Pickup Testing

[Steve Conner]

I've always just assumed that you can characterise a pickup as a cascade of a second-order lowpass filter and a comb filter. (And a constant gain term too, I guess.) The second-order section models the electrical resonance in the pickup coil, and the comb filter accounts for cancellation effects caused by the finite size of the magnetic aperture and the speed of sound on the strings.

The pickup placement on the guitar body affects tone too, of course, but that doesn't belong in the pickup's transfer function.

[DrStrangelove]

I thought I saved a copy of Stephan's pickup article, but I can't find it. Did you happen to save a copy?

Sadly,no. If I had, you and others would have it, too.

I note that you did layout on the AC-30 simulator.
Can you still contact Herr Moeller?

As nearly as I can remember, his simulator landed him a job
at TC Electronic for R&D on an AC-30 digital modeling plug-in
sold as the TC30.

-drh