Possible to get a 150 turn 8Ω coil to sound 'ok'?

[peskywinnets]

I toy with making sustainers in my spare time ...these things are wound to about 8Ω with about 150 turns of 0.20mm-0.3mm wire.

Now I thought'd be an intersting tangent to try and get the output of one of these coils to sound vaguely 'pickup-ish'.

So what are the things I need to focus on?

Is it just output level? (which for such a coil as the type I wind is going to be feeble). If so, would a preamp suffice, or is there some other missing element that makes a pickup sound 'reasonable'

Any tips greatfully received!

[Stealth]

In effect what you'd have is the coil part of an active pickup - that is, an extremely low-impedance coil that'd need a boosting preamp.

I've seen an example of such a pickup on Talkbass, someone used a two-hundred turn coil and married it to a low-noise op-amp (no idea what exact circuit he created) and positioned it close to the bridge - had a nice sound to it, actually, and a lot of clarity as the pick-up collected a lot of harmonic content.

[David Schwab]

In effect what you'd have is the coil part of an active pickup - that is, an extremely low-impedance coil that'd need a boosting preamp.

Actually most active pickups, such as EMG, have regular high impedance coils.

A preamp or transformer would work here, maybe in combination (like a microphone).

[peskywinnets]

In effect what you'd have is the coil part of an active pickup - that is, an extremely low-impedance coil that'd need a boosting preamp.

The reason I reckoned it'd need 'more' (I use that term here becuase I don't know what 'more' in this instance is!) is becuase I believe those who have tried to preamp up a Roland GK2 midi pickup, said the sound was thin & weak - that said, there must be something workable with using such low impedance pickups as the front end to some serious signal treatment cos don't Roland use the same pickups as the signal source for the VG99 sim system?

[salvarsan]

Use roughly double the windings and feed the output into a Lo-z/Hi-z matching transformer for microphones and DI mixing panels.


-drh