PAFs that sound like sh*t

[kevinT]

Not all PAFs sounded great as everyone may know. What are some of the reasons why some PAFs sounded like crap?

[R.G.]

Good question, and one that gets to the heart of some things I'm doing now. I've been devouring all of the available information I can find on pickups, designing of, building of, and testing of.

There doesn't seem to be a set of objective tests that can tell you this. Someone can say that they sound bad because they use X material instead of Y, that the coil is wrong insulation, not potted (or potted when it shouldn't be), tightly layer would or incorrectly scattered, but there's no numbers behind it that I can find.

I think a good kind of answer would be something like "The resonant peak of JoeBob's PAF copy is at 1.2kHz and is a 3db peak that makes the thing sound really honky as well as causing treble cutoff of 6db down at 4kHz, which makes the treble really muffled. That's because the wire is too thick and doesn't have enough damping resistance.

The coil inductance is 4.2H and that with the self capacitances of about 1000pF put the resonance there, and the wire resistance of ??? ohms.
Also the pickup cover is made of aluminum and chokes off the lower frequency responses by eddy current losses on the bass strings, as well as the magnetic field being weak over the second string.

They would sound better if they were wound with #43 instead of #40 to dampen that peak. Also the magnet needs to be a full width ceramic instead of a short ceramic; there's not enough spread from the magnet into the pole piece to keep a consistent 20G across the width of the pole pieces."

(All of which is nonsense I made up out of thin air with buzzwords I've gathered in my pickup education reading. But it's the kind of data that would be a useful answer.)

I'm guessing that you won't get that kind of answer though.

[NightWinder]

Thats put blantantly Honest!!

[kevinT]

It's baffling to me why some of them sounded bad.

Was it a few hundred extra turns of wire on the bobbin because the person didn't stop the winder in time?...and as a result causing the pickup to have the wrong combination of mismatched coils?

Could it have been a bad batch of magnets or bad wire when they did certain production runs?

Could it have been the actual winding pattern? Maybe the Leesona vibrated itself out of the intended pitch settings after a certain number of bobbins wound.

I'm just trying to figure out why because IMO, there are only a few variables that could have caused it.

Did Gibson do any testing during the manufacturing process or did they just get them out the door?


Does anyone know or have a theory(s)?

[kevinT]

R.G. I know what your saying but i actually want to know how they got that way during the manufacturing process because i don't think (as far as I know) they were aiming for any specific specs except for the number of turns of wire on the bobbin (5000 to 6000....correct me if i'm wrong).

Good question, and one that gets to the heart of some things I'm doing now. I've been devouring all of the available information I can find on pickups, designing of, building of, and testing of.

There doesn't seem to be a set of objective tests that can tell you this. Someone can say that they sound bad because they use X material instead of Y, that the coil is wrong insulation, not potted (or potted when it shouldn't be), tightly layer would or incorrectly scattered, but there's no numbers behind it that I can find.

I think a good kind of answer would be something like "The resonant peak of JoeBob's PAF copy is at 1.2kHz and is a 3db peak that makes the thing sound really honky as well as causing treble cutoff of 6db down at 4kHz, which makes the treble really muffled. That's because the wire is too thick and doesn't have enough damping resistance.

The coil inductance is 4.2H and that with the self capacitances of about 1000pF put the resonance there, and the wire resistance of ??? ohms.
Also the pickup cover is made of aluminum and chokes off the lower frequency responses by eddy current losses on the bass strings, as well as the magnetic field being weak over the second string.

They would sound better if they were wound with #43 instead of #40 to dampen that peak. Also the magnet needs to be a full width ceramic instead of a short ceramic; there's not enough spread from the magnet into the pole piece to keep a consistent 20G across the width of the pole pieces."

(All of which is nonsense I made up out of thin air with buzzwords I've gathered in my pickup education reading. But it's the kind of data that would be a useful answer.)

I'm guessing that you won't get that kind of answer though.

[R.G.]

Turning over a rock usually gives you some really interesting wildlife to look at, and often some more rocks to turn over.

One obvious question is - what do you mean by "sounded bad"?

Music being what it is, "good" and "bad" by themselves have no meaning in describing how something sounds. Good treble response is good in a violin and bad in a bass drum. Nice, resonant midranges is good in a cello, bad for a violin where it sounds nasal. Resonant peaks are what make human voices create vowel sounds, but they're darned ugly in speakers.

So what does "sounded bad" mean to you in this context? Too much or not enough treble? Too much or not enough bass? Too much or not enough mid? Honky resonances or mysterious holes in the response? Too much high-midrange presence? Not enough output? Uneven response to strings?

I read a musicology paper about research into the way people perceive tones. Giving you the short version, not everyone hears the same sequence of tones the same way. It seems to be a cultural thing, the way people learn to like music. So the guy next to you may not even be hearing the same melody you are when you're both listening to the same recording.

That's one reason when aesthetics are involved, techies will duck and run for the numbers. One can argue that missing treble is bad or good, but there can be agreement that it's 6db down at 3.5kHz.

[Satamax]

Well R.G. treble response of a bass drum makes the atack of the note clearer and might not be that bad too

[R.G.]

R.G. I know what your saying but i actually want to know how they got that way during the manufacturing process because i don't think (as far as I know) they were aiming for anything specific except for the number of turns (5000 to 6000).

That's kind of my point. Unless you can at a minimum describe what the differences are between the good sounding ones and bad sounding ones, you have no hope whatsoever of understanding what happened.

It is probably true that they were only aiming for 5K-6K turns, and anything in the middle was OK. They ordered bales of bobbins and magnets, pallets of magnet wire, and trained five high school dropouts to run the wire winders (maybe, this is again a made up example).

At a guess, you'd get variations in number of turns, maybe different assortments of magnets, possibly magnets from different suppliers or different batches with different saturation, possibly harder or softer steel back plates, and so on. All of this kind of thing has been pointed to in the archives as a reason for some effect or other.

Let's say it was the magnets. The bad ones all had magnets from MagnetMakersAnonymous, the good ones were all from Steel In Flux Inc., and someone knows this beyond a doubt. That's the answer you get.

What good is it as an answer? To me, it's worthless.

It's the answer you get from someone who has a glimmer of an idea, but does not possess the real data, or from someone who knows the real answer but puts you off because they don't want to tell you the real stuff.

I'd want to know not only that it was the MMA magnets, but how the MMA magnets were different from the SIF magnets expressed in numbers, not handwaving. I would sure like to know which was the stronger vs weaker magnets and what the flux density was, whether there was any length difference, and how that affected the frequency response of the pickup. It would be very interesting to know that all of the bad sounding ones had a frequency cutoff at a lower frequency than the good ones, and how much lower.

I can't remember where I read this, but the saying pops into my mind that of course one horse can run faster than another horse - but which one? Differences matter. Until you can nail down the numbers, you're just speculating.

[kevinT]

One obvious question is - what do you mean by "sounded bad"?

Music being what it is, "good" and "bad" by themselves have no meaning in describing how something sounds.

Good point. I haven't played a guitar (up close and personal ) with a real PAF in it since the 1980s. At that time it sounded good to me.

However, some of the pro winders here on the forum that have done a lot of research can tell you that some PAFs just sounded bad (nightwinder, spence, possum, wolfe, jgundry feel free to chime in).

I assume muddy sounding, ultra high levels of scooped mids, no sparkle whatsoever, etc...

[R.G.]

Well R.G. treble response of a bass drum makes the atack of the note clearer and might not be that bad too

True. And if I was a drum maker, I'd sure want to know how to make a drum with a nice crisp attack as well as how to make a drum just have a dull thud. They're both good, and they're both bad depending on context. Hmmm... every drum's a winner and every drum's a loser...

What's not good is not having any clue ahead of time how to make a drum be one way or another and proceed toward that goal. If my life is making drums, maybe I want to make a thousand drums and keep really, really good notes on how I built them, then make good notes on how they sounded when I got done. Then I could consult my thousands-of-drums notes for a crisp attack, medium volume if a customer wanted that. That's how it was for musical instruments for centuries.

I can maybe shorten up that thousand-drums apprenticeship if I have some idea what a Helmholz resonator is, how to measure drumhead tension, and what the density of the drum walls does to the sound.

This forum is entirely about making pickups, which I view as the same as making violins or guitars - a pickup IS a musical instrument. So I think it makes sense to figure out what to measure so I can ahead of time decide to make a pickup that has a specific frequency response that I want, then translate that into specifics of X wire, Y magnets and Z configuration, build one, and have it come out darned close.

Yes, building a thousand pickups first with no particular measurements or predictive theory will get you there. But it's a really hard way to go.

[Spence]

Well, not being one to upset others I am certain that the ones that sounded bad were the ones wound on the Leesona. That's not to say that any handwinder can make a great sounding pickup. So there's probably a bit of both.
In any case, we have a broad spectrum of tones in our personal mind libraries of what sounds good or bad to us individually.

[R.G.]

Good point. I haven't played a guitar (up close and personal ) with a real PAF in it since the 1980s. At that time it sounded good to me.

However, some of the pro winders here on the forum that have done a lot of research can tell you that some PAFs just sounded bad (nightwinder, spence, possum, wolfe, jgundry feel free to chime in).

I assume muddy sounding, ultra high levels of scooped mids, no sparkle whatsoever, etc...

OK, I understand. So the question should be -

"I remember that some PAFs sound bad, but don't really remember how or what it was that sounds bad about some of them. Can someone who has some experience with these tell me what it is that sounds bad about the bad ones, and what it was that made them sound bad?"

Did I get that right?

[Satamax]

True. And if I was a drum maker, I'd sure want to know how to make a drum with a nice crisp attack as well as how to make a drum just have a dull thud. They're both good, and they're both bad depending on context. Hmmm... every drum's a winner and every drum's a loser...

What's not good is not having any clue ahead of time how to make a drum be one way or another and proceed toward that goal. If my life is making drums, maybe I want to make a thousand drums and keep really, really good notes on how I built them, then make good notes on how they sounded when I got done. Then I could consult my thousands-of-drums notes for a crisp attack, medium volume if a customer wanted that. That's how it was for musical instruments for centuries.

I can maybe shorten up that thousand-drums apprenticeship if I have some idea what a Helmholz resonator is, how to measure drumhead tension, and what the density of the drum walls does to the sound.

This forum is entirely about making pickups, which I view as the same as making violins or guitars - a pickup IS a musical instrument. So I think it makes sense to figure out what to measure so I can ahead of time decide to make a pickup that has a specific frequency response that I want, then translate that into specifics of X wire, Y magnets and Z configuration, build one, and have it come out darned close.

Yes, building a thousand pickups first with no particular measurements or predictive theory will get you there. But it's a really hard way to go.

And expensive too Well, i don't build guitars anymore, and i've never taken any notes, i believe in feeling the wood. That's may be why!

[R.G.]

Well, not being one to upset others I am certain that the ones that sounded bad were the ones wound on the Leesona. That's not to say that any handwinder can make a great sounding pickup. So there's probably a bit of both.

Kewl. So a machine (Leesona??) wound the bad ones and a hand wound the good ones. What exactly was it that the hand did differently? Was it just that there was a human hand touching the wire? Was it that the machine always put only the right number of turns on and the human typically erred high or low? was it that the human used different wire gauges because the machine broke the fine stuff? Was it that the human ones were potted because the machine ones were firmer and more consistent? Is there any real data other than machine versus human?

In any case, we have a broad spectrum of tones in our personal mind libraries of what sounds good or bad to us individually.

Aye, that we do. And there can be no disagreement about matters of taste. There CAN be disagreements about whether the response of a pickup falls off faster or slower, and how it responds to a string in which position. Is the real data in the minds' libraries as well?

[SkinnyWire]

That's easy. It's the "mojo". Without it, it's just a regular humbucker.