Pickups- physics or cooking?

[fieldwrangler]

This is a good way to focus your query, fer Shure.

I don't know what level of science was used in various designs. And the FEMM stuff I've seen seems to embody a pretty broad brush...

However, I think that the original Lace sensors show a more "scientific" approach than most. And just because a lotta folks didn't seem to like them for various reasons (although I think Clapton is a notable exception) that doesn't mean that others with esthetic, tactile & aural discrimination that more closely agree with The Broader Affinity couldn't tweak the design to achieve the exemplary product you specify.

Bob Palmieri

[kg]

i don't know if we have consensus on what a "good pickup" sounds like in the first place.

in the case of an acoustic guitar, one MIGHT say that a metric for performance would be how much the pickup sounds like the unamplified guitar, when run through a "blameless" amp and loudspeaker. but the goal of an acoustic pickup is--999 times out of thousand--transparency.

in contrast, what does a solidbody electric sound like, unamped? does it even matter?

as usual we're getting into the old realm of sound reinforcement vs. sound synthesis...

[Mike Sulzer]

Alright... here goes another try.

In my main day gig teaching jazz in college we have a considerable amount of dogma regarding ways of putting pitches together that are supposed to sound good.

Like all such distilled generalizations, they depend on limiting a number of variables found in messy real-world situations.

When a student comes up with some application of these principles that appears to contradict their veracity, I usually say "Great! Now let's see if we can generalize some aspect of this specific context that might give future aspirants some new principles to use for guidance."

So, I've never been able to clearly see any necessary mutually exclusivity between all this Art & Science business; one can and does indeed advance the other.

Bob Palmieri

I think the pitch rules are part of the art, not the science. Why? Two Reasons:
1. They are a useful but delightfully imperfect guide to how human perception of sound works, something that is intriguing, but not well known.
2. They keep changing as musicians experiment and audiences react. I see two major drivers of change:
a. changes in society
b. changes in technology.
Both of those operate all of the time, but for some creative advances one can dominate over the other. An example of the first is bebop. Same instruments, but new music.
An example of the second is distortion in electric guitars, and other instruments to some extent. The excessive intermod distortion led to the neither minor nor major power chords, and then to new ways of using the tones that remained.

Science to me means using the complete and unchanging laws that describe the technology in question in the design process. A trivial example is using inductance, capacitance, resistance, and certain magnetic properties, rather than number of turns, shape of the coil, etc.

[FunkyKikuchiyo]

If we're going to talk about the method of pickup making, we really need to decide what the goal of pickup making is. How can we best decide how to get somewhere if we don't know where we're going?

What is a "perfect pickup"? No need to pick an existing one, just imagine it. Is it the most efficient pickup with the fewest losses? Is it the one with the most bass and treble response? Is it the loudest pickup? It isn't any of those. Once you get something to market, people decide for very ambiguous terms "I like it!" or, "I don't like it!". If you're lucky, you'll get more descriptive, albeit still unscientific descriptors - warm, bright, jangly, hollow, thick, ice pick... Science, fully mastered, will let you have complete control of all of the pickup making elements. It won't make you make "perfect pickups" because there is no metric for that. Enter art.

[jmaf]

Hmm, so once again, no matter how deep you think your insight is, Frank Zappa has been there already.

The original quote is something like "If you were never a communist up to XX years old, you don't have a heart. If you are a communist after you're XX years old, you don't have a brain." and I've never been able to find the original source but I've heard Vladimir Putin use it in a interview.

Sdrawkcab Appaz Knarf is the first person I know to have adapted it to science vs. art I believe.

[salvarsan]

The original quote is something like "If you were never a communist up to XX years old, you don't have a heart. If you are a communist after you're XX years old, you don't have a brain." and I've never been able to find the original source but I've heard Vladimir Putin use it in a interview.

Sdrawkcab Appaz Knarf is the first person I know to have adapted it to science vs. art I believe.

I believe Zappa was recycling Voltaire's epigram on radical vs. conservative outlooks.

...and why write Zappa's name backwards?
Afraid that Adelaide Gail Sloatman will come after you?

[jmaf]

Is it backwards? I see it normally from down here(I am under the Equator).

But seriously, today I learned she actually patented FZ's moustache. Gail Zappa - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[fieldwrangler]

I think the pitch rules are part of the art, not the science. Why? Two Reasons:
1. They are a useful but delightfully imperfect guide to how human perception of sound works, something that is intriguing, but not well known.
2. They keep changing as musicians experiment and audiences react. I see two major drivers of change:
a. changes in society
b. changes in technology.
Both of those operate all of the time, but for some creative advances one can dominate over the other. An example of the first is bebop. Same instruments, but new music.
An example of the second is distortion in electric guitars, and other instruments to some extent. The excessive intermod distortion led to the neither minor nor major power chords, and then to new ways of using the tones that remained.

Science to me means using the complete and unchanging laws that describe the technology in question in the design process. A trivial example is using inductance, capacitance, resistance, and certain magnetic properties, rather than number of turns, shape of the coil, etc.

Mike -

Another good clarification. I'm not putting these "pitch rules" in quite the same scientific category, but the ways in which students can react against them or work with them to generate new conjectures about possibly useful principles is quite analogous.

However, the version of pitchset visualization and consonant vertical harmony I spew does, in fact, resemble something much more "scientific" than the usual "chord/scale/mode" business. I can't begin to get into the specifics here, but this leads me to something else interesting you've brought up.

My strong feeling about this stuff is that the whole business of what pitch (actually interval) relationships get treated in certain ways has much potential to shed light on this intriguing human perception of sound you refer to, and on parts of the ear/nerve/brain system. In fact, this whole collection of metaphors we use for pitches and chords is basically an obfuscatory mess.

But really, at the moment we mostly use these principles to find promising areas for fishing for the appropriate notes; the final determination is still a subjective matter.

Bob Palmieri

[fieldwrangler]

If we're going to talk about the method of pickup making, we really need to decide what the goal of pickup making is. How can we best decide how to get somewhere if we don't know where we're going?

What is a "perfect pickup"? No need to pick an existing one, just imagine it. Is it the most efficient pickup with the fewest losses? Is it the one with the most bass and treble response? Is it the loudest pickup? It isn't any of those. Once you get something to market, people decide for very ambiguous terms "I like it!" or, "I don't like it!". If you're lucky, you'll get more descriptive, albeit still unscientific descriptors - warm, bright, jangly, hollow, thick, ice pick... Science, fully mastered, will let you have complete control of all of the pickup making elements. It won't make you make "perfect pickups" because there is no metric for that. Enter art.

At the moment I'm of the "First do no harm" school of thought. So, no hum or string pull and very good string balance are big parameters for me.

Bob Palmieri

[FunkyKikuchiyo]

At the moment I'm of the "First do no harm" school of thought. So, no hum or string pull and very good string balance are big parameters for me.

Bob Palmieri

Yeah, that's true. I'm in the same school of thought - my current design (hopefully going to market soon) is almost entirely based on those principles.

[salvarsan]

At the moment I'm of the "First do no harm" school of thought. So, no hum or string pull and very good string balance are big parameters for me.

Maybe I lack soul, but that sounds like a "Don't f*ck it up" credo to me.

Put in context, I believe that Science is a tool you use in pursuit of your Art
(or maybe just to pay off your kids' dental bills).

Some people like to improve the tools and others like to use them to purpose.

There is plenty of room for both flavors.

Make mine mango-papaya gelati with a choco-vanilla ice cream twist, please.

[fieldwrangler]

that sounds like a "Don't f*ck it up" credo to me.

A notorious guiding principle behind the "California cuisine" movement of a coupla decades ago, as preached & practiced by Alice Waters & others.

For me, it's a good starting point.

Bob Palmieri

[David Schwab]

Is it backwards? I see it normally from down here(I am under the Equator).

That would be upside-down, not backwards.

[jmaf]

That would be upside-down, not backwards.

I wondered if someone would comment on that from the moment I posted. You're absolutely right. My Frank Zappa prank has been fully dismantled.

[RedHouse]

...can the theory and the practice of pickup making coexist or even benefit from each other? They seem more or less disconnected at present.

Yes.

...arrived at through years of experimentation...

Most things are actually developed that way. Modeling and math only gets us close, then the "real world" steps up to enlighten us.

So, on the one hand there are people like Joe Gwinn, Mike Sulzer and me, who feel that actually cooking and eating food is beneath us: you should be able to look at the list of ingredients and calculate how it's going to taste.
...

Remember that pint we had at Louders in Glasgow last December? IIRC you had a Tennant's while I had a Stella, well think about it, they both share nearly the same ingredient list, both are "created" with nearly the same physics, but in the end it's the list of minor differences that make them taste different, same with everything in the world really. There are a LOT of shades of gray between black and white.


IMHO, it's best to let the sound be that "last word" on pickups, amps, effects etc. When we find what we like it's great intellectual amusement to anylize it all and see if we see relativity and patterns, but in the end, whatever sounds right ...is right ...end of story. (for me anyway)