Noiseless Pickup designs

[Sweetfinger]

The problem is..

If you're playing blues and your phrasing has spots where you don't play, letting the listener 'breathe', there's that dang hum! Ever play a gig where the bar left the jukebox or TV on during your set? Nothing ruins 'All Your Love' by Magic Sam like the lilting strains of Foghat slowly riding over it For me, that's what hum is like,..might as well just set an a.m. radio on top of your amp tuned to Limbaugh.

The only hum cancelling method that seems to work well and isn't terribly complicated is the dummy coil in series, away from the pickup. That's my go-to cure-all. IMO when done nicely, It retains about 98 - 99% of the single coil mojo. You have to have REALLY good ears to hear the difference, where I would put the best of the commercial stack type pups at 90%. You've GOT to get that other coil away from the strings and magnetic field. The more 'art' than science part is that the dummy coil only works really well with narrow coils with moderate turns, i.e. regular garden variety strat style pups. The fatter the coil, and the more turns, the harder it is to get the hum cancelled. On P-90's I have to settle for a bit of residual hum. Pickups with weirdo designs like Gretsch Hi-Lo trons are also tricky.

BTW I actually like the sound of P-100's in certain applications. Send them to me! I will dispose of them properly

[Spence]

[QUOTE=Sweetfinger;10088]I don't think that two stacked coils will EVER get much closer than they are right now and side-by-side or rail pickups just don't do it either. There probably is a design that's been done that really nails it, but is probably way too expensive or impractical to be of commercial use. QUOTE]

If, and I mean if, my design works it will fit inside a regular strat cover, sound just like a single coil and be cheap, noise-free and stacked. Gotta think outside of the box sometimes.

[Joe Gwinn]

I suspect the fine-tune resistors on the Suhr system are for the purpose of matching the DCR of each pickup.

Not really. DCR tells you very little about the voltage induced by the humfield. Only the area-turns parameter affects voltage.

Instead, the large coil is loaded by the 10Kohm pot and 10K tone control so the large coil will produce exactly the same voltage (at both 60Hz and at the first few harmonics of 60 Hz) as does the pickup coil.

The DCR of the large coil does matter in that the lower the DCR, the lower resistance of the 10K pots must be to have any effect. But changing the wire size of the large coil has no effect on induced voltage.

The circuit diagram is given in Figure 5 of US application 20050204905, and the operation of the circuit is described in paragraph 0048 on page 3 of the text.

[Possum]

hummmmmmmmmmmmm

well yer either a hummer or yer not :-) Yes I've played on a small bar stage and on the other side of the stage wall was a huge bank of video poker machines and I'm playing P90s. I don't think audience notice things like hum realisitcally, the bar noise and drums usually mask it out, its not often you get a guitar solo where everyone is really quiet behind you either. Even on that stage though if I pointed in one direction alot of hum went away and I would always shut it off between songs. I can see in a recording environment hum could be a problem but you also have alot more control over that stuff in a studio too. I had a guy do a record with my low wind custom strat pickups and his tech was able to use some kind of star grounding thing to an aluminum guard plate and some trick they wouldn't tell me about that got rid of vitually all hum without killing any tone. It can be done. P90s though are a problem, I know Gibson did a guitar with a dummy coil hidden inside but I knew a guy at the jam that had one and when the hum went away so did the tone :-)

[mick]

" and be cheap, noise-free and stacked. "


Wow , it sounds like the ideal woman...

[Spence]

Nice one Mick. Personally I'd prefer a perfect size 10. You know, just tall enough to do the honours with a flat head to rest my beer on.

Apart from that, I recently did a small gig where my strat started humming a bit. 'Annoyed' was not the word as my strat's so bloody quiet normally. Turned out to be caused by some shit the resident DJ was pissing around with.

BTW, check my new 21 Y O girly singer!



Amazing voice apart from everything else....