Pickups- physics or cooking?

[David Schwab]

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.

But, that's only if you have experience eating those ingredients, and prepared in the same manner, since cooking food changes the flavor. Then there are combinations that mask the ingredients. Who would think there are cloves in Coke or citrus in Pepsi?

My wife makes candied yams that are out of this world, and I couldn't put my finger on some flavor in them. It was her secret ingredient. She finally told me, and needless to say I was surprised, since even after hearing it, I couldn't taste it. But it did something to the combination that was very good. It's true of pickups too. I've done things either by accident, or just on a hunch, and got something I wasn't expecting.

"Real" cooks don't need to follow recipes, they can improvise, because they have experience. So as with cooking it is with pickups; once you get used to making a few variations, you can tell what needs to be changed to get to where you want it. It's just like anything creative. There is science behind it, but you don't always need to know that to be successful.

For me, I count turns, and take DC resistance readings after the coil is wound to make sure it's good, and that's it. I'd like to know what the inductance is, out of curiosity, but I don't, and it hasn't prevented me from getting the tones I want. I'm sure if I had an Extech meter I'd use it for a few days, and then it would end up on the shelf with my Gauss meter. I only use that when examining existing pickups, or when prototyping new designs. They are handy tools, but as with a hammer, you don't always need it.

[Joe Gwinn]

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.

It isn't quite that bad, actually. Helmholtz worked the scientific basis out in the 1880s. One does not hear of this in music theory courses.

I got interested because my wife was taking Music Theory, and so I looked at her books. It's one rule after another. All rhyme but no reason.

So I started digging, and soon came to the Computer Music world, on the theory that they must have some idea, or computer music wouldn't be possible. This lead me to "On the Sensations of Tone", Hermann Helmholtz, 2nd edition, 1885, now available from Dover.

On the Sensations of Tone

Amazon.com: On the Sensations of Tone (9780486607535): Hermann Helmholtz: Books It's cheaper from Amazon.

Hermann von Helmholtz - Wikipedia

[Possum]

I'll make a comment here. You need both science and hands-on mechanics. You can't design a good sounding pickup on paper or in software exclusively. The reason most vintage pickups sound good is because that technologies of the time were CRUDE. Crudely made materials sound more "musical" than their modern high tech, efficiently made counterparts. Without a basic knowledge of the physics that go into guitar pickups, its just a hit or miss design method. Luckily most are using the Extech LCR meter now, so that gives a means of communicating in a common language.

But there IS real MAGIC in these things we use. We use magnetism, we use electricity, no one truly knows WHAT either actually IS. Much of what is accepted knowledge in both is just plain wrong. I've been reading the work of Roy Davis and Walter Rawls on effects of magnetism on living matter. They proved that south pole energy and north pole energy are radically different energies, work that was replicated by thousands of scientists and backyard experimenters, yet even now mainstream science chokes on their work and refuses to look at it.

Most everyone thinks a common bar magnet has the flux going from one pole to the other as seen with iron filings, yet Davis proved this wrong, later NASA confirmed this but then for some reason reversed their stand. In actual fact the flux arcs from one pole to the middle of the magnet, which is called the Bloch Wall (where our gaussmeters show zero gauss), then arcs back up to the other pole. Not only that, flux lines from the North pole spins counterclockwise, goes to the Bloch Wall, then reverses spin back up to the South pole. You don't see this with magnetizeable filings etc. because the filings are magnetized and become small magnets so they don't show a true picture of whats going on. Davis used some substance I forget what it was now, that shows this in real time. In the Bloch Wall where the spins switch there is a figure 8 formation that happens. The spins are seen in magnetic "tubes" and they demonstrated this using a color CRT tube, and in the tubes there are curious triangle formations they never could explain.

South pole energies aren't generally good for living matter, it will cause cancer cells to increase, tumors to grow more rapidly etc. North pole energies do the reverse, it stops cancer cells from growing and tumors to shrink. Of course you won't hear this from the FDA or the pharmaceutical Mafia guys ;-) Why this should be of concern is that almost all headphones have South pole facing magnets into the ear. Davis designated magnet pole differently than pickup makers or most do, the North pole of a compass is in itself a South pole magnet and seeks North. So he would say a compass's North pole indicator would point to a North magnetic pole, while our gaussmeters read this as a South pole. Davis's work was fairly well known in the 50's and it makes me wonder that Leo Fender's decision to switch from North pole charged single coils to South (actually to North according to Davis), might have been enfluenced by those books. It'd be better to have your hands exposed for long hours to N pole energies than irritating S pole energy. Rare people who can see energies, in some early experiments back in the 1800's I think (can't remember offhand who the researcher was), saw each pole as having red and blue colored "light."

Anway, this stuff is fascinating to me and shows us that we really don't truly know what these energies are, we have a pretty good mechanistic working method to harness the energies but there's way more to the story than we've figured out yet. As pickup makers we KNOW how complex coils are, there's really no data on coils and audio frequencies in guitar pickup uses, some of it makes sense but some of it defies explanation; you try to find something that sounds good and stick with it. Vary from that formula in one direction or the other and logic goes out the window more often that not.

You want to make good sounding pickups, the only way there is make thousands of them, and some things start to make sense, learning the physics end of it is very important, and thats also where the magic is, if there wasn't I probably would have quit making pickups five years ago, there's just no end of things one learns doing this stuff every day, no end of experiments to dream up. Total fascination for me....shit I better get back to work, this was supposed to be a short post, DUH!!!!

[Steve Conner]

Davis and Rawls' theories sound like cooking all right, meth cooking.

Crudely made materials sound more "musical" than their modern high tech, efficiently made counterparts.

This is the kind of Rousseauian romantic generalization that probably makes Mike and Salvarsan want to go postal and kill us all. And yet the Lace Sensors still sound like crap.

I think it is born of the Darwin's dumpster fallacy. Back in the so-called golden age, all musical instrument materials were crudely made, and most instruments very probably sounded like crap. But only the very best sounding ones stood the test of time, the rest were landfilled. So we find ourselves in the odd position of using the latest high-tech materials and methods to analyse and replicate a very particular kind of crudeness.

[David Schwab]

Davis and Rawls' theories sound like cooking all right, meth cooking.

And yet the Lace Sensors still sound like crap.

The blue ones sound good in the neck position. I have a silver one someone gave me in the neck position on my Charvel, and that sounds good as well. They are too thin sounding anywhere else though. They are very quiet for single coils.

I think it is born of the Darwin's dumpster fallacy. Back in the so-called golden age, all musical instrument materials were crudely made, and most instruments very probably sounded like crap. But only the very best sounding ones stood the test of time, the rest were landfilled. So we find ourselves in the odd position of using the latest high-tech materials and methods to analyse and replicate a very particular kind of crudeness.

It reminds me of all the fascination with "vintage" gear. A lot of the stuff was crap, especially when it came to bass amps. Younger players think the bass players wanted to sound like farts...

One thing about older instruments though, at least american ones, was since things were cheaper back then they had a little more time to do things, like binding. You look at Gibson these days, and they make it seem like not putting binding, or buffing out a guitar is a feature! Also companies didn't source the cheapest pickups and stuff.

At the same time, cheap Asian instruments are better then they used to be when I started paying. You can get a pretty decent guitar for $100.

[Mike Sulzer]

The magnetic force is between charges in relative motion. The magnetic field was invented to provide a convenient way to state the effect of the motion of many charges on a single charge. Its significance in physics has grown beyond that. But it has not taken on a life of its own and morphed into something that contradicts its original properties.

Humans have a tendency to project the properties, especially the limitations, of their perception onto the external world. We see that at work here.

[Mike Sulzer]

It isn't quite that bad, actually. Helmholtz worked the scientific basis out in the 1880s. One does not hear of this in music theory courses.

I got interested because my wife was taking Music Theory, and so I looked at her books. It's one rule after another. All rhyme but no reason.

So I started digging, and soon came to the Computer Music world, on the theory that they must have some idea, or computer music wouldn't be possible. This lead me to "On the Sensations of Tone", Hermann Helmholtz, 2nd edition, 1885, now available from Dover.

On the Sensations of Tone

Amazon.com: On the Sensations of Tone (9780486607535): Hermann Helmholtz: Books It's cheaper from Amazon.

Hermann von Helmholtz - Wikipedia

I am reminded of Freud. Starting from scratch and working with a tiny subset of highly neurotic people in a particular European subculture, he set out to explain the workings of the human mind.

OK, so I exaggerate a little bit.

[frankfalbo]

As long as we're bringing Freud into this, this sketch is not only a must-watch but illustrates the point a little. You can use decades of psychiatric, psychological, and basic scientific research upon which to base your techniques, or you can follow the technique below:

YouTube - Bob Newhart-Stop It

Its a stretch, but some parallels might be that sometimes the answers are pretty simple, right there in front of you but the scientist in can't see them because he's overthinking it or does not have a name for it. Inversely the straight-up cook takes too long to find them if he lacks some of that knowledge.

The "cook" takes action. If it's bad he makes another batch. If he's any good he knows why, and is only one or two tries away from his goal. He is a creative thinker. The science only folks have to go through quite a bit more analysis, often times because they do not posess the same creative thinking gene. I'm not saying they don't think creatively with the data they're working with, its just a different side of the coin. They seem to need a name and a explanation for everything, which can delay or stunt development of anything cool and useful for the artist. The reason I'll usually default to the side of the former is because in our industry we make tools for art and artists. If the end use for our product was nuclear fission or space exploration, you can bet I would be hiring the latter. But as iron sharpens iron, the coexistence of both usually produces the best results.

I have to admit though, its pretty funny when the cooks come up with something awesome and the scientists get so pissed about it because the cook can't tell you why in the correct terminology. Then the scientist is convinced the cook is an idiot who just got lucky. It's pretty much the same set of emotions that make you hate the people who got rich from some simple idea like the pet rock or beannie babies. When really they're flipping geniuses.

[Possum]

Davis and Rawls work was duplicated with the exact same results by thousands of legitimate scientists in many countries over 40 years. "Scientists" in our times, especially in the United States, have rigid views and stay away from things not in approved school textbooks, or they lose their grants, their funding, their jobs. Obviously you have not read their works. They pioneered and pretty much invented magnetic treatment of water that thousands of people in this country use to keep their plumbing from becoming clogged with mineral deposits. There is a video on YouTube by a company in Australia that makes magnetic water treatment systems for farmers. These systems cost about $10,000. They install these systems for FREE with the guarantee that if the farmer doesn't see any results he doesn't pay a dime and they remove the system. Magnetic treated water increases crop yield 30% and reduces water useage noticeably, and produces better produce. They've never had any farmer who tried the system not pay the final bill. Davis got the same results and was the first guy to figure this stuff out.

Here is a link to the true picture of a magnetic field using barium ferrite, the field goes from one pole to the Bloch Wall, then goes to the other pole. Physics guys already know about the spin, its been proven long ago.
http://www.magnetage.com/images/scan0013ab11.jpg

One of the reasons I don't post here much is this prevalent attitude of attack any idea you've never heard of, without knowing anything about the subject from the author's own works. One of my favorite quotes lately is "Every progressive spirit is opposed by a thousand men appointed to guard the past." I suggest you read Davis/Rawls work before you pass judgement, they never publicized any of their work until it was repeated with 100% same results by others.....

[Steve Conner]

Edit, aargg, I'm sorry for the harsh words, this stuff just makes me see red.

No, the Davis/Rawls stuff is utter new age drivel. The magnetic water descalers are a scam, just like the magnetic fuel line things that are supposed to improve your car's gas mileage. Show me a paper on it published in Nature and I'll eat my words, maybe.

Trying to understand guitar pickups with the classical laws of electromagnetism is hard and subtle enough without polluting your brain with quantum hippy bullsh*t. Earlier someone posted a 20 page document by some university professor that points to about 20 PhD's worth of research you could do on pickups.

[kg]

Magnetic water treatment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Steve Conner]

All I know is, if magnetic fields really did have biological effects, the magnetic field in a MRI machine would f*** you right up. You get 50,000 gauss from a superconducting magnet the size of a truck, and 30,000 watts of RF power.

Known biological effects of EM fields are things like:
Transcranial magnetic stimulation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_hearing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptoc...Magnetoception

[Mike Sulzer]

Possum, these things always start off with nonsense that a student in a high school lab could disprove. (Field lines do not run the the way scientists think they do!) Then they get so involved that no one figure out where the ideas come from. (South poles will kill you!) Then they turn into ways of taking your money. (Grow better cattle with magnetically treated water!) Then they start again in a slightly different place.


Has it occurred to you that when you are naive enough to fall for this stuff, it might reflect on your credibility concerning your products?

[Mike Sulzer]

"all science would be superfluous if the form of appearance of things directly coincided with their essence" - Karl Marx

That is one of the oddest statements I have seen in a while. Perhaps if the appearance of things included their potential interaction with other things (certainly necessary to make science unnecessary), it would no longer be possible to describe the world as containing things.

[Steve Conner]

I notice you said "oddest" and not "most invalid".

I understand it as follows: Science is about deriving theories (the essence of things) from experimental results (the form of appearance of things). If the two were the same, there would be nothing for science to do, and indeed the "thingness" of the world might break down as Buddhists have always wanted.