Why no single coil blade pickups?

[peskywinnets]

A bit of googling reveals scant single coil blade pickups about....with the only ones immediately Googleable (is that a legitimate verb nowadays?!) being of the humbucking type.

Any ideas why?

[FunkyKikuchiyo]

They're out there. Bill Lawrence made some, and I think they still exist under his name. One of the posters here (though I haven't seen him on here in a while) Possum, makes some that sound pretty good..... Stephens Designs?

Why this is, I'm not sure. For a while there it seemed like no large company wanted to waste their time making good single coils. There were all sorts of stacked humbuckers, and there was more demand (perceived necessity?) to make a guitar "noiseless", and that really reigned the markets for a while. There also was the trend of "humbucker tone in single coil package" pickups. It wasn't until relatively recently, the past ten years or so, that people have been reducing their rigs and going for a purer, less complicated sound. Rack effects went away (mostly), amps got smaller (mostly), floorboards were simpler (mostly), which allowed for real single coils to flourish more. Personally I like that direction for gear. I like the almost hi-fi-ish sounds you can get with old amps with few controls and so forth. I can live without flange and gates if a note has that pure 3D feel.

Sounds like you may have found a good market niche. Go for it!

[peskywinnets]

Thanks for your thoughts.

Sounds like you may have found a good market niche. Go for it!

Bearing in mind this is a pickup makers forum, if I'd being trying to identify a niche, this wouldn't be my first port of call - I can hear the winder motors of the world whirring as I type!

[jason lollar]

I make three different types as stock items and have for years- I make 12 inch long ones for experimental musical instruments and they keep a stock of a couple different sizes so they are made.
i always thought they made those rack effects boxes for single coils because they sound like crap with humbuckers!@ Too much gain and you loose all the definition but I tried playing with effects to get more of a robben ford tone but no matter how hard i tried I never liked it as much as plugging straight in to a vintage fender amp

[FunkyKikuchiyo]

People who got onto the band wagon early for lace products and EMG were often giant rack people, perhaps those clarity issues were at hand, too?

Can you tell us about the experimental musical instruments, or would you have to kill us afterward?

[peskywinnets]

So they're out there then - Jason, it might be worth establishing how to get your single blade pictures up into the first couple of pages of Google images (that's how a lot - like me - tend to google for rarer stuff, as I get a thumbnail on all the 'hit' links first!)

[David Schwab]

The Bill Lawrence L-250 single blade pickups are humbuckers. I think the reason why most blades were some kind of hum canceling pickup was just that traditional type of players wouldn't want the blades, and the modern players don't want hum.

But blades have nothing to do with rack units and the like. You can make a blade pickup sound just like a vintage pickup. I'm disappointed by many of the small humbuckers in Strat size cases because they make them sound too much like a cartoon version of the large humbucker. Too dark and wooly. I'd rather they sound like single coils.

[Rick Turner]

Um...errr....has nobody here seen or heard of a "Charlie Christian" pickup? Single coil, blade, 1936? Specs even more all over the map than PAFs...

[peskywinnets]

Um...errr....has nobody here seen or heard of a "Charlie Christian" pickup? Single coil, blade, 1936? Specs even more all over the map than PAFs...

Has he a website?!

Perhaps you misunderstood the point of the initial post .... such a pickup type may well go back to a time before light bulbs, but there ain't many folks selling such a variant in 2011 ...I think David hit the nail on the head, the traditionalists want strat type single coils, the modernists want humbucking single coils.

No further questions m'lud.

[Rick Turner]

Seymour Duncan and Jason Lollar both make variants on the Charlie Christian pickup.

Gibson did a fairly authentic reissue...down to the cobalt steel magnets...a few decades back.

I wonder if there's a tone difference with those magnets? :-)

[Mark Hammer]

Lindy Fralin currently has a side-by-side, or rather, end-to-end, dual coil blade pickup. It is similar to the old Evans Eiminator pickups, but uses a blade instead of polepieces.

Insomuch as it is a dual-coil, it does not meet peskywinnets' criteria. On the other hand, it is not intended to sense between blades, the way a "dual rails" type would, so I think it sort of meets his criteria.

General question: Do all blade types use a separate magnet, or do some actually use a charged blade without any additional magnet?

[FunkyKikuchiyo]

General question: Do all blade types use a separate magnet, or do some actually use a charged blade without any additional magnet?

I think this came up in the thread a while ago and the answer was "no", but some folks here were going to try to wind directly onto a magnet to see what they could get. If I had scads of alnico lying around, I'm sure I would have tried it by now myself. I'm not sure that I ever saw the results.

Blades can sound amazing, but are also really easy to eff up. I hope some more people post to this! This is fun.

[Rick Turner]

What's the difference between a charged blade and a magnet? Other than that if it's steel, it won't hold the charge for very long...

I wind pickups directly on ceramic magnets. Are they blades?

[jason lollar]

yes there are old single coil pickups that use an alnico bar magnet for the blade- gibson melody maker, lipsticks and there is a P-13 variation- firebird and thunderbird pickups are humbuckers that use alnico magnets for the blade/pole. Dave stephens makes a blade single- vintage vibe makes one
The experimental musical instrument pickups are for just that- a blade so pole spacing isnt an issue and you can use them on pianos and various oddities people build, I have outfitted entire pianos with them. I call them knuckle busters - ever tried winding a 12 or 16 inch long pickup by hand guiding? I have seen photos of seymour doing even larger ones They can bust your knuckels for sure, i had to make an oversize winder for them. the guy that runs that place EMI (Bart Hopkin) use to publish a quarterly magazine full of really interesting stuff- fire organs, bamboo saxophones, pipes for organs that simulate human speech- electronic stuff. Excellent stuff
I did a job for one of paul allens yachts years ago where i made a bunch of blade pickups for a clock he had that used big cables as the chimes and these pickups would trigger a synth so they could program it to sound like anything mixed in with the tone of the cables in many variations.

[peskywinnets]

With a tradtional strat single coil, I was quite surprised at the amount of signal fade when string bending (even at the bridge end) - this is as observed with a sustainer. (that said, a sustainer's AGC - when enabled - can address this).. by this I mean, with the signal in the its normal position, I adjust the sustainer for good sustain - but when I bend the string, the sustainer no longer has a hot enough signal to keep the string sustaining - I'd have thought the 'dead space' between the pickup poles would be the sum of the magnetic field of the adjacent pole pieces (and therefore reasonably close in overall strength to that of the field above a pole piece, but nope my assumption was wrong. I guess our ears don't hone in on this as much