Making recordings to compare pickups

[Kindly Killer]

I am a full-time pro player. Lately I keep getting more and more interested in pickups. I suppose it's like getting obsessed with the culinary arts in your home kitchen.

Currently I am interested in measurement, and it occurred to me that I could benefit from doing a better job with the test recordings of pickups I'm recording. I could use some help figuring out how to make those recordings. I have done this some already, using a hogged out, quick-change mule guitar and whatever DAW session I'm working on at the moment

I am trying to balance the ideas of repeatable/directly comparable performances with the necessity of hearing a pickup used on real music in an ensemble. I think it's obvious why repeatability/comparability is desirable, but I also think it is informative to hear myself playing the pickup IRL - I mean just going into the zone and playing the instrument as my prosthetic voice without thinking about gear at all. Some gear just bonds effortlessly with my mind, pretty much instantly - I'll sit down to evaluate a pickup I just wound and suddenly it's 45 minutes later and I remember what I was supposed to be doing. That kind of bond - or the lack of it - I guess the degree of it - effects the performance and that's part of what I want to get a sense of. All things held constant (they never are IRL) I play better on "better" gear - better being more natural, nothing that draws attention away from the music.

Basically I want to make recordings to compare how a pickup sounds and feels to use on actual work, and I'm wondering how much stuff I can control/keep the same between iterations. Basically I want to gather impressions much faster than putting a set of pickups in a guitar and using it in clubs and whatever for a month.

So far here are my collected ideas. I could really use some input/ideas

• produce/receive a session/project/file/song/whatever-its-called-in-your-DAW that i enjoy playing with
• set pickup height to be comparable, but how? by ear? IRL a pickup is going to be set to where it sounds best, including pole screws. e.g. it would be strange to have the screws buried in a too-thick sounding P90 when raising them could make it sound so much better...
• plug the same mule guitar directly into the interface using the same cable
• adjust gain in the interface but nothing else. (how to set gain? getting the amp reacting just so is one of things that helps get in the flow. how can i set it with some precision? driver coil and RTA to match amplitude? by ear, and don't proceed until i'm satisfied i have the ideal gain?)
• play the head/melody really straight. maybe play along with a voice/instrument, so i'm matching tone and articulation and dynamics instead of playing in the moment? that might give a more consistent impression of the pickup?
• just play - there is no control for this part, but like i said, playing especially well at least requires gear with which i have bonded on some level
• listen back. is A/B testing informative? I remember seeing an article recently about A/B listening being bad for mixing music, but i can't remember where i saw that or what the argument was...
• stack tracks using all the coil combinations I use IRL. i have noticed that pickups with odd, wonky response curves really show themselves when stacked. the best pickups - like most of the best microphones - can stack and stack and stack and just sound better and better
• some kind of spectrum analysis? could that be relevant on a played part? you know how some things just sit naturally in their own space in a mix, and things that don't sometimes you can see a problem with a spectrum analyzer...

I'm sure better minds than mine must have been through this whole thing already.

All help is appreciated. Thanks,
Michael

[soundguruman]

There is no test equipment to measure good sound. It's all up to your own ears.

Especially in a guitar amp.

The usual tests, used for HiFi equipment, are really useless, compared to just plugging in your guitar.

Verify operation with test equipment. Is it working OK? You have essentially reached the limit of test equipment.

Like I've said before many times:
"listening is half the job."

Recording it, is a good way to compare.

[David King]

In bass-land we generally start with dead strings for testing. Strings are a huge part of the sound so try to be consistent.

[Jim Thomas]

I played around with free spectral analysis software awhile back, running 2 guitars into the sound card (one at a time) on my desktop computer. I hit the same cord and tried to duplicate the same strum with both tests. I was able to capture a graph of the pickup output but I wondered if I wasn't really measuring the sound card's specs and in comparing the histograms... I really couldn't tell what the differences meant. Somebody who is working on a PhD in acoustics would be able to figure out more, I would be willing to guess.

[David Schwab]

In bass-land we generally start with dead strings for testing. Strings are a huge part of the sound so try to be consistent.

Really? I use strings I would use for gigs, and when they are dead I replace them. Luckily the D'Addarios I use keep a consistent tone for a long time. But when they start to sound dead, i.e., thumpy on the low strings, they have to go! Dead strings might have you make a pickup that's much brighter than you want. I don't play with dead strings, so I want to hear how the pickups sound with fresh strings.

Michael, when I'm working on new pickup designs I often record them for later reference. My experience has been that I might not like a new pickup design the first day, but often I come back and like it the next day. This showed me that I can't always trust my feelings vs. my hearing.

I record direct into a Roland VM-3100Pro digital mixer and then into my Mac. It has a high Z guitar input as well as amp modeling. I find using a clean Fender Twin patch helps with getting a tone that sounds more like what someone would hear though an amp, and it translates well to actually live situations. But I also record a DI tone with bass pickups. Currently I user Adobe Audition to record the audio.

[David King]

David,

I didn't mean dead and done for strings just not brand new strings. And for the same reasons you stated. You want a string that represents the average string condition tonewise. Not many bass players can afford new strings every week or even month let alone the time it takes to change them.

[soundguruman]

You really want to use new strings.

You can take bass strings off and boil them.
Then dry them in the oven.
This brightens them up...

Otherwise you are trying to make a pickup compensate for dead strings.

There is no benchmark for the sound of a dead string. You need a reference point.
That's why new strings are the reference.

New string is consistent. It's precision made.
old dead string is an unknown, because there are too many possible variations.

So I don't know how you expect to get a consistent result out of a dead string...

However you do have the basic idea, and that's a good start.

[David King]

New strings actually aren't particularly consistent in my experience. Some brands are better than others. Testing with new strings is fine but you had better have some idea of what the pickups are going to sound like with strings that aren't new since that's what your customers are going to be hearing 99% of the time.

[David Schwab]

I really like D'Addario strings. They sound very consistent from the first day you put them on, and I have some that are like 9 months, old, or even older, and they sound the same.

[Kindly Killer]

While we're on strings, I wonder whether anyone here has looked into the reason some people's body chemistry eats through strings like crazy, while some people's strings fade at the same rate as if they just hang in the open air. I know three guys who, if they so much as touch a guitar, the strings will be rough and black the next morning. My own strings will get kinked on the high string if I have to play too hard (can't hear), but generally they go dull very gradually at a constant rate that doesn't seem to be tied to how much the guitar is actually used - just how much it is exposed to open air...

[Joe Gwinn]

While we're on strings, I wonder whether anyone here has looked into the reason some people's body chemistry eats through strings like crazy, while some people's strings fade at the same rate as if they just hang in the open air. I know three guys who, if they so much as touch a guitar, the strings will be rough and black the next morning. My own strings will get kinked on the high string if I have to play too hard (can't hear), but generally they go dull very gradually at a constant rate that doesn't seem to be tied to how much the guitar is actually used - just how much it is exposed to open air...

Some people have corrosive sulfur compounds in their sweat. One standard test for prospective cleanroom workers is to have them handle a polished piece of OFHC (Oxygen Free High Conductivity) copper. A significant fraction of the population will stain the OFHC sample black, and so will not be hired to work in a cleanroom.

I'm guessing that the guitar strings are being corroded by the sulfur in some people's sweat.


Oxygen-free copper - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[David King]

From eating to much onion and garlic?

[Joe Gwinn]

From eating to much onion and garlic?

Heh. Actually, no. It is genetic.