Naive question: Can nails make decent slugs?

[Bruce Johnson]

I think that The Modified Needle Probe Method would be an excellent album name.

[salvarsan]

I pretty sure that anyone here could make a good-sounding pickup irrespective of materials.

If you know enough about pickups, you can build one from junk.

What I want to know is if you can do it with refrigerator magnets,
bits of steel drop cuts from the machine shop floor, enameled wire
from a local bead shop, and paper bobbins reinforced with StupidGlue(tm).

The design need not be high impedence or even passive.

[David King]

Salvarsans statement begs the question : What makes a "bad" pickup? Other than obvious defects like shorted turns and shorts to the armature. If anyone can make a great sounding pickup from trash -why can't some of us seem to make good sounding pickups from the very best materials?

[Mark Hammer]

Because there is a difference between making a pickup that "works", and making a pickup that consistently achieves a specific tonal target.

As a guy who only makes pickups for himself, and not for sale, I have the liberty of missing specific tonal targets by a country mile, and still ending up with something that is musically valid.....for me.

[Mike Sulzer]

Salvarsans statement begs the question : What makes a "bad" pickup? Other than obvious defects like shorted turns and shorts to the armature. If anyone can make a great sounding pickup from trash -why can't some of us seem to make good sounding pickups from the very best materials?

The circuit properties of a pickup are important; most important are the location and width of the resonance. These properties can be measured and predicted. Or they can be arrived at totally by trial and error, simultaneously with other properties.

[Rick Turner]

Mike, don't try to make too much sense out of it!

:-)

I just want the pickups I make...which I like...to sound exactly the same from one to the next, from 2000 (when I did the last major change) to 2020 if I live that long. I can do it, and I do.

[defaced]

The rolling process (as does drawing it for wire) creates what is essentially a grain structure to steel.

And the time at temperature reactions during the cooling process. Not as much of a factor at low carbon or alloy content steels, but a significant issue when you add the likes of Cr, Ni, Mo, Va, or more than about 0.2% C. I would not at all be surprised if every little metallurgical difference between steels of a given chemical composition has an impact on magnetic properties. Grain size, grain orientation (as you've already confirmed), % content of alpha ferrite/pearlite/banite (if you happen to cool fast enough), presence of weirdo phases like carbides/nitrides/sulfides and all the variations there of. Not to mention that AISI classifications are a mile wide and pretty much junk for quality control outside of coarse sorting of materials.

[Rick Turner]

All of this suggests that deep cryogenic treatment for ferrous alloys used in pickups may be beneficial.

I may have been the first to cryo treat strings...this would have been in 1985, and I damned well should have patented it then. I got pretty deep into all the theory behind it, and there's really interesting effects going on with regard to helping relax the crystalline matrix of various metals. The process has been pretty much accepted by the machine tool industry, but you'll also find folks doing racing motorcycle and car engine parts as well as some competitive target shooters having gun barrels done. It's also done (with some controversy) with banjo tone rings...and again, I probably did that first...1988 when I worked for Gibson.

You could simply do an entire pickup...

The F-5 mandolin that I did didn't like it...well, the wood was OK, but the celluloid binding didn't like minus 360 F! That's OK; I'd find that a bit chilly myself... That's colder than a witch's...can I say that? OK, than a warlocks balls...

[salvarsan]

Salvarsans statement begs the question : What makes a "bad" pickup?

It begs no question in the petitio principii sense but strikes to the heart of what makes a 'good' pickup.

Other than obvious defects like shorted turns and shorts to the armature. If anyone can make a great sounding pickup from trash -why can't some of us seem to make good sounding pickups from the very best materials?

Since taste in pickups is so frequently backward-looking, one (i.e., every fucking one of you) needs to examine one's own beliefs. "Learned preference" from old recordings plays a very large part in this. As has been frequently confirmed, a pickup that is too high-fidelity is an undesirable pickup since it shows up how undesirable a solid body guitar sounds.

You have grown up listening to distortion artifacts in electric guitars and amplifiers.
Most of these artifacts relate to dynamic range compression.

You absolutely want a pickup that compresses the initial attack profile, which is exaggerated by microphonic sweetening. You certainly want the compression from the power supply sag in a tube amplifier

Keep in mind that I like electric guitars, but I have less emotional and financial investment in servicing their sound than most here.

The emperor has no clothes and his prick isn't noteworthy, either.

[Rick Turner]

Uhh, errr...I don't resemble that remark. If there's anyone here who went his own way from the get-go, I will claim that title. I have never made a clone of any pickup from the past. Yes, I've mucked and fu... around with them, but all you have to do is see what I did in 1969 to know that I've been on my own path of pickup design for over 40 years now. Hell, I wasn't just hand-winding back then; I was cutting my own ceramic magnet material and magnetizing it myself. And then I got better at it and used an automatic coil winder that my then-partner, Ron Wickersham, build out of a Unimat lathe. But I never bowed down to the random Gods of 1954 or 1958 as so many do.

But, salvarsan...whoever you are...I'm liking most of your comments more and more...

Though I do have to do this to make a living...

[Mark Hammer]

Well, having lived on the west coast, I can say at least this much with authority: slugs make lousy nails. Here's a sextet with "staggered heights".

[J M Fahey]

Puajh !!! Disgusting !!! I thought the "mezuzah guys" couldn't even touch them.
I'll check with the Rebbe.
And talking about about slugs, they are not *that* bad, they are just the economy version of high quality (s)nails.
For those who don't care that much about "shielding", they may be an affordable option.
I think StewMac sells little clip-on shells for those who get worried later.

[Mike Sulzer]

Mike, don't try to make too much sense out of it!

:-)

The reason to make sense out of the simple part is to make the rest more accessible.

[Mike Sulzer]

As has been frequently confirmed, a pickup that is too high-fidelity is an undesirable pickup since it shows up how undesirable a solid body guitar sounds.

You have grown up listening to distortion artifacts in electric guitars and amplifiers.
Most of these artifacts relate to dynamic range compression.

You absolutely want a pickup that compresses the initial attack profile, which is exaggerated by microphonic sweetening. You certainly want the compression from the power supply sag in a tube amplifier

.

Undesirable for what purpose? Les Paul played about as clean as you could at the time he made his best known early recordings. Would he have have wanted to have an even cleaner sound if he could have had it? He could have had it in his later years, but by then he must have had what he wanted.

"pickup that compresses the initial attack profile": I do not think that pickups compress the attack. Instantaneous gain increases with motion towards the pickup, and decreases away from it. Harmonics are produced, but very little compression of the response.

power supply sag: I think that is a detail. The major effect is the non-linearity of the amplifying devices. Put a regulated supply in a tube guitar amp, and it still sounds like a guitar amp, just somewhat different.

[Rick Turner]

The issue of "clean" in pickups is obviously semantic as my own definition has nothing whatsoever to do with compression of dynamic range and everything to do with frequency response. Guitarists have pretty much generally rejected wide band pickups in favor of high impedance pickups with noticeable resonance well within the audio band.

Les was about low impedance wide band pickups. I know because I spent two evenings at his house in Mahwah, NJ being grilled by him to see if I could pass his test and was worthy of being Gibson's technical liaison to Les Paul. I passed the Les Paul test, but ran afoul of Mr. Top Dog at the corporate level and was soon gone. But Les was adamant about his love of wide bandwidth. He also told me that Mary Ford was a human audio limiter...she'd sing watching the VU meter, and when she came close to the red line, she'd turn her head so she wasn't singing so directly into the mic. So that's dynamic range limiting in the Les Paul world!

One of the problems with wide band pickups is that if you go into overdriving an amp, you wind up creating a lot of very high frequency harmonic distortion products, so for overdrive, a low pass limited frequency response can be preferable, and a nice low midrange resonant peak can tickle the tubes, so to speak, creating pleasing distortion rather than the nails on a black board that you get with wide band pickups driving distortion.

And this is one of the tricks to my putting a semi-parametric EQ circuit in most of my Model 1 guitars. It's a fantastic circuit for voicing the distortion of a tube amp. There's nothing like a big 10 dB boost set to a medium wide bandwidth kicking in at about 500 to 900 Hz for making great honking tones with a tube amp. The nice thing is that you can do that without losing whatever highs are there, so a clarity comes through in the decay.

Just try putting a parametric EQ circuit between your guitar and a tube amplifier and use the EQ as a distortion voicing device. It's killer.