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Pickups- physics or cooking?

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  • Pickups- physics or cooking?

    So, on the one hand there are people like Joe Gwinn, Mike Sulzer and me, who feel that actually cooking and eating food is beneath us: you should be able to look at the list of ingredients and calculate how it's going to taste.

    On the other hand we have pickup master chefs with lots of delicious recipes arrived at through years of experimentation.

    I know whose cake I'd rather eat, but the question is, can the theory and the practice of pickup making coexist or even benefit from each other? They seem more or less disconnected at present.
    "Enzo, I see that you replied parasitic oscillations. Is that a hypothesis? Or is that your amazing metal band I should check out?"

  • #2
    although it pains my inner engineer to say so, when it comes to magnetics, i think there are still a lot of things unknown. some might call it black magic.

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    • #3
      Originally posted by Steve Conner View Post
      They seem more or less disconnected at present.
      The purpose of understanding the physics is to do a better job of making something that sounds good. Why does almost everyone look at this as an either/or thing? The way to determine if something sounds good is to listen to it. The physics is a guide as to what to try. (If you know that a large inductance reduces the high frequenies too much but do not know what causes high inductance, then you are going to waste a lot of time.)

      (And if when you listen, you hear something that totally contradicts the physics, you might want to do another, more careful, listening test.)

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      • #4
        When you consider that ultimately we are making a product for public consumption which then is used in the creation of art, the ultimate goals of the product remain subjective. They operate on discrete principles, but when the final end comes down to "does anyone like it?" it is hard to call it 100% science. Even if someone mastered all of the elements of pickup design, that subjective end still exists.

        Good chefs CAN look at lists of ingredients and know how it'll taste. I've listen to some chefs basically make up recipes or critique dishes purely intellectually. A mediocre foodie can do the same thing to an extent (I never use recipes, but always come out with something edible and moderately tasty), but the really great breakthroughs are beyond our abilities to just think something up.

        Who first came up with peanut butter and jelly, anyway? Was it a purely intellectual decision to combine sweet and savory flavors, or was someone just cleaning out a cupboard using what was available?

        I see no reason for the two to be so disconnected, though I know what you're talking about. For the purely practice people I say there are ways to understand anything given the time and resources, and to the purely theory people I'd say don't knock it until you try it. A proper scientific process involves both theory and practice. How many foods have you tried that you thought would be gross but turned out to be amazing? And, ultimately data is what brings the two together. We achieve our data from practice, and data is the basis for our theory.

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        • #5
          Originally posted by Steve Conner View Post
          So, on the one hand there are people like Joe Gwinn, Mike Sulzer and me, who feel that actually cooking and eating food is beneath us: you should be able to look at the list of ingredients and calculate how it's going to taste.

          On the other hand we have pickup master chefs with lots of delicious recipes arrived at through years of experimentation.

          I know whose cake I'd rather eat, but the question is, can the theory and the practice of pickup making coexist or even benefit from each other? They seem more or less disconnected at present.
          Troll.

          Don't conflate scientific understanding with practical implementation, although molecular gastronomy bridges the gap exceptionally well.

          One of the reasons we see hard science contributions here is that descriptions of the craft have been dominated by subjectivist hand-waving and attributions of magic.

          Since you forgot, I'll say it again:

          "When the Science of a craft advances, the Art advances with it."
          Christ, Steve, you've hand-rolled a Douglas Self amp design, you KNOW this stuff.

          Shame on you.
          "Det var helt Texas" is written Nowegian meaning "that's totally Texas." When spoken, it means "that's crazy."

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          • #6
            Yes, and I had to do a lot of things that were more like cooking than physics to make it work. For instance, Douglas Self never discusses the clipping behaviour of his designs in any of his books, and I found out why.

            As an industrial R&D guy, conflating scientific understanding with practical implementation is more or less my day job. Scientific understanding is something I use on a customer's problem so I can make some machine or write some software to fix it, and get paid. I struggle to see scientific understanding in any broader sense.

            Hi-fi amps are easier to design than guitar pickups. You can measure all of the performance parameters to a better resolution than human hearing. If you do honest measurements, not the kind that make the amp look its best for the spec sheet, they all measure good, and you built in enough oomph to drive your favourite speakers easily, you know it'll sound essentially perfect. That is Douglas Self's objectivist thesis as I understand it.

            But we have no meter that tells us how good a guitar pickup is going to sound, so how can we do objective pickup science? Self avoids all subjective issues in his books, but a pickup designer can't. That is the essence of what I wanted to say, and I'm sorry if it came across as trolling. (Ok, maybe it was, but with the intention of hopefully sparking an interesting debate rather than a shitstorm )
            Last edited by Steve Conner; 05-02-2011, 06:59 PM.
            "Enzo, I see that you replied parasitic oscillations. Is that a hypothesis? Or is that your amazing metal band I should check out?"

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            • #7
              Originally posted by Mike Sulzer View Post
              The purpose of understanding the physics is to do a better job of making something that sounds good. Why does almost everyone look at this as an either/or thing? The way to determine if something sounds good is to listen to it. The physics is a guide as to what to try. (If you know that a large inductance reduces the high frequenies too much but do not know what causes high inductance, then you are going to waste a lot of time.)

              (And if when you listen, you hear something that totally contradicts the physics, you might want to do another, more careful, listening test.)
              (I just spent such a long time responding to this post that "the token" expired and I lost every word.) Maybe I'll try to get over it and give it another shot in the next coupla days...

              Bob Palmieri

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              • #8
                Originally posted by fieldwrangler View Post
                (I just spent such a long time responding to this post that "the token" expired and I lost every word.) Maybe I'll try to get over it and give it another shot in the next coupla days...

                Bob Palmieri
                Please do. I look forward to reading your response.

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                • #9
                  Cooking is physics.
                  It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure. — Albert Einstein


                  http://coneyislandguitars.com
                  www.soundcloud.com/davidravenmoon

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    Originally posted by David Schwab View Post
                    Cooking is physics.
                    Why no one said this earlier, I have no idea... Genius David, genius!

                    Comment


                    • #11
                      Alright... here goes another try.

                      In my main day gig teaching jazz in college we have a considerable amount of dogma regarding ways of putting pitches together that are supposed to sound good.

                      Like all such distilled generalizations, they depend on limiting a number of variables found in messy real-world situations.

                      When a student comes up with some application of these principles that appears to contradict their veracity, I usually say "Great! Now let's see if we can generalize some aspect of this specific context that might give future aspirants some new principles to use for guidance."

                      So, I've never been able to clearly see any necessary mutually exclusivity between all this Art & Science business; one can and does indeed advance the other.

                      Bob Palmieri

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                      • #12
                        "If you think you can advance art without science, you've got no brains. If you think you can advance science without art, you've got no heart."
                        - Sdrawkcab Appaz Knarf
                        Valvulados

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                        • #13
                          Hmm, so once again, no matter how deep you think your insight is, Frank Zappa has been there already.

                          So, can anyone give an example of a pickup design that you think shows a perfect harmony of art and science? If FEMM was used in the design process, I eat all of my words.

                          But for now I'm still left with the impression that there are two opposing camps of pickup makers, except the physicists don't even seem to make any.
                          "Enzo, I see that you replied parasitic oscillations. Is that a hypothesis? Or is that your amazing metal band I should check out?"

                          Comment


                          • #14
                            Steve, perfection is for people who don't live in an experiential world.

                            It's not that there is no science to pickup making but that scientific sensibilities are not prevalent among the builders.
                            The science is in the materials and a 100+ year old magnetic design. It is a theoretical foundation that most craftsman
                            take for granted without thought. There is no dichotomy unless you want to make one.

                            The science shows you where to dig the hole, lets you estimate how deep, and helps decide on the proper shovel.
                            The instant you put shovel to dirt, that's craft or implementation or whatever you call sweat from directed activity.

                            Check out Harold Mcgee's "On Food And Cooking" ISBN-13: 978-0684800011.
                            It's a very engaging and wide-ranging discussion on stuff we eat, something there for everyone.
                            "Det var helt Texas" is written Nowegian meaning "that's totally Texas." When spoken, it means "that's crazy."

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                            • #15
                              The Physics Of Pickups

                              Check out this DUT in a physics lab.
                              Link:UIUC Physics 498POM Guitar Pickup Measurements
                              Attached Files
                              Last edited by Jazz P Bass; 05-03-2011, 01:55 PM.

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