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Vintage style is good enough for me, grounding magnets I doubt makes any significant dent in a strat pickup being noisy. You'll notice Leo Fender didn't ground the magnets in tele bridge pickups, he put tape over the magnets so they can't be grounded. Sure maybe in low impedance preamped pickups it might make a difference but not in vintage single coil designs, its just overkill with little return. I tried copper tape wrap on strat pickups to drop the peak frequency which it did, closed loop and grounded, but it didn't make it quiet. And ultimately I gave that idea up, it trimmed some treble but not in a very musical way and the very few I sent out like that the customers took it because it sounds better to them as well.
I read yesterday that Seth Lover on the alnico staple pickup grounded the magnets. For noise? No. He did it because if they weren't grounded and you touched the magnets you'd get an electrostatic "pop" noise in the right conditions. Thats all, it didn't make them any quieter.
Vintage style is good enough for me, grounding magnets I doubt makes any significant dent in a strat pickup being noisy. You'll notice Leo Fender didn't ground the magnets in tele bridge pickups, he put tape over the magnets so they can't be grounded. Sure maybe in low impedance preamped pickups it might make a difference but not in vintage single coil designs, its just overkill with little return. I tried copper tape wrap on strat pickups to drop the peak frequency which it did, closed loop and grounded, but it didn't make it quiet. And ultimately I gave that idea up, it trimmed some treble but not in a very musical way and the very few I sent out like that the customers took it because it sounds better to them as well.
I read yesterday that Seth Lover on the alnico staple pickup grounded the magnets. For noise? No. He did it because if they weren't grounded and you touched the magnets you'd get an electrostatic "pop" noise in the right conditions. Thats all, it didn't make them any quieter.
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