your pickups are good, they will sell themselves, to which I would add, even at a dreaded "shoot-out".

That's not what he said, he said:

If you have a good product you don't need to be in a shootout of any sort.
Your pickups will sell themselves.

To me that says a shootout is pointless. Is Spence sending in pickups?

I wasn't going to send one in due to lack of time to wind extra, but if it's not too late, I think I'll join in...

The thing to look out for is that even if all the pickups are good, if they don't like them, that will project that they suck on your product, even if they don't.

A "real" review wont say something sucks. If the product is that bad, they just wont review it! I've never read a review in Guitar Player were they said something was bad. But they will point out problems with it.

An example is there was a restaurant in town here that had just opened. I never got a chance to try them out, but heard from someone, who had heard from someone, that the food wasn't very good. Now this person I talked to never ate there. And we don't even know if the person they talked to did. But apparently it got around and the place went out of business rather quickly. Was the food really bad?

Meanwhile a Chinese restaurant that I know was bad replaced one that was really good. They kept the name, but added the word "New" before it, so now it was "New Peking". The food really wasn't very good, but they lasted longer because people associated them with the former good restaurant, and there was probably still enough people telling other people that the food was good at Peking on Valley Road, so people kept going there. Until they realized it wasn't good, and they went out of business also.

So I'm not saying that a "shootout" is a bad thing, it all depends on who's doing it and how well it's done.

Why would you want to be part of the shootout anyway? What would there be to gain from it?

[Zhangliqun]

The difference you point out with what Spence said is a difference without a distinction. His point is you don't need a shoot-out to sell pickups, true. But my point that great pickups truly shine even in that environment still stands.

Consider also that these folks could still enter our pickups in a shoot-out "without our permission" by just buying one from us without us knowing who they are or whether they planned to enter it in a 'pickup derby'.

As for intent to knock a brand down and build another up vs. plain ol' customers, SO WHAT? It happens to us all the time anyway. Said plain ol' customers are often no less biased in that way and will review on the net accordingly, and sometimes they buy from us with precisely that intent.

In other words, we're all in a shoot-out every day with ZERO control over bias or rules or format or agendas or anything, whether we like it or not. In this case, there's a chance for some extra publicity, even if your pickup doesn't finish first.

I think also everyone is assuming that they're going to say that "This pickup is the best and all the others suck". Knowing the crowd over there a bit, and knowing they are not a bunch of Harmony Central pimple-faces, it's far more likely going to be "In our opinion, this one is the best under these conditions/applications -- but these four or five others over here are awfully good and were so close that with a different rig, any of them might have won. You really can't go wrong with any of them. The next tier was also really, really good, etc..." and they would save their scathing reviews for the so-so to crappy pickups that truly deserve it.

Finally, we have to take the PR angle into consideration, again whether we like it or not. Having read these posts, I think we winders as a group -- regardless of intent and even if it could be shown that we are 100% right on every point of logic -- have come across in this thread to potential customers as defensive, insecure and downright cranky. I think that's bad PR for our little 'trade association' and thus bad for business. That doesn't mean everyone, or even anyone at all, had to participate, but I think we could have come across a bit nicer.

[trioderob]

shootout

I will tell you guys something.

I would rather see you guys send your pickups to a shootout like this
then read a magazine review.

why ?


because all of the reviews I have read are positive~!

or at least they are not negative.

when have you ever seen a review that said a pickup sounded like arse ?

[trioderob]

i think everybody's being wussy and anal about all this. If you don't have time to wind and ship out an extra pickup, that's one thing, you're running a business and ya gotta do whatcha gotta do.

But being so overly concerned about the fairness of the judges, heck, folks like these perfectly fit the profile of our ideal customers -- gearheads obsessed with tone. And as spence said, if your pickups are good, they will sell themselves, to which i would add, even at a dreaded "shoot-out".

I wasn't going to send one in due to lack of time to wind extra, but if it's not too late, i think i'll join in...

Edit: Well it's too late to get in now, i've been told. Maybe next year.

not too late if you are in cali- contact them again

[Zhangliqun]

I think they have to have the pu there by tonight, in which case I'm just out of luck.