Silent single coil

[David Schwab]

Now, this becoming contradicting. Why would there be low end phase cancellation in a stacked single coil if its only sensing the strings from one point? This is why I think there is something else going on with equally wound coils.

Because the two coils are out of phase. They don't have the opposite magnets facing the strings, so they are sensing the same part of the string, but out of phase.

If you switch them in phase, the pickup gets much louder, with more low end, but then it hums. Duncan calls that a "power boost". I had made a stacked Tele lead pickup, and wound it to about 14K, and it was bright and clean like a Tele. When I switched the coils in phase it sounded like a 14K single coil.

[Possum]

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This is contradictory information. Have you ever heard a Kinman noiseless strat or a Lace? Those things are very bright. What I'm saying is that a traditional humbucker with equal wound coils and a stacked humbucker both suffer from the same problem of not having a full frequency response because the coils are equally wound. I'm not talking about single coils at all here, only equal wound noiseless coils of both types. ONe sense the strings at two points the other doesn't yet they have the same problems. I haven't worked with noiseless stacked coils but I am assuming that like traditonal buckers, that if you don't wind both coils equally you will get a more full spectrum tone. If that is so, then where the sensing is happening isn't the main cause of notched dropouts.....clear?

[Possum]

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I think you've lost the thead of what I was trying to say, that EQUAL WOUND DOUBLE COILS in any kind of bucker BECAUSE THEY ARE EQUAL, are trimming out stuff besides extraneous noise, no matter what kind of bucker idea it is, stacked, or side by side. And this is why when you turn down the volume pot they sound lifeless and flat. The idea of string vibration phase cancellation can't happen in a stacked bucker because its not sensing two seperate areas of the string. So WHAT IS happening? I don't know, I just know its there and by unmatching the coils frequencies start coming back. WHY?

[Mike Sulzer]

I think you've lost the thead of what I was trying to say, that EQUAL WOUND DOUBLE COILS in any kind of bucker BECAUSE THEY ARE EQUAL, are trimming out stuff besides extraneous noise, no matter what kind of bucker idea it is, stacked, or side by side.

Applying science and engineering to a humbucker does not show such an effect.

Anyway, aren't you kind of shooting yourself in the foot? From all accounts, Gibson did not control the relative number of turns on the two coils of PAFs with any accuracy at all. So if your effect is real and significant, the sounds of PAFS should vary a lot. So there would not be much reason to sell or buy a product that claims to duplicate it. Which "it" would be correct?

[David Schwab]

This is contradictory information. Have you ever heard a Kinman noiseless strat or a Lace? Those things are very bright.

Lace sensors are single coils. I don't think Lace makes any stacked pickups, but they do have the Holy Grail side-winder.

Yeah, I said stacked pickups are bright sounding. When I wound a 14K pickup, I was expecting a fuller tone with more mids, but I got glassy bright vintage-Tele-land. This is why you see stacks wound like 24K on the DiMarzio HS-3 and the older Duncan stacks.

What I'm saying is that a traditional humbucker with equal wound coils and a stacked humbucker both suffer from the same problem of not having a full frequency response because the coils are equally wound.

But.. a humbucker loses highs, and a stack loses lows. The reason you have to unbalance the coils is because they are out of phase, so making them mismatched puts them slightly back in phase.

As a test, make a humbucker with two coils with the same magnet polarity facing the strings, and with both coils in phase. It will sound very different (and hum too).

I haven't worked with noiseless stacked coils but I am assuming that like traditonal buckers, that if you don't wind both coils equally you will get a more full spectrum tone. If that is so, then where the sensing is happening isn't the main cause of notched dropouts.....clear?

If you will get more low end. The low end is notched out. With a regular humbucker the highs are notched out. If you move the two coils closer together, like a mini rail Strat pickup, the notch moves up and they sound brighter.

Any time you combine two pickups, even if they are in phase, you will get cancelations and reinforcements, because the vibration of the string is not sensed in phase by both pickups at all frequencies.

[Possum]

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Mike you totally missed the point again My point is that a perfect noise cancelling pickup sucks!
Science and engineering falls short in alot of pickup areas especially in this one, where for some reason no one here has really explained, why perfectly matched coils don't sound good unless you have your guitar's volume pot dimed all the time. I'm not a fan of flat sounding tones and thats exactly what they do, stack or side by side. Sure, through a cranked amp at high volume they cut right through, but for expressive more full tones, they don't do it for me.
I wasn't even talking about PAFs. All over the place, well yes and no. The ones that were just plain bad were just a happenstance combination of everything gone wrong, but I think the good ones were more common than not. They did have a recipe, Seth Lover said they were wound to inductance in a rare interview I have, they weren't just willy nilly. Wire gauge sizes changed, some steel things changed, so early year PAFs and later could sound different. All the good ones all sound very similar to me and thats what I shoot for, those tones are shared by all the famous guys who made those guitars famous, all very close sounding, the differences being the artist and their rig mostly. Allman for instance used his tone controls alot more than most others did.

There is a "sweet spot" in mismatching coils in an accurate PAF reproduction and it depends on how many total winds the pickup is and goes from there. There will probably be several sweet spot ratios, just takes agonizing amounts of time to find, and it also depends on how your coils are wound, how many turns per layer. Science and engineering can't tell you anything about that, it takes ears. I don't mean any disrespect and I learned something here, but my experience isn't what you are telling me it should be, sorry. None of my bucker sets use identical wound coils.

[Mike Sulzer]

Mike you totally missed the point again My point is that a perfect noise cancelling pickup sucks!

You are claiming that there are frequencies missing when the coils are perfectly matched. That is not correct.

Gibson may well have changed the number of turns to keep the inductance the same when steel or wire size changed in different production runs, but that is not what I am referring to. I am referring to the accuracy with which the number of turns in the two coils was constrained to match within a production run. From all accounts, it was not that good. Therefore, you have some that match well, and others, not so well. You say that all but a few bad ones sound good. That contradicts your statement that the coils of a pickup cannot match well if you want the pickup to not suck.

Yesterday you were using what Lemme (a guy who does kind of engineering analyses) wrote to justify what you are saying. But now that you have realized that he was not saying what you thought, engineering cannot explain what you hear. And you think I am confused!

[uvacom]

I've noticed nobody has mentioned one effective method, that of using an electronically buffered parallel inductance. Basically you have a small inductor (usually by opamps), with a buffer in an inverting configuration. The inductor is kept small with gain applied at the buffer to match the level of the hum from the pickups.

The advantage to this system is that it can be matched to virtually any pickup, and it does not change the electrical characteristics of the pickups so the tone is totally unchanged. The active components are not in the signal path of the pickups, and the whole system is small and fairly flexible in how it can be mounted.

Unfortunately, ernie ball holds a patent on this system (which I imagine a fair number of people, including myself, have independently devised) and they do not sell their system aftermarket at all. But it is not a difficult circuit to build, just a battery, an inductor (probably something in the 100mH range), an opamp, a few resistors, maybe some coupling caps if you're very picky.

[Mike Sulzer]

uvacom,

Yes, I do not know how one can be granted a patent for using an op amp buffer. I bet it would not stand up in court if anyone cared to challenge it.

In any case, using a small inductor and then an amp (op or otherwise) with gain is not such a good idea if you play the guitar with a lot of gain. The op amp on the dummy becomes the main contributor of noise (hiss) since you have more total gain on the dummy than the pickup.

[uvacom]

Yeah, I mostly play clean and cavity space on a tele is short so that's the tradeoff I make. But certainly it's possible to use a larger inductor with less gain, and obviously the quality of the opamp matters too.

I'd say that probably most people who are concerned enough about single-coil tone to not use some kind of hum-cancelling pickup aren't piling on the gain anyway, but nonetheless that is one of the biggest drawbacks to the design.

[Possum]

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Mike you're off in PAF land and my thoughts are strictly on matched coil buckers, stacked or side by side. Why is a stacked bucker with matched coils sound so sterile? Why is cancellation happening in those pickups, why do they sound flat when volume pot is rolled down. Thats what I am trying to get an answer to and it sounds like you're saying they are reproducing the full frequency range same as a single coil would? I misinterpreted Lemme but still doesn't explain stacked coils not sounding good enough for me to ever buy one. Somewhere around here I do have some Lace pickups and they ARE buckers, they have 2 coils set up vertically on each side of the pickup. I don't like them and they have a problem with the end poles not being very strong in sensing I'm told. The Suhr system is the only thing that makes any sense to me because it actually doesn't interfere very much with the single coils you use it with. But I did have one customer tell me after he tried it that it still takes away from the tone. Gibson PAFs were never evenly matched, though towards the end of them it looks like they made more of an effort to do so. With TTops they had counters and shutoffs and those WERE matched, and one of the reasons they are way less musical than PAFs. I did alot of research on those as well, but even those don't have matched winding patterns which is another way to go thats helpful....

[soundmasterg]

Now, this becoming contradicting. Why would there be low end phase cancellation in a stacked single coil if its only sensing the strings from one point? This is why I think there is something else going on with equally wound coils.

Hard to say anything about TV Jones or old Filtertrons, I'd have to examine the real alloys and everything about them to figure them out. His pickups are oustanding.

Yeah I agree about TVJones's stuff. He pretty much did the Gretsch thing so well that no one competes with him. I love the set of Classic Filtertrons I got from him that I put into my 5120 Electromatic.

Greg

[Possum]

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Tom is a really nice cool guy too, I like his covers alot also. Those pickups remind me alot of stuff I'm doing, I can literally hear the thought and attention to detail that went into them, couldn't find fault with them at all, they are way underpriced in my opinion....

[David Schwab]

Mike you're off in PAF land and my thoughts are strictly on matched coil buckers, stacked or side by side. Why is a stacked bucker with matched coils sound so sterile? Why is cancellation happening in those pickups, why do they sound flat when volume pot is rolled down.

I'm not Mike, but I answered your questions Dave...

Side-by-side humbuckers have two electrically out-of-phase coils. This is how they buck the hum. Because the magnets are reversed, they sense the strings in phase. But because the two coils are separated by a distance, each one hears the string at a different point in its vibration. While the string is vibrating you have nodes and antinodes. The higher harmonics end up getting picked up by both coils and canceled out slightly. If you wire a humbucker in-phase, you will hear the opposite, the harmonics and very little fundamental.

The other thing that's going on is the common frequencies from both coils get added, so you get that big low end and mid boost.

Stacked pickup are different because you have two out-of-phase coils occupying the same space. If you take any two pickup guitar and wire the pickups out-of-phase, you will get a thin sound with very little low end. The closer you move the two coils together, the thinner it gets.

The only reason you get any sound from a stacked pickup is that the bottom coil sounds much different from the top. It has a very dark sound with little high end. So the highs from the top coil get heard, and the low end from both get canceled out.

In both situations, unbalancing the coils works because you are hearing more of one coil than the other, so the phase cancelation is reduced, just as if you had two out of phase pickups on a Les Paul, and you turned the volume down on one.

The newer stacks have a bottom coil with low resistance and fewer turns, and it's partially shielded from picking up the strings, so it doesn't phase cancel as much of the tone.

But even the older stacks can sound nice. I had a set of the old Duncans in a Strat once, two vintage stacks and a hot stack, and they sounded very nice.

Even the one I made for my Tele sounded good, but I wanted a hotter pickup for that guitar, so I went with a dual rail pickup.

Stacks tend to have reduced output too, so you have to wind them hotter.

What do you define as lifeless? Lack of highs? Lack of lows?

Here's an old recording I did back in 1987. It was done on a Tascam Porta Studio, and the tape has a lot of dropouts. But in it you hear two guitars, the rhythm guitar is a real Tele with the stock pickups, and the lead/melody guitar is a Strat type guitar with Duncan stacks. The guitar also had a Floyd Rose, but even then it got a very lively tone. All the guitars were recorded direct, so they are a bit sizzly. The track was mostly improvised as I recorded it, so there are lot of flubs! For the curious, the bass is my '74 Rick with a Gibson mudbucker at the neck and a Hi-A (Bartolini) at the bridge. I think it had flats on it.

They don't sound lifeless to me! That guitar used to get a great Hendrix tone from the neck pickup.

Drums & Wires (my homage to XTC)

[Possum]

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Thanks Dave, Mike seemed to be insisting that buckers only have notched frequencies because of the coils hearing different areas of the strings, which stacked buckers don't. I was talking only of exactly matched coils. I'm still no fan of fake single coils that are "noiseless." I did hear a guy play some Kinmans and they were pretty impressive, but still no match for the dumbass single coils. The reason I like PAFs is because they were seldom exactly matched, and just the design details of each bobbin and associated steel parts guarantees they won't match. They are much more single coil/P90 sounding than perfect humbucking. Perfect humbucking is an engineer's ideal but a musician's disaster.....