A Pickup Riddle

[bbsailor]

What do pickups and wine have in common?

Hint: The answer is very educational.

Joe Rogowski

[MattT]

I can't open either without ruining it?

[Spence]

They both get better with age.

[Mark Hammer]

Um, they're both cheaper if you make them yourself?

They can both make you a little microphonic?

They both get you humming?

They can both make you pick up radio stations without understanding why?

If you love either of them, you can't stop trying out new ones?

[jonson]

Pickup selection is a bit like choosing a good bottle of wine. In the beginning it can be overwhelming and you’re forced to rely heavily on suggestions from friends and experts. As you gain some experience, you learn to more deeply understand the various factors that contribute to the subtle and not so subtle differences. In the process, you also develop your sonic palette and become more in tune with your own individual tastes and preferences. Eventually, you’ll be able to make excellent choices entirely on your own. Unfortunately, though, sometimes along the way you have to try some wine that tastes like the grapes were crushed with unwashed feet! So… better get comfortable with that soldering iron!

[Sam Lee Guy]

Maybe they both go to class? swim in schools? have a Cambridge degree?

[DrStrangelove]

The crafts of both wine and guitar pickups were revolutionized by
some pertinent scientific understanding, much to the anger
of rote practitioners in both businesses.

-drh

[GlennW]

They have to pass the sniff test.

[WolfeMacleod]

Y'all have it wrong.

They both get better with age.

[Ruel]

Y'all have it wrong.

They both get better with age.

That's what Spence said.

[DrStrangelove]

Whatever

Someone else has observed that among all the old pickups, only the good ones were worth keeping while the rest got rewound or junked.

Natural attrition, intelligent selection, nostalgia for younger days, and "learned preferences" are all at work in the highly subjective assessment of guitar pickups.

Is it good because it's old,
good because the crappy ones are gone,
or good because you remember having a great time being young when you first heard one?

It may be all of them, but you need to be honest when sorting out the balance. Hint: nostalgia is a proven deterrent to character growth.

Wine, a complicated creation, must be specifically crafted for aging that can range from none to decades. If a wine was made to show at 25 years, drinking it at 10 years will pickle your tongue into leather and dye your lips purple.

A 40 yr old wine is usually old and faded...if the cork survived.
After the first few years,
there are no good wines,
only good single bottles of wine.

A 40 year old pickup is just old. Good luck with the decomposing wire enamel.

Inflation from name recognition is another matter.

Parker's enthusiastic review of an australian shiraz briefly inflated a $20 bottle to $30 until good sense prevailed. Pouilly Fuisse is still stupidly over-priced because of its high-name recognition.

A good review from Vintage Guitar can easily inflate a pickup's price to unrealistic levels. Anyone care for an $800 '59 PAF?

Which pickup sounds better:

• an original '59 PAF,
• a Pearly Gates handwound by Seymour hizself,
• or a Fralin 7.5 kOhm humbucker?

Beats me. I'd need to hear each one and then I could only say which of those particular three I liked best.

They may all sound great, but I'd actually buy a coupla John Suhr's machine-wound DSV buckers (preferably mounted in a Suhr guitar).

While pickup/wine production is quantifiable and reproducible, their appreciation is subjective and vexingly at the mercy of hucksterism, wishful thinking, ignorance, and a belief in magic.

Put me in the camp of Emile Peynaud and UCDavis on winemaking, and John Suhr's machine-winding for pickups.

Parting Shots
All wine, from worst to best, is biological waste after consumption.
The single greatest source of pickup noise is the guitarist.

-drh

[Mark Hammer]

Ironically, I have a friend who is a former musician and music store employee and, following some tragic hearing loss, has become a wine writer over the past 15 years or so. When he came up for a visit recently, he brought me a copy of an oenophile's lexicon (a dictionary of wine-tasting terms) that he had published. I don't particularly care for wine myself, but browsed through it and couldn't help but notice how desperately the pickup and amplifier industry could use a similar type of book. Wine tasters and pickup fanatics share the common trait of using terms that convey very little information unless you're in the loop. When someone describes a pickup as having a "chimey" quality, what does that mean in terms of a specific referent? I remember reading a review of a Lindy Fralin PU in Guitar Player a number of years ago, and the reviewer described it as having "nuts, ring, shimmer, the whole deal". Clearly the reviewer was enthusiastic about the tonal qualities of the pickup, but I'll be damned if I knew what they were. How would I know when a pickup had "nuts"? When someone tells me that a pickup has ring and shimmer but minimal nuts, what should I anticipate hearing?

Now, I'm not saying those descriptive terms aren't at all appropriate or even used in an agreed-upon consistent way among those in the know (and that's how the wine-tasting terms come about), but if one is trying to describe a PU to someone who is merely reading a review, without years of gabbing to other pros at NAMM shows every season, there needs to be some means to communicate more specifically. I think it would be useful to have a similar "pickup lexicon", that reviewers in trade mags or on-line could use as standardized language.

[DrStrangelove]

Wine tasters and pickup fanatics share the common trait of using terms that convey very little information unless you're in the loop.

The loop got opened with the U.C. Davis Wine Aroma Wheel and similar artifacts.
If you are interested, you can describe wine flavor.
You don't need to be fanatical, only be consistent with the terminology.

If you say that a wine has an initially honeyed aroma that evolves
to poached pear, it's pretty plain. Other pretentious crap like a
Rutherford Nose is obfuscatory language for the technical defect
of smelling like a green bell pepper, and reviewers should called
out for it.

http://bookstore.ucdavis.edu/Display.cfm?ItemID=526

I think it would be useful to have a similar "pickup lexicon", that reviewers in trade mags or on-line could use as standardized language.

Until I see an I/O plot from some kind of standardized test setup, it's all bullshit.
So long as reviewers present a Bode plot and an MLS pulse response chart,
I have no problem with the steaming heaps of hagiographic ad copy
they pass off as objective journalism.

Microphones and loudspeakers are accurately characterized by an assortment of input-output models.
Aside from guitarists not being the most technically informed, there's
no reason we can't have reproducible electronic characterizations of pickups.

-drh

[WolfeMacleod]

That's what Spence said.

D'OH!

I even LOOKED for that...

I must be blind

[David Schwab]

I must be blind

It's that tiny wire... gets to your eyes after a while!