Rick's 38ga 1000wind bucker challenge

[JGundry]

If my assumptions are correct about low impedance pickups then the lower dynamic range cannot help but effectively lower the resolution of any apparent tonal results you get from something like a magnet change. You can up the amplitude with a preamp but you still have this same basic problem. So I guess my basic point is changes in inductance may be less noticeable with a low impedance pickup simply because you are dealing with a lower dynamic range from the get go. I'm just wondering if a low impedance pickup is a good test bed for hearing audible differences between magnets? Then again my assumptions could be completely wrong.

[Rick Turner]

Jon, I fail to see how you'd come to that conclusion. You're once again missing the point. This is about the harmonic content of the pickup signal in an undistorted context. It's about the interaction of the strings and the magnetic field as intercepted by the coil.

I think you may be too hung up in winding specs to see past wire and turns in this context.

[salvarsan]

re: dynamic range

I'm wondering what that means in the context of a guitar pickup.

Roughly, it is the maximum signal energy divided by the noise floor energy.

Considering resistive noise (Johnson-Nyquist) is fairly useless since
it is insignificant compared to EMI in the audio range.

5000 winds (= PAF) are a better EMI antenna than are 1000 winds.

While the 1000 wind coils have 1/5th the voltage output of PAF's,
their EMI noise sensitivity is lower in the audio band, if only because
it is spread over greater bandwidth.

Since the EMI is minimized in a hum-cancelling design, the chore becomes
one of equalizing the average outputs of the different pickups.

If the average output amplitude differences between the 1k and PAF pickups
are minimized, then other differences will manifest more clearly.

Practically speaking, what measurement best represents a pickup's average output?

[David King]

Practically speaking, what measurement best represents a pickup's average output?

Ear-bleed?

Seems like you would want to scope the signal and compare it to the output of a second pickup, perhaps a piezo saddle? You would need to correct the phase offset but that shouldn't be a problem at a fixed frequency.

You could put the second magnet sample armature equidistant from the other node i.e. the "nut"

Having pickups in two locations would cause problems if you didn't pluck the string at a uniform distance from your pickups to that they would receive identical harmonic content.

[JGundry]

Jon, I fail to see how you'd come to that conclusion. You're once again missing the point. This is about the harmonic content of the pickup signal in an undistorted context. It's about the interaction of the strings and the magnetic field as intercepted by the coil.

I think you may be too hung up in winding specs to see past wire and turns in this context.

Rick, actually I think you hit upon my point. My premise is the raw signal coming from a low impedance pickups gives a less complex harmonic content than a higher impedance pickup because the raw signal has a much lower amplitude. An on board preamp artificially raises the amplitude. In the transient state of a note being picked to full peak output of picked note to decay there is harmonic content in the output signal. There is just more pure resolution in the harmonic content that you can attribute to the magnetic circuit with a higher impedance pickup. So as a result this is a useful test for low impedance circuits but may not be meaningful for a high impedance pickup. Again I may be totally full of it.

[David Schwab]

I guess I'm confused as to how you are going to do a playing test with these. Is this going to be clean or distorted tones? I would assume clean which I think is pretty limiting in terms of an audio test of an electric pickup. I think a lot of tonal differences surface with distorted tones.

If you really want to hear the pickup, you have to listen to it clean. You can make almost anything sound good with distortion. As a case in point I have a cheap FirstAct guitar that had the muddiest pickups I have ever heard. Distorted it sounded nice, since the pickups were overly warm and had little high end. Clean, or with crunch tones it sounded like crap. But this seems to be the trend these days with PAF clones.

I had a customer recently bring me his 80s Les Paul for a setup and to install new pickups. The pickups that were in the guitar were hand wound "boutique" PAF clones. The customer said "these are ***** pickups, and are supposed to be the hot new pickup on the market." He hated them. I tried the guitar out, and I didn't like them either. They were dull and lifeless, with no highs or even mids. Very bland sounding. He replaced them with Duncan Alnico IIs (Slash model) and the guitar sounded great.

Now distorted the boutique pickups were OK sounding, but very generic. Clean is where the deficiencies showed up. The Duncans sounded great clean and distorted.

As far as this test... I used to make low impedance bass pickups that were very similar to these test pickups. I used ceramic magnets. I was also able to swap out the magnet for an Alnico 5 and later a neo. This was on a pickup with steel blades. I made recordings of the tests, which I'll try and dig up. I felt the alnico was too soft and mushy sounding, and the neo added a lot of edginess and texture to the top end. I've repeated the test with high impedance coils, and liked the neo best, since the coils are fuller sounding, and found the ceramic to be thinner sounding, and I still didn't like the Alnico. But then bass pickups are often brighter and more hi-fi than guitar pickups.

So I did hear pretty large differences in tone between the magnets in tests with a clean DI bass signal. This was my point in the other thread that while there are output level differences, there are larger tonal differences.

I can honestly say that I have no experience with low impedance pickups other than never playing one that I liked. But would I be correct that a low Z pickup has flat frequency response with a much lower Q? And that for this test to have enough resolution you have to have a big enough Q to get the same relative dynamic range out of the low z pickup as you would get with a higher impedance pickup. I may be full of shit though so let me know if I'm wrong about the Q. Maybe I should be putting this in terms of output signal amplitude an not Q?

What low Z pickups have you played? I'm curious because I cant even think of any on the market, not for guitar anyway. Les Paul Recording guitar? Alembic?

Low Z pickups are higher in resolution because they have a wider frequency response. They often don't sound as bright because the resonant peak is very high; often above the area where human hearing is most sensitive. The more wire you wind on a pickup, the more it behaves like a band pass filter, reducing the low and high end.

A lot of people don't like playing on low Z pickups because you can hear every little thing your fingers are doing.

[JGundry]

David, it sounds like your low Z magnet test results are what I would have expected from a high z pickup. Although I never tried neo magnets in a pickup but all of the rest of the results are in line with what I would have expected from inductance variation between the magnets.

I have been frequenting Elderly Instruments in Lansing since I was a teen. I have played all sorts of custom and weird guitars they had through there. Very nice Brian May knock off's, Rick's Model 1 (which I liked). But for low impedance I have tried the Les Paul recording as well as the funky looking flying V Gibson made that I believe has low z pickups. There were a few of these at local shops in the 80's that had a tough time selling. A few shops in Grand Rapids used to get 2nd's and overstock guitars from the Kalamazoo plant.

I think any pickup test has to be done clean and on the edge of distortion. Frankly I think many pickups fall apart when pushed to the edge of distortion. Right at the edge of distortion where more pick attack brings on distortion and a lighter touch gives subtle dynamic cleans is the sweet spot for test a electric guitar pickup IMHO.

BTW I think Salvarsan understands what I am getting at.

[Steve Conner]

Right at the edge of distortion where more pick attack brings on distortion and a lighter touch gives subtle dynamic cleans is the sweet spot for test a electric guitar pickup IMHO.

No, that's the sweet spot for testing the amp, and how it reacts to the pickup. You'll attribute tonal differences to the pickup that are actually caused by the amp, which makes your life unnecessarily complicated. (Not to mention that you don't know how what you hear will translate to other players using different amps.)

Salvarsan: I think it's interesting that Rodenstock's fake wines tasted better than the real thing. Kind of like PAF clones, then.

[Rick Turner]

I'm with Steve on this.

How can "pickups fall apart when pushed to distortion"? That's completely bass ackwards. It's a pickup-centric view of the universe that is positively medieval. Pickups are the source of the signal, not the part of the signal chain noted for distortion. (BTW, I'm not going to say that pickups do not distort...I'm sure they do in the most basic sense of not necessarily delivering exactly what the strings are doing). If you want to know the details inherent in the source, you have to be able to listen and measure as free of other issues as possible. It is the anomalies of the pickup response in both frequency/harmonic content and phase response that determine what that pickup signal will do to subsequent stages of the amplification chain. Pickups are just one part of the whole strings to sound equation, and if you want to understand pickups, you need to have the rest of the signal chain be as neutral as possible. I'm not talking about what we want to hear, either. I'm talking about understanding as exactly as possible what these subtle changes in pickup construction actually do. I don't think we can have very good control over designing a new generation of pickups...whether they be for clean or distorted sounds...until we know if and/or how some of the observed changes...for instance with magnets...affect the pure signal.

[Joe Gwinn]

How can "pickups fall apart when pushed to distortion"? That's completely bass ackwards. It's a pickup-centric view of the universe that is positively medieval. Pickups are the source of the signal, not the part of the signal chain noted for distortion. (BTW, I'm not going to say that pickups do not distort...I'm sure they do in the most basic sense of not necessarily delivering exactly what the strings are doing).

Yes. I have driven pickups hard enough (with a coupling coil) that there was [up to] 70 volts [peak-to-peak] across the output, and measured negligible distortion. The details are in an old posting, perhaps on the old AMPGE site. [It is on the AMPGE site, in November 2005.]

So if there is audible distortion, it's the amp.

[StarryNight]

... it's about magnets and whether we can hear the difference among various magnet types independently of the limitations of high impedance coils. .

No one has made reference to the gauss maximum charge for each of the different magnets. Are we assuming the gauss readings will be the same between magnets? and if so, does under-charging a magnet change the overall timbre of a pickup (and not just the amplitude)?

[Rick Turner]

We're making no assumptions at all re. gauss strength. Of course there will be different gauss levels, and we're trying to determine whether that alone makes the difference in tone, whether it's just the differences in inductance, or whether there is something else going on that has not yet been adequately explained. We're trying to compensate for varying output by "normalizing" through a good preamp and then see if we can hear and measure tonal differences.

One difference we know will happen with high gauss pickups a given distance from the strings is "Stratitis", but what other changes happen?

[salvarsan]

No, that's the sweet spot for testing the amp, and how it reacts to the pickup. You'll attribute tonal differences to the pickup that are actually caused by the amp, which makes your life unnecessarily complicated. (Not to mention that you don't know how what you hear will translate to other players using different amps.)

Don't waste time quibbling over a small rhetorical point.

Jon, as you well know, was referring to the ease with which a pickup may control the amplifier's major distortion onset. Guitarists have called it "touch sensitivity" in some instances. Quantifying it is a can of worms since it varies with the guitarist's right hand technique, the guitar, and the amplification chain.

Salvarsan: I think it's interesting that Rodenstock's fake wines tasted better than the real thing. Kind of like PAF clones, then.

I like that modern PAF clones are so consistently well-made
and usually sound better than the originals.

A few hundred artificially-aged PAF clones would destroy the antique PAF market.

The builders could rest confidently, knowing that the fraud would go undetected because people who pay $thou$and$+ for ostensibly genuine PAF's will seldom play them in a guitar, and if they do, they'll have no idea what they're hearing.

I do NOT advocate this, but the inflated PAF prices assure that it is already happening.

[StarryNight]

We're making no assumptions at all re. gauss strength. Of course there will be different gauss levels, and we're trying to determine whether that alone makes the difference in tone, whether it's just the differences in inductance, or whether there is something else going on that has not yet been adequately explained. We're trying to compensate for varying output by "normalizing" through a good preamp and then see if we can hear and measure tonal differences.

One difference we know will happen with high gauss pickups a given distance from the strings is "Stratitis", but what other changes happen?

perhaps using the same magnet at different gauss levels and levelling the amplitude with the preamp will eliminate some of the variables. If there are no perceived changes in timbre then we can move onto different magnets and instead of adjusting each magnet's gauss level, have them fully charged and adjust amplitude with the preamp as before.

[JGundry]

I'm with Steve on this.

How can "pickups fall apart when pushed to distortion"? That's completely bass ackwards. It's a pickup-centric view of the universe that is positively medieval. Pickups are the source of the signal, not the part of the signal chain noted for distortion. (BTW, I'm not going to say that pickups do not distort...I'm sure they do in the most basic sense of not necessarily delivering exactly what the strings are doing). If you want to know the details inherent in the source, you have to be able to listen and measure as free of other issues as possible. It is the anomalies of the pickup response in both frequency/harmonic content and phase response that determine what that pickup signal will do to subsequent stages of the amplification chain. Pickups are just one part of the whole strings to sound equation, and if you want to understand pickups, you need to have the rest of the signal chain be as neutral as possible. I'm not talking about what we want to hear, either. I'm talking about understanding as exactly as possible what these subtle changes in pickup construction actually do. I don't think we can have very good control over designing a new generation of pickups...whether they be for clean or distorted sounds...until we know if and/or how some of the observed changes...for instance with magnets...affect the pure signal.

I think you are knit picking my description as if it were an epic novel. I'm flattered but really, little ol' me, medieval and pickup-centric, blush. It is like debating the William F. Buckley Jr. of Rock and Royalty, invented words and all. Not that I mind though.

I will try and clarify. If you want to judge the straight pickup and nothing else go to a studio and play it clean through the board with a flat EQ. However musicians do not generally play this way unless they are making a Windham Hills record. I test through a variety of amps both clean and dirty. For me the most useful test is on the edge of distortion when you can get both clean and dirty tones. I'm not testing amps, I'm testing pickups just like other musicians do, with an amp. Personally I find only listening to clean tones of little use just as I would find only listening to dirty tones of little use. I listen to them all but real world application is all that matters in the end. The challenge is to come up with a new application in the real world or decoding a successful application that was abandoned. Both challenges can be fun but it is all too easy for them to fall into data mining sessions if you are not careful. Not that this is one of those instances though.