Naive question: Can nails make decent slugs?

[salvarsan]

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.

Heh.

Les Paul's sonic tastes are statistically referred to as "outliers"
given the aesthetic decadence of the last 15 years.

"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.

You need more information.
Two otherwise identical pickups, one using Alnico 5 and the other Alnico II, exhibit distinct
dynamic signatures. In practical terms, you can only bang on the guitar so hard before
the Alnico 2 pickup audibly self-limits. Ditto for A3 and A4.

Much of the perceived harshness of early Ceramic I and C5 magnets was due to the
sharp attack that higher coercivity magnets provide. Until makers understood how
to wind for ceramic magnets, those pickups were problematic. It took Joe Barden a
decade of pestering Danny Gatton before Joe's C5 pickup builds were ready for release.

If you can add some commentary about recoil permeability and its possible effect
on the generated signal, I would be _very_ interested.

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.

It's a detail with a substantial market niche.

Here's one: Weber Copper Cap Rectifiers
Another is the Dumble RC plate-to-grid bypass in the preamp stage; its compression+sustain
is a signature sound and very desirable in general. Note: the typical RC is .05uF/22Meg serially
connected for a t=RC time constant of 1.1 seconds.

Much of a pickup's marketability lies in its ability to adequately exploit the pathological
aspects of the amplification chain, and buyers expect these pathologies to be available
on demand.

It's not that I particularly like this state of affairs, but I think it figures prominently in
the use of electric guitars. Others, doubtless, have a less jaundiced view.

[Mark Hammer]

What an absolutely delightful post!! Seriously.

We are on identical wavelengths here, and I think you hit upon something very central to "desirable" tone: the sonic outcome is always a product of the input signal, what you feed it to, and how you treat it along the way. One of the ugliest things in the world is harmonics of harmonics of harmonics. So if the plan is to reproduce as cleanly as possible, with as much fidelity as possible, retaining as wide a bandwidth as you can lets all the harmonic animation come from the instrument and pickup. If the plan is to let the amp and other aspects of the signal path do the harmonic animation, and use your fingers and pick to control the harmonic animation from the signal path, then you absolutely have to rein in the harmonic content from the source.

As for quasi-parametric boost before overdrive; it's something I've been using to put a smile on my face since the mid-80's. I gave David Lindley an overdrive a couple years ago that I had made with him in mind. It had some resonant boosting before clipping, plus some lowpass filtering post-clipping. Not sure if he ever used it. For all I know, it was left in a hotel room somewhere.

The interview with Joe Barden in Dave Hunter's Pickup handbook was very interesting with respect to thinking about what the "right" bandwidth is. Barden describes his pickups as rather "unforgiving", because of the wide bandwidth.

[David Schwab]

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".

I always liked slugs. Those are leopard slugs!

[Rick Turner]

Slugs have a unique ability literally to go f..k themselves if no suitable partners are to be found. And the banana slug is the mascot of the University of California, Santa Cruz. What does that say about life up on campus?

[David Schwab]

The interview with Joe Barden in Dave Hunter's Pickup handbook was very interesting with respect to thinking about what the "right" bandwidth is. Barden describes his pickups as rather "unforgiving", because of the wide bandwidth.

That's a fun interview. I had no idea that Joe didn't know zip about pickups and was just trying to please Danny, whom he was a big fan of. So he just kept at it and stumbled upon stuff. He figured everything out from the ground up and still doesn't know why what does what, but he knows what to do.

Les used to say people didn't like his pickups because they were too clean. And how many guitarist, compared to bassist, use Alembic instruments. I love clean bright pickups. I can alter them to sound good with distortion, and then come back and have that nice chime and bite.

[Mark Hammer]

Agreed. I enjoy having wide bandwidth, because I can always filter out what I don't want, but creating it from nothing is kind of hard. I like to think of gutar tone as using both subtractive and additive synthesis approaches to achieve different goals. The subtractive part can involve having a harmonically rich signal (via distortion) and filtering stuff out for effect, but it can also involve wide bandwidth pickups and doing the "filtering" at the guitar itself, via picking. One of the threads that runs through several interviews in that Hunter book is the value of lower-wound pickups that retain clarity and bandwidth, and the greater tonal flexibility that affords the player. And certainly the players that I tend to find the most emotionally expressive are those with a preference for the clarity that single-coil pickups and "brighter" instruments provide.

Sometimes I think the world of guitar/bass players is divided into those who can make effective use of an Aphex Aural Exciter....and those who can't. Those things tend to sit in music stores and gather dust, largely because so many players DON'T like clean wide-bandwidth tones, and plugging that sort of pickup/guitar into an enhancer/exciter pedal (yes, I know they operate differently) leaves them wondering if the thing is even on.

[Rick Turner]

I'll take Clapton with an SG or Les Paul over Clapton with a Strat any day of the week. Of course, the actual mix was Clapton+humbuckers+heroin... And I'll take Peter Green and Danny Kirwin over just about any of your single coil guys other than Hendrix and Landreth. Point being that some awfully expressive music has been made with relatively muddy pickups.

[Mike Sulzer]

Les Paul's sonic tastes are statistically referred to as "outliers"
given the aesthetic decadence of the last 15 years.
You need more information.
Two otherwise identical pickups, one using Alnico 5 and the other Alnico II, exhibit distinct
dynamic signatures. In practical terms, you can only bang on the guitar so hard before
the Alnico 2 pickup audibly self-limits. Ditto for A3 and A4.



If you can add some commentary about recoil permeability and its possible effect
on the generated signal, I would be _very_ interested.

Rick, I agree that pickup frequency response is very important for the dynamics of the whole system, that is, guitar + amplifier and whatever is in between. That is why I am somewhat surprised at the low rating in this forum of the pickups that Mr. Smith from the eastern shore of MD makes. I believe that he is aiming at a market that uses a very high level of distortion and thus he makes pickups with less high frequencies. They are not for everyone.

-------------


I agree that LP's sonic tastes are an outlier. The reason for mentioning him was just to point out such differences. He apparently liked the sound of a solid body guitar played clean and with wide bandwidth pickups. However, it is important to see that the audio systems he had available had less high frequencies than the norm now, and that factors into the equation somewhere when we listen to his old recordings.

I think the question of the effects of magnets on the sound of pickups is a difficult one. The main point is that the vibrating string does not move the system along the B-H curve to a significant degree as in a motor, speaker, or other high level devices. Recoil permeability should not be an issue with pickups. So what is the physics of the effect? I think it has to do with the effect of the magnet on the vibrating string, subtle versions of "stratitis". It would be interesting to investigate this, but difficult.

[Rick Turner]

Mike, there is a natural bias here to think of pickups as being the most important element in the signal chain. This is the pickup maker's forum. Go to a guitar makers' forum, and the bias will be in favor of the guitar...wood and metal and carbon fiber. Go to an amplifier makers' or tweakers' forum, and it's all about the amp, tubes, speakers, cabinets, whatever.

It's the three blind guys and the elephant...

So pickup makers don't like Paul Reed Smith's pickups... Well, a lot of guitar players do! I'd love to have Paul's sales success... And how many of us can claim to be a part of such an iconic signature guitar tone as Carlos Santana's? There may be an element of sour grapes among those dissing PRS.

Other stuff... Magnetic braking or pull will certainly de-linearize string vibration. It would be interesting to actually be able to visualize the changing shape of the flux field as a string vibrates over a pickup. There's some 3 dimensional dynamic (well, that might make it 4 dimensional) stuff going on that we just don't know enough about, though many claim to hear it.

[Mark Hammer]

Much of the perceived harshness of early Ceramic I and C5 magnets was due to the sharp attack that higher coercivity magnets provide. Until makers understood how to wind for ceramic magnets, those pickups were problematic. It took Joe Barden a decade of pestering Danny Gatton before Joe's C5 pickup builds were ready for release.

I remember during the mid-80's, when folks were kvetching abut how bad digital recordings sounded, one of the writers in Stereo Review, Julian Hirsch or Len Feldman, noted that much of what recording engineers had grown up learning to do was mic things in anticipation of the high-end loss that would inevitably occur during the transfer to tape, and eventually vinyl; some of it to simply provide "cutting power" against a poor S/N ratio. As a result, when faced with a new technology that did a good job of preserving top-end and silence, applying the traditional methods resulted in harsh and brittle sound. The author predicted that once recording engineers adapted their mic-ing techniques to suit the newer recording technology, all would be well again.

I think what Salvarsan alludes to in the evolution of Joe Barden pickups is a similar sort of pattern: you can use other kinds of magnets, but you can't just blindly apply the sorts of techniques and coil designs you acquired from other more traditional approaches that used alnico.

[Joe Gwinn]

Other stuff... Magnetic braking or pull will certainly de-linearize string vibration. It would be interesting to actually be able to visualize the changing shape of the flux field as a string vibrates over a pickup. There's some 3 dimensional dynamic (well, that might make it 4 dimensional) stuff going on that we just don't know enough about, though many claim to hear it.

One can actually model the 4D fields (3D over time) with modern modeling software, but this software ain't cheap. But it would be within reach for a large company.

[Rick Turner]

There are far deeper reasons why early digital recordings sound like fingernails on blackboards other than mic and EQ technique. Only now with the Sony DSD techniques (which Korg uses as well), and better 24/96 recordings are we able to hear digital recordings that don't have some pretty nasty artifacts buried but audible.

Another problem with severely band limited recording is that you've effectively cut off the possibility of hearing beat frequencies that come from the combining of sound that is considered outside human ear bandwidth. But that's a subject worthy of an entire PhD dissertation...

[Mark Hammer]

Some banana slug porn. Could be gay, could be straight. Could be "girl-on-girl action". Or they could just be checking each others' pockets for spare change. I can't tell.:

Actually, I always found those banana slugs with the mottled skin to be one of the more visually appealing invertebrates. At the same time, given that they bore a distinct resemblance, in shape, size, and colouring. to some of the fallen leaves on the same forest paths where you were likely to encounter them, what made them appealing also made them a source of risk. You really didn't want to step on any by mistake.

[David Schwab]

So pickup makers don't like Paul Reed Smith's pickups... Well, a lot of guitar players do! I'd love to have Paul's sales success... And how many of us can claim to be a part of such an iconic signature guitar tone as Carlos Santana's? There may be an element of sour grapes among those dissing PRS.

Actually many players don't like them either. I was first exposed to them back in '95, before I was making pickups. But I was doing repairs. The guy who just bought the guitar hated them and had me install Alnico II Pros. I didn't like them at all, and that's from a player's standpoint. I liked the Alnico IIs a lot. They have become one of my favorite pickups. The PRS pickups just were toneless.

More recently a guitarist I was playing with bought three brand new PRS guitars (inheritance money), two with HBs and one with P-90s, and replaced the pickups in all of them. That was based on his playing them for a few weeks and really hating the tone. He put Duncan JBs in the bridge position on the two humbucker guitars. He put some other Duncans in the neck. He put a DiMarzio Tone Zone P-90 and two Fralin noise canceling pickups in the other.

Another guitarist I know has a PRS Studio and replaced all the pickups with Duncans. He said he hated the pickups.

Santana's guitar is set up to roll a lot of high end off, so it probably doesn't matter.

I think most people play PRS guitars because they are nice guitars, but I see a lot with new pickups.