Science, Scientism, and Understanding Pickups

[David Schwab]

I'd encourage anyone to try winding low Z coils on your standard bobbins. Go down to 36 gauge wire or some such, and wind 'til the coil looks the right size. Forget about output; this isn't about that. Just listen for the tone when the frequency response is really opened up and the resonant peak isn't there for you to hear. You'll start hearing your pickups in a new way, I guarantee.

I was making low Z bass humbuckers for a few years using 42. They sounded very nice. I had read you used 40 on the old Alembic pickups... don't know if that's true. I got some of that and wound some medium impedance pickups, and they sound really nice too. I just did a low Z set with 40 but haven't tried them out yet.

I picked up a roll of 28 for some experiments. Boy that stiff is like bailing wire!

You really can hear your fingers on the strings.

[Mike Sulzer]

Unfortunately the available pickups of various shapes are also not wound the same. So is the difference in tone from more windings, shorter magnets, or coil shape, or a combination of the above?

Al those things can affect the inductance, and some of them can affect the resistance as well.

[madialex]

This may not relate at all but I think it kinda does. Can someone explain to me why in some cases, when you wind a different way between say the bridge and middle pickups on a strat the in-between tone can get almost muddy or darker sounding. And what can one do to fix this problem?

[Ronsonic]

My thinking about a lot of this was transformed when I read some short pieces about Thomas Edison's early wax cylinder recordings. Apparently, he made some coin by going to country fairs and charging people money to record their voices onto his was cylinders. News reporters at the time described the recordings as being difficult to distinguish from the actual voice, they were THAT lifelike. (You can stop rolling your eyes now)

Of course, now we would laugh at such comparisons, just as we would giggle at the "Is it Maxell or is it Ella Fitzgerald?" comparisons in an era of 24-bit digital recording.

Snipped

And of course, as David rightly notes, sometimes someone does something different without truly understanding how it works or why it works, and over time we start to comprehend the hows and whys, leading to yet another serendipitous advance.

I think there's a familiarity with a new medium that develops over time. Movie audiences thought the original King Kong was terrifyingly lifelike. Now we recognize the stop action and see the strings on the airplanes. Just as we hear albums from the early 80s and each of the 8 or 12 bits of the samples on the synth claw at our ears. It isn't that the sounds or visuals have gotten worse, just that the novelty that overwhelmed our senses has faded and we're seeing and hearing it more clearly.

I will say I've been very impressed with how long the Line6 stuff held up. I gave it 5 years before the Pod started to sound dated and fakey. It took ten.

[David Schwab]

And of course, as David rightly notes, sometimes someone does something different without truly understanding how it works or why it works, and over time we start to comprehend the hows and whys, leading to yet another serendipitous advance.

I meant to comment on this the first time, but seeing it quoted in the last post made me think of this...

And Mike will like this too....

Of course things are discovered often by seeing that doing one thing causes something else. Then you see if you can repeat that, and if you can, you try and figure out what's going on. Then you test for that. Pretty close to scientific method I'd say.

Of course we often stop at "this does this" and just use it. Then without knowing what's going on, you can intuit it, and start using it. I do that all the time. I'd like to know what's going on, but don't find it necessary to use it. Understanding it would allow you to fine tune it.