Measuring and defining "tone" and stuff

[Just Bob]

There's a lot of discussion about "tone" here. I'm curious about how people, especially the pros, measure it. Do you just play and rely on your ears and memory? I know I don't hear or remember as well as once I did. Do you keep a library of pickups for comparison? Do you use a "standard" guitar? What strings? They make a difference. Anybody using those magnetic coil things to get a frequency response curve? Is it meaningful? What about people who don't play well, or don't play the instrument they're making a pickup for? You rely on your customers' opinions? How do you translate their words into your terms? Fat, thin, rich, clean, muddy. What's it mean to you and how do you translate that into physical reality? Electrical measurements are necessary and useful, but only a small part of the picture. Objective versus subjective. Anybody measure sustain and string damping? Susceptibility to hum?

[Just Bob]

Been a week and nobody has said a thing. Pretty much what I figured. Say something is "hot, thin and greasy" and nobody knows or cares whether it's a Strat or a Big Mac.

[corduroyew]

questions like this are just big and take a lot of time to answer. I would have said something but I haven't had the time to actually go into detail. My "big" question hasn't had any responces yet either. It's just because people can go on for hrs with this kind of thing. I'll say more about it when I have a bit more time to sit and type.

[Ray Ivers]

Bob,

Say something is "hot, thin and greasy" and nobody knows or cares whether it's a Strat or a Big Mac.

Well put. I personally try to refrain from using terms like these, as they have no reliably-transferable meaning to another person - and even my own definitions change when I encounter, say, an amp that gives new meaning to the word "crunch", etc. Every now and then I do slip up, but I'm workin' on it.

It seems to me that considering the incredible diversity of the English language, there's always some other way to get one's tonal point across using words with clearly pre-defined - i.e., dictionary - meanings.

My apologies to Billy Gibbons.

Ray

[jason lollar]

I have done it with measurements but 99% of the time its totally by ear and I never ship anything out I havent heard.
I have multiple copies of guitars set up exactly the same with matched pots and do A-B comparisons and I keep samples on file from every year and with every change ever made.

I call it ruthlessly thourough.
I go back months later and do the same test over to make sure what I recall is real

[Possum]

yeah big question

I didn't see this question before but I don't come back here as much as before since the new forum format.

You ask too many questions for one reply :-)

You'll get alot of different answers to this one, everyone's opinion differs radically. For me I use an LCR meter and use inductance as a general guide but AC resistance as a finer more accurate guide. DC resistance is just for rough winding to get close enough to unwind to sweet spot.

I messed with frequency response charts using computer programs, using a driver coil into the pickup and straight into the computer. Methods how to do this differ radically and there have been some heated arguments about whats "right" way to do it. There is no right way basically. Frequency response charts aren't all that useful. They are fun to mess with, they do cover higher frequencies than the LCR meter does but you can't really see fine detail in a chart at an affordable level. Some of the bigger companies use HP spectrum analyzers but really its alot of money wasted in my opinion. Theres stuff you just can't measure with any method except your ears. How do you measure "quack?" Hang out at a pond and see if the ducks come running?

I keep a master copy of all my pickup sets to refer back to, especially when the season change and its gets cooler in the room and hard to regulate a perfect temperature. Room temp changes all your readings. Basically though you can't make an exact duplicate of any pickup, its impossible. The other thing is that probably none of us wind the same way we wound last year, I don't wind like it I did in the beginning and I don't wind like I did last year, so having instruments to check everything is a necessity for me. Wire suppliers don't send the exact same stuff every time so you have to check everything when you start a new spool. Some supplier sends you different keeper bars and suddenly your tone changes, if you have the LCR meter you can spot these things right away.

Customer requests for tone can really be a bitch sometimes, if they stump me I ask them to refer me to a recording of what they want to hear. If all else fails I always tell them they have to put the pickups in THEIR guitar because I can't predict what my stuff sounds like in their rig specifically.

And yeah, the professional players are easier to deal with if they have verbal skills and describe what their educated ears are hearing or want to hear. The amateur bedroom players can be difficult because most of them don't even know how to raise or lower a pickup, or even describe basic tone, or even have good enough ears to be able to tell something good from something mediocre. I give players their money back if they don't like my stuff, that way no one gets mad at me and I don't giving them a big sales spiel either, I tell them to listen to my sound clips and if there's something in those that attracts them, then try a set out and see if it works for them.

I test my pickups in a real guitar, I did do a test guitar made out of a cheap plywood LP all hacked up but its almost useless. Generally I use cheap off the shelf stock guitars to test with since thats usually what most players have. Most importantly I take these guitars out and PLAY them in clubs at blues jams twice a week and hand those guitars around to anyone who wants to try them out. So I listen on stage and off. Its always best to have one of the better players play them onstage for my listening tests, the lower level players make everything sound bad :-)

Designing a new pickup is always a major bitch, sometimes it can make you crazy trying alot of different wire, magnets and winds to the point that you lose your perspective and have to walk away from it for awhile. When you start out in this stuff you think everything you wind sounds good, years later you think everything could sound better and keep trying to get it one step better than the last 12 versions you wound :-) Its hard work....amen.....Dave

[JGundry]

I have a bunch of test equipment I use for amps, effects and pickups. The test equipment is useful as a trouble shooting tool and as confirmation that you are on the right track with any experimenting you may be doing. But your ears are far and away the best piece of test equipment you have. I keep reference amps, effects and pickups and a routed out test guitar to compare stuff against before it goes out the door. There are some things like germanium transistors that can only be electronically tested to a certain point. The acid test is always listening. There is a real advantage to using your ears as the main test tool. Doing so will help you produce a unique line of products. I figure the best I can do is to make products that I love and offer them for sale. This is why I don't do custom orders. People's individual tonal taste is so varied that trying to custom make a pickup, amp or effect to suite a customer's tonal description can quickly become bad experience for everyone involved.

[carl gigun]

What you're asking about is a debate that extends way beyond pickup making and has been going on for decades. Objective vs Subjective. You can measure things, and you can hear things, and you hope the two might agree but they rarely do. For decades the quality of audio gear has been described with an objective measurement, THD. Unfortunately it correlates very poorly with subjective ratings of the same piece of gear. This was known as far back as the 50's or earlier but THD was easy for test equipment to measure and what do consumers know anyhow, so you'll still see it on spec sheets today. (You can see http://gedlee.com/downloads/THD_.pdf for more on that story)

"Hot and greasy" might not conjure up the same thing in every person, but neither does "3dB dip at 2.3k", so in the meantime everyone just does the best they can. Ironically this music-electronics forum has to be about the worst environment possible for discussing sound. We're all silent letters on a screen, you can't hear my amp and I can't hear your pickup, but we try to communicate what we're hearing anyhow.

[Possum]

test gear

Sometimes your ears can't hear small changes, and ears can get overloaded and confused if you do alot of testing. Ever pick up your guitar and it sounds different than it did two days ago? For me the test gear is super important in pickup design. AFter testing say 6 prototype winds, you can get burned out trying to hear how each pickup differs if they are somewhat close in values, plus its hard to remember what the last one sounded like when you had it in a guitar, it takes time to swap things out and your ears forget. The LCR meter can spot small changes, and will also show live changes in design, say if you are trying a different set of pole screws or different manufacturer's keeper bars in a bucker, so you can dial something in before you spend the time putting it in a guitar. Ears at a live venue are the final acid test, but good test gear sure can cut to the chase sometimes. One of the most valueable things about the LCR meter is it will spot coil shorts when nothing else will; I have some old Korean wire that sounds real good but wind it just a tad too tight and it shorts out real bad, you can't see it in the DCR unless its a real bad short, but the meter catches it every time......

[ken]

It is almost impossible to quantify 'tone' with just words, since one man's 'dark and muddy' is another's 'fat'. Even measuring specs won't help much, since the pickup is only one small part of the whole instrument. A pickup will react differently with different metal parts, body/neck woods, scale length, string gauges, and even type of finish and the finish's thickness on the guitar.

I have each of my customers bring in his guitar, effects and amp, and some CD's of music he wants to sound like so I can actually hear what he wants. Even then, sometimes the tone won't happen... like when a customer brought in an Indonesian strat copy and a cheapo practice amp, and he wanted to sound like SRV. I had to explain to him that new guitars made of urethane and 'glit' (Blandex) won't resonate like a fifty year old alder and nitro Strat, and a $79 tenwatt transistor amp with a 6" speaker isn't a Vibrolux.

Carl is right, the best measurement of your pickup's tone is purely subjective. In the end, the only thing that really matters is does the pickup make the tone the musician hears in his/her head? If it doesn't, no amount of statistics
is going to help.

Ken