Pickups- physics or cooking?

[fieldwrangler]

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.

You've done a very good job of stating the situation; I'll go so far as saying that there ain't even much in the way of rhyme, and what rhyme there is has just led people to artificially force one pitchset system to resemble another.

Really, as far as I can tell, once upon a time people sang two notes at once and someone else quickly tried to construct some general rules about what made some notes sound good together (while often ignoring subtleties of context.) Then they gave names to things and taught these names to their students, who mistook them for principles. This has been continuing for centuries, with dozens of ifs, ands & buts and piles of new names being added without much in the way of tying them on to much simpler root tenets. Excavating through this pile of one bad metaphor upon another is quite a dig.

Bob Palmieri

[Steve Conner]

And what do you expect to find at the bottom of the pile?

[RedHouse]

...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...

Oh good, and all this time many were thinking it was because of that last round of turning every thread into a PAF debate and your personal research conclusions, geez man, now I feel bad for thinking that, sorry.

...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.

Consider the source.

While you're considering that, you are right on the money, many instruments sounded like crap, even the ones that are now held as holy-grail fodder. I recall ump-teen Gibsons with PAF and PAT's and T's that were just horrible.

Back then (in the USA anyway) there was no GC on every corner with 15 Les Pauls and 30 Strats hanging on the walls, there were very few music stores that stocked enough instruments so you could compare them and get one that sounded good/great. Many times you actually had to order a guitar and were compelled to accept it when it came in.

Getting a great sounding instrument was a crap shoot, you went into a few stores, looked at a few intruments and made your choice, usually based more on the wood (tone) and finish, than the pickups.

Most of those artists we name-drop all the time aquired their holy-grail instruments though individual parties who had "found" the ones that sounded great (ie; Allman, Page) it was a rare case when the under-the-bed aquisition was a decent sounding instrument (ie; Gibbons).

...It reminds me of all the fascination with "vintage" gear. A lot of the stuff was crap...

Bang on target David, case in point the infatuation with old EH effects (ie; Small Stone) back in the day, they sucked, noisy, cheap (built), 1-in-5 didn't work and you had to take them back in a few days. Back in the 70's one only bought a Small Stone if you couldn't afford an MXR Phase-90.

But now days, they tout the Small Stone as holy grail stuff, sheesh gimmie a break.

...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.

That is another absolute fact, if you wanted anyting for $100 or less you usually had to go to the pawn shop and get something like a Lyle or Mateo, or if you were very lucky you could score a pre-lawsuit Ibanez, but all of those played badly, super tall (un-dressed) frets, buzzing bridge's, and of course the obligatory scratchy asian pots and wonky pickup switches.

I picked up a Squire Strat for one of my nephews 6 or 7 years ago and was totally surprised at the value for money.

[Steve Conner]

Younger players think the bass players wanted to sound like farts...

Well, that's what I thought! I spent ages trying to get that vintage farty sound just right.

[RedHouse]

Well, that's what I thought! I spent ages trying to get that vintage farty sound just right.

You guy's talkin about that Jack Bruce / Cream type tone?

[Steve Conner]

I guess so, or Noel Redding on the Hendrix recordings, maybe even Geezer Butler.

Dave makes a distinction between "burpy" and "farty", though, I think burpy is supposed to be good.

[kg]

which end of the gastrointestinal tract is very important.

[FunkyKikuchiyo]

Why everyone takes their gloves off for silly debates around here I'll never figure out, especially when Possum chimes in; I'm not saying you have to agree with him, but I'd call him a top tier pickup maker these days, and has more information about pickups on hand than most "experts" out there.

On a different note, some of this magnetism stuff brings me back to middle school when a family member got caught up in all this magnets for health stuff. Realistically it was a pyramid scheme and everyone just rolls their eyes at it now, but there were some basic practical experiments that actually worked. It was about 98% snake oil, but those experiments worked. They usually involved someone doing a basic strength test (put your arm out and let someone push it down and see how well you resist) and doing a comparison with and without their overpriced magnet products. It totally felt like old timey hurdy girdy garbage, and I don't really buy into it, but it DID work and that is hard to deal with.

Regarding vintage stuff - people worked under entirely different paradigms in the 50s and 60s than they do now. When people are thinking of music, mass production, marketing and economics in entirely different ways 50-60 years later, it isn't absurd to think the guitars will be different. Then if you wanted an entry level guitar, you reduced the number of features, reduced labor by omitting carved tops, binding etc, and often ended up with very thick necks and light weight hardware. These days if you want a cheap guitar, it has the same number of features, but is made overseas of lesser materials, has a paper thin neck, and a super thick finish because these days that reduces production time rather than increases it. Leo Fender looked for ways to use stamps, dyes, and templates to mass produce instruments. Today we look for ways to use CNC automation. Nevermind comparing apples and oranges, we're comparing apples and penguins. It is entirely valid to talk about differences in eras of guitar design.

[fieldwrangler]

And what do you expect to find at the bottom of the pile?

I see a strong likelyhood of finding something revealing about the way our brains process auditory information.

[RedHouse]

I guess so, or Noel Redding on the Hendrix recordings, maybe even Geezer Butler.

Dave makes a distinction between "burpy" and "farty", though, I think burpy is supposed to be good.

Geezer is definately burpy, Jack is absolutely farty.

[Steve Conner]

Something that Helmholtz hadn't already discovered in 1880-something?

We know that the ear works along the lines of a spectrum analyzer with a bandwidth of a couple of percent, and that explains why the octave is divided up into about 10 intervals, although between the various world music systems, it ranges from roughly 5 to 24, 12 semitones of course being the Western standard.

Anything smaller than that isn't distinguishable as an interval, because both tones fall in the same bin, it just sounds like an out-of-tune beating.

We also know that the consonant intervals are pleasant because their partials and their intermodulation products are the same frequencies, or something along those lines. This also explains the exponential distribution of the pitches, and hence the importance of the octave.

But I have a hard time seeing how to get from there to Thelonious Monk or John Coltrane. It's not scientifically obvious why consonance has to be balanced by dissonance to make it sound like proper jazz.

We do know that church music only used the consonant intervals and never modulated, because every note had to be consonant with every previous one within the cathedral's reverberation time.

[David Schwab]

You guy's talkin about that Jack Bruce / Cream type tone?

No! That was a great tone. He wasn't trying to sound clean. I mean the fact that bass amps were underpowered and all. You got this awful flubby tone.

Geezer got his tone from the way he plucked the strings. Jack used a Versatone amplifier, cranked all the way up, to get that wonderful fuzz tone.

[salvarsan]

Geezer is definately burpy, Jack is absolutely farty.

There was a period when Bruce's EB-3 had a germanium diode in the signal path --
emphatically farty distortion, different from Noel Redding's Marshall distortion.

When the pickup is wound out to 20k and has a lot of moving steel above it,
a 0.4V excursion over the diode is no problem at all.

[fieldwrangler]

Something that Helmholtz hadn't already discovered in 1880-something?

In fact I'm planning on re-reading Helmholtz (not to mention Hanson & Hindemuth, just to stay within the H's) this summer.

We know that the ear works along the lines of a spectrum analyzer with a bandwidth of a couple of percent, and that explains why the octave is divided up into about 10 intervals, although between the various world music systems, it ranges from roughly 5 to 24, 12 semitones of course being the Western standard.

Anything smaller than that isn't distinguishable as an interval, because both tones fall in the same bin, it just sounds like an out-of-tune beating.

We also know that the consonant intervals are pleasant because their partials and their intermodulation products are the same frequencies, or something along those lines. This also explains the exponential distribution of the pitches, and hence the importance of the octave.

Nothing to negate here. However, tomorrow I might get a chance to point out some ways of looking at pitch relationships that are quite revealing but are obscured by looking at scales as a succession of half & whole steps

But I have a hard time seeing how to get from there to Thelonious Monk or John Coltrane. It's not scientifically obvious why consonance has to be balanced by dissonance to make it sound like proper jazz.

You said it. In fact, I'll pass along a very interesting fact about a book that 'Trane credited as being a major source of his harmonic vocabulary within the next 48 hours or so.

We do know that church music only used the consonant intervals and never modulated, because every note had to be consonant with every previous one within the cathedral's reverberation time.

A fine adaptation of tool for job, this.

Bob Palmieri

[David Schwab]

There was a period when Bruce's EB-3 had a germanium diode in the signal path --
emphatically farty distortion, different from Noel Redding's Marshall distortion.

When the pickup is wound out to 20k and has a lot of moving steel above it,
a 0.4V excursion over the diode is no problem at all.

Yes, that was the Felix Pappalardi mod. He was another great player with a fuzzy tone. My first big bass amp was a Peavey Series 400, aka, "the Bass", which I bought specifically because it had this great over drive circuit that did a perfect Bruce/Pappalardi tone.