Interesting Pickup Design from Fishman

[David Schwab]

They are using PCBs for the coils, stacked up:



Unwound: Fishman Rethinks the Electric Guitar Pickup | Premier Guitar

[Mark Hammer]

Very interesting concept, and certainly one that was unproduceable a decade ago. It is hard to separate the explanation from the ad copy in the article, but I'd certainly be interested to try one out. Wonder if the layers could be produced in a fashion to create "scatter", or whether that would even change anything.

Would these be "better"? Hard to say. But, like Alumitones, or Neovins, or any of the assorted attempts to produce a nominal "single coil" with hum-rejecting abilities, they don't have to be better. All they need to do is produce something musically useful in dependable and usable fashion.

[LtKojak]

I hope Frank Falbo will share at least the skinny on these with us... for what I understand, he's been involved in the development.

Frank, are you there?

I'm not asking you to spill the beans, mind you; but just a hint will go a long way!

[David King]

They look pretty (and distinctive) and that's probably all they need to sell well.

[John_H]

It all boils down to another active pickup system. Interesting, but not exciting.

[bbsailor]

They are using PCBs for the coils, stacked up:



Unwound: Fishman Rethinks the Electric Guitar Pickup | Premier Guitar

If you do a little reverse engineering you could deduce the way this thing could work. If a passive SC stacked humbucker pickup has 8000 turns per coil and the active amplifier provided a gain of 10 times, the same active pickup would need only 800 turns. The pickup is made of individual layers of circuit board coils, each layer of a maximum of 48 layers should have about 16 turns per layer. The amount of connection points above the Fishman name is 24 contacts to pair up with 24 above plus a few more for start and end leads. Now, the continuity and connectivity of each layer needs to be maintained to have a fully operational 48 layer coil.

If a high impedance pickup has a 250K ohm impedance at resonance then a coil with one tenth the turns will have one hundreth the impedance or 2.5K ohms. To feed this into a bridging impedance of 10X the source impedance or 25K ohms the resonance of the same number of coil stacks can be very accurately replicated and manipulated by adding a fixed capacitane to shift the resonant point to replicate famous pickup types. Add active buffering and the length of the connecting cable between the guitar and the amp is no longer a tone altering point of variability. With the easy ability of making both the upper coil and the lower coil have the same exact number of coil layer stacks, humbucking symmetry is assured.

Once a pickup is designed to be relatively flat through the upper mid range (5Khz to 6Khz), active midrange shifts, boosts and cuts can replicate almost any passive pickup. One needs to keep a few extra 9V batteries on hand or have access to recharagable batteries and time to recharge.

This looks like an interesting and highly replicatable Fishman design that can sound like the best of what we collectively think and agree is a good guitar pickup sound.

Joseph Rogowski

[Jim Darr]

It all comes down to how they sound! Very interesting application and design. Has anybody heard them or tried them?...If so, how do they sound? I look forward to some first hand reports and reading the article in PG tonight.

[charrich56]

The stacked circuit board pickup coil looks great from a tech-geeky point of view, and it is probably Mil-spec level on durability (great for long-term interplanetary expeditions, playing guitar on Mt. Everest or underwater, etc.) but it probably will be priced like a Department of Defense toilet seat. It's the "MIT Ph.D." approach.

I have to admit a slight envy for Larry Fishman being able to hire top engineering and manufacturing talent and spend a mill or three in development, as opposed to a little guy in a garage like some of us probably are, but his market is going to be limited unless he can bring out a complete system with 2 or 3 pickups and all electronics for less than $250 street price. I don't think that is going to happen although it might. MIT Ph.D.'s don't come cheap these days. But if it is priced right it will affect both the mass aftermarket and the high-end boutique market for pickups.

That being said, I love the idea and reviews of the Fishman Triple Play product and plan to get one whenever the financial stars align.

What this quacking duck probably is, is a low impedance pickup with a unique coil design (I do admit, I like it, I'm a techie geek too), preamp and voicing circuitry as Joseph pointed out. I am totally sold on this approach, having fooled with it for about two years with lots of inspiration from (and kudos to) Joseph Rogowski, Mike Sulzer, and David Schwab among others for some great posts on low-Z pickups and ideas. I will have something to share soon on this and I will do a Texas bet that it isn't going to be cost-wise anywhere near what Fishman is probably going to be asking for the new system.

The article also mentions an outside magnetic field engineering consultant who was brought in, and if there is some sort of inherent "betterness" to the Fishman design it speculatively would be the magnetic circuit. However if they wanted to model existing pickups, they couldn't go too far afield on that one, could they? Maybe just enough to get the patents. I am somewhat skeptical until a lot more ears have heard the pickups, and then, most of the "oohs" and "ahhs" would be because of the clean low impedance signal through preamp with electronic voicing, rather than the mag circuit or whizbang coil construction, most likely.

I do like Fishman as a company, have bought at least a couple of products of theirs and want to buy at least one more soon.

-Charlie

[frankfalbo]

It all boils down to another active pickup system...

I'd say that's probably the opposite of what it boils down to, but hey what do I know? LOL

I'll try to hit as much as I can without a bunch of quotes and responses.
Battery: there will be rechargeable control and trem plates available if you want to quit 9-volts. I have a proto on an electric I'll have at NAMM. Just plug in mini USB.

The coils: the tech is heavily patented. It's true you can't do this with wire. I told someone else it would be like saying "can't you take that SM57 and use it to make a ribbon mic?" No, you can't. Someone asked about scatter. Just to give a glimpse into this tech, scatter winding lowers distributed capacitance. This layer by layer arrangement is even lower, by a factor of >10x.
There are reasons (which I'm not ready to divulge) that these are having a cleaner "picture" of the string, with greater tone density from which to parse.

Anyone remember talks about $1200 Zephyrs, silver, and cryo? Those represent incremental improvement in various performance parameters of the traditional wire-wound pickup. These possess the superlative qualities of those improvements to an even greater degree. Yes, I agree that one man's better is another man's worse. These don't sound like Zephyrs, I'm simply referring to the speed and other dynamically responsive characteristics.

Coils close to the strings are more productive, as is never having to send a coil wire down, and away from the strings only to return several turns later. So in a stack for example, the bottom coil is far more "deaf" than with a wire wound.

"Flat frequency response-what does that mean?" The response is incredibly even. The resonant peak of the test coils was around 80kHZ. Not a typo. 80k. Flat frequency does not mean flat dynamically. They're jumpy, extremely fast, and highly nuanced. Yes the magnetic circuit shapes the response, feel, etc.

Cost: these will cost roughly the same as mainstream active pickups.

[Mike Sulzer]

So it is a medium impedance stacked humbucker with circuitry to adjust the frequency response and provide gain to get the level right. This is a really good way to make a pickup, and I think Fishman has been doing that for ever. The coil is lovely, but there is more than one way to make a good coil.

From the article:
"The interaction between the vibrating string and the magnetic field greatly affects the physical dynamics."

This is the usual ignorant drivel that pops up whenever anyone wants advertise a new product. The explanation in the box explaining how a pickup works sounds like something out of a sci-fi fantasy novel, but that is entirely normal.

Looks like a good pickup to me. I doubt that as a drop in replacement you can obtain the full range of possible sounds, but starting with a guitar from scratch and using a version of the electronics with a customized switching and control system ought to produce a really fine instrument.

[charrich56]

Totally agree with you, Mike, including your comments on the marketing hype.

Also just thought of this - they are apparently doing hum cancellation within the coil, so essentially it's a low (or medium, not sure where you would put the distinction ) impedance stacked humbucker coil. Maybe they had to do the fancy mag engineering to overcome the inherent response/output problems with a stacked humbucker. Lots of other folks have put in a lot of effort to make that configuration work reasonably well. Are they re-inventing the wheel? Looking forward to finding out more about this thing.

[Mark Hammer]

Thanks for that, Frank. Informative.

Funny, isn't it, when a new means for accomplishing a traditional goal comes along? For the longest time, the only way we had available to have a conductive path around a magnet, of sufficiently narrow gauge to fit a lot on and thereby produce a signal of sufficient amplitude....was wire.

But once one asks the question "Well, is there any other way to have a thin conductive path?", and deals with it at that conceptual level, instead of being fixated on wire as the only means available, things start to open up.

That's some good lateral thinking, there.

[Mike Sulzer]

It's active, so they can make up for any level loss, making sure to use a preamp with sufficiently low noise. Yes, the medium impedance stacked humbucker is a really good choice. The cancellation is excellent, and you need not have the preamp in the guitar as long as you are willing to use the correct values of pots, capacitors, etc. Electrostatic hum pickup is less of a problem with the lower impedance. Of course, if you want a drop in replacement, you need to integrate the electronics inside so it looks the same from that point on.

Totally agree with you, Mike, including your comments on the marketing hype.

Also just thought of this - they are apparently doing hum cancellation within the coil, so essentially it's a low (or medium, not sure where you would put the distinction ) impedance stacked humbucker coil. Maybe they had to do the fancy mag engineering to overcome the inherent response/output problems with a stacked humbucker. Lots of other folks have put in a lot of effort to make that configuration work reasonably well. Are they re-inventing the wheel? Looking forward to finding out more about this thing.

[John_H]

I'd say that's probably the opposite of what it boils down to, but hey what do I know? LOL

Are you ridiculing me here?

The coils: the tech is heavily patented. It's true you can't do this with wire. I told someone else it would be like saying "can't you take that SM57 and use it to make a ribbon mic?" No, you can't. Someone asked about scatter. Just to give a glimpse into this tech, scatter winding lowers distributed capacitance. This layer by layer arrangement is even lower, by a factor of >10x.
There are reasons (which I'm not ready to divulge) that these are having a cleaner "picture" of the string, with greater tone density from which to parse.

Is this from the sales dept?

Anyone remember talks about $1200 Zephyrs, silver, and cryo? Those represent incremental improvement in various performance parameters of the traditional wire-wound pickup. These possess the superlative qualities of those improvements to an even greater degree...

That's pure hyperbole.

They're jumpy, extremely fast, and highly nuanced. Yes the magnetic circuit shapes the response, feel, etc.

I don't get "fast", and how can dynamics be improved in an active circuit?

With all due respect Frank. From the outside it looks like an active system with a new fangled type of coil. I think the technology of it is fascinating, but I'm not excited.

What is the life expectancy of these in our RoHS compliant world?

[Mike Sulzer]

Even in a high impedance pickup, the coil capacitance is not the dominant effect (It is the cable.), although it does matter. In a medium impedance pickup, it is even less important. In order to get he traditional boost in the upper middle, it is necessary to either resonate the pickup with additional C or use an active filter in the preamp. But what the hey, if you take the trouble to make a new pickup, you have to sell it. You can claim that the lower C opens things up; who can stop you? But that is not how it works.