Designing With Brass

[David Schwab]

One thing I have to give DiMarzio credit for is being creative in their designs. Using different materials and coming up with formulas that work.

My buddy has one of their PAF style pickups. They have changed them a bit over the years, so I'm not sure which one he has. It's an interesting pickup in that it looks just like a standard Gibson humbucker on the surface. But the screws and slugs are both made exactly the same way. The slugs have thin shafts with heads on them, just like the screws. Then they have additional steel slugs between the slugs and screws that you can't see from the front that don't contact the magnet. This is to increase the inductance. Lastly they have nylon spacers on the four outside poles to keep a space between the magnet an poles. There are no keepers.

He wasn't real crazy about the pickup though, and prefers the Duncan Antiquities.

[ShannonH]

late again,

Hi all,
as usual i seem to come into these discussions late, but i have done a bit of experimenting with brass. As a cover, it's bad. I can't find a decent way to wind the coils to compensate for the amount of high end it strips out. As a baseplate however, I like it quite a lot. It very slightly increases bass response, which is great on overwound pickups (14k and higher w/ 43g, 9.2 and higher with 42g.) It is also OK for an "open" cover, which is really just a surround. It seems to focus the tone a bit. I have some brass mini covers I am cutting out to do this with. Peace!

Shannon

[NightWinder]

hey wade,

long time, no see... Hope you're doing we'll. Been seeing your advertisements in Premier Guitar. ... Nice.

Thanks for the advice. I think I'm going to tinker with some brass and see what I come up with.

Thanks Kev!!

Things are great ; ) I'm actually working on a brass design myself. Sometimes you just have to go for it and leave everything that you've ever heard out, peoples opinions, everything and start from scratch. Get crazy with it!!