Interesting Duncan Stag Mag Mod...

[Rick Turner]

I have long wanted a real electric guitar sounding pickup on a bronze strung guitar. 99% of what's on the market in mag pickups for bronze are voiced as "acoustic guitar pickups", that is they have relatively low output, wide band response, not too much peak, and are fairly low impedance devices. Fine. It's a decent approach for the best feedback suppression if that's what you need in an acoustic guitar pickup, but I am just fine with undersaddle pickups and high headroom active electronics for that in my semi-hollow Renaissance guitars. But...a real crossover guitar...one that can get nasty with a mag pickup...nice and fat, growling tone, good distortion driver...that's what I wanted.

Of course, the big problem with bronze strings and mag pickups is the miserable voicing between the (usually) wound G string and the unwound B. The B winds up hugely overpowering the G, and the high E is and icepick, too. The usual ways to deal with this are: adjustable pole pieces...with Sunrises you have to drop the Allen screws for the B and E practically all the way into the coil. Most other "acoustic" pickups have some other method of taming the magnetic strength, usually something internal that you can't see, but it could be distance, it could be magnetic shunting, whatever.

So, sure, I could design something, but then I noticed that Seymour Duncan had the "StagMag" pickup...a humbucker with almost normal looking bobbins, but with Strat-like magnets instead of slugs, screws, and an Alnico bar. So now I drill out the base plate large enough to just shove the B and high E magnets down. Could do it with the G as well. I can get perfect string to string voicing, a real electric guitar sound, and it's a four wire pickup so I can use a push-pull to get single coil. I add this to my already piezo equipped Renaissances, put on a second output jack (sure, it could be a stereo jack, but people like two mono cords more than they like stereo cord), and now we have an acoustic electric on one channel and a fine sounding electric on the other...but with bronze strings. Next I'll make a solid body with just a StagMag and bronze strings, string it up with plain G .011's, and it should be great.

Obviously you could do something like this with typical single coil pickups, too. Just glue a bit of a plastic rod to the end of two or three of the magnets so the magnets themselves drop way down. Of course you could use shorter magnets, too, and use plastic extenders...or wood...or brass...

The point is that we can design pickups that allow the use of bronze strings on electric guitars.

[Possum]

I don't think the Duncan pickup is an original idea, I was sent a pickup from some kind of metal guitar from the early 80's that has alnico slugs, if I remember right there is some kind of steel base and the pole screws are very short and not really adjustable as they contact the metal baseplate. I should dig that thing out again, it was pretty bright sounding, and don't remember if it had a bar magnet in it or not. I think Fralin makes one too. I had some slug alnico mags made when I was experimenting with all the PAF madness, they really brightened the tone up but also gave it a real hard sounding edge, like any sag that was there disappeared in an unmusical sounding way.

[fieldwrangler]

Rick -

This kind of thinking can be very fruitful.

I saw Jon Levinthal (one of my absolute favorite guitarist/producers) a couple of months ago playing a duo with just himself and Roseanne Cash (admittedly, his wife). He happens to have a formidable collection of vintage guitars, which he completely ignored for this occasion. Instead, he used a small body flattop steel-stringed acoustic (fitted with a mag soundhole pickup) with a 4-10" Bassman reissue (probably rented) and a few doofey pedals. The sound was, as you might expect, quite unclassifiable with regards to the usual electric/acoustic division. Yet he played AN ENTIRE SHOW, WITH NO OTHER MUSICIANS, ON THIS BIZARRE RIG!

At every instant (and I am not exaggerating) his choices about what needed to be done at a given instant were staggeringly brilliant, and well represented with this hybrid presentation.

Bob Palmieri

[JaimeC]

I saw him play with Roseanne at the Big Tent Festival in Fife, Scotland just a few weeks ago - the tone was wonderful. Just the one guitar for the whole of the set.

[Rick Turner]

Possum, I didn't have anything to say about whether Seymour was the first to do that; my point is that it is an available pickup which leads one into new possibilities for string to string voicing with strings you'd not normally be able to use on an electric guitar. I think you missed my whole point entirely. The origin of the design is actually not relevant. What is is that this is a pickup which can be modded and made useful in a whole new manner. To use the cliche, "think outside the box." Frankly, this is as much about strings as pickups. Perhaps I should have posted this on a string design forum...

[fieldwrangler]

Possum, I didn't have anything to say about whether Seymour was the first to do that; my point is that it is an available pickup which leads one into new possibilities for string to string voicing with strings you'd not normally be able to use on an electric guitar. I think you missed my whole point entirely. The origin of the design is actually not relevant. What is is that this is a pickup which can be modded and made useful in a whole new manner. To use the cliche, "think outside the box." Frankly, this is as much about strings as pickups. Perhaps I should have posted this on a string design forum...

Series/parallell might be a cool option in this case.

Ken Parker recently asked me if I would get going on a magnetic pickup for his new bronze string equipped hand built high-end archtops. For various reasons I couldn't jump on it immediately so he's adapting these cool soundhole mags that Larry Fishman uses (I believe they're patented by another archtop builder in Scotland.) His quick & dirty tests of field strength in the various string positions showed a quite different field distribution than I would have expected. Don't exactly remember what it looked like but if any of you have one of those Fishman Rare Earth setups and a gaussmeter it might be enlightening to post some measurements. (Not to say that the empirical push-the-mags-up-&-down method enabled by the Turner-modded Stag Mag wouldn't get you where you needed to be.)

[Rick Turner]

I have personally not found series/parallel to be particularly useful in passive instruments; I just don't like the volume difference that happens when switching from one to the other. To me it feels like a cheap trick for the sake of having more switches rather than something that is actually musically useful. I prefer coil cut which doesn't have a drastic a drop in volume. Of course, any of these tricks could be smoothed out in an active circuit by just dedicating another deck of the switch to gain resistor switching; that works very well.

[David Schwab]

I find series/parallel works well for some of my customers who will put a hot single coil size humbucker at the bridge, and still want to get cleaner tones. I've done this on Teles and Strats. Since the bridge pickup is wound to sound like a humbucker, the switch to parallel is perfect.. the volume drops down to where the single coil would be, and they get the brightness and crunch back, all while not humming. I try to avoid single coil switching because these guys would complain about the noise. 90% of all the Strat or Tele pickups I install are some kind of hum canceling models. These are usually brought to me by the customers.

[fieldwrangler]

I, too, find series/parallel to be a very good option for many situations, such as the above scenario and ones in which (relevantly) a more "acoustic" full-range sound is appropriate. So, I'd definitely listen to it in a bronze-string setup.

I used to do a lotta surgery on multipole switches (moving & re-mounting contacts) in order to make the copacetic combinations come up quickly for the customer. Sometimes these setups were optimized for all combos being hum-resistant, so half the humbucker would only come up when combined with another complementary coil. Nowadays we see a lot of this kindof thing.

I know you guys know all this but I just figured I'd enter it into the Public Record for the benefit of visitors.

[LtKojak]

Rick, it all boils down to the following: "What's a one man's trash, is another man's treasure" (a line from the poem GARAGE SALE by Tom Zart).

Once you make something intended to be used in a certain way, somebody else may use the same thing to do or make something completely different. That's human nature and from this situation, many things were discovered just using things "the wrong way", LOL.

I, for one, use the coil tap in my 335 in several songs, specially if there's a high-octave funky rhythm lick, or slapping and popping the strings like it was a bass... and I see Robben Ford using it all the time with his Shakashta... I'd say is VERY useful in a musical way!

Another quote, one of my favorites is the following:

"If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called RESEARCH, now would it?
Albert Einstein

HTH,

[Possum]

Got it Rick, just mentioned that there are other pickups like that. I pulled it out of the "museum" last nite, this pickup is really strange, it has a short leg baseplate with Gibson's patent number stamp in the metal. the only magnets in it are alnico slugs, pole screws and slugs touch a steel plate underneath to channel the magnetism through the pole screws, if you raise the pole screw you lose contact. One tab has a 3 hole adjustment piece riveted to the adjustment tab. Both coils are copper tape wrapped. 7.5K and a Gibson looking rubber stamped code on the bottom 345 182. Anyone ever seen one of these? I think the guy said it came from an old Kramer or similar pointy guitar brand late 70's early 80's.