There is a very lengthy discussion taking place over on the TDPRI board pertaining to MicroCoils. Ron Kirn put a lot of good information to this topic (as well as handsplayingbutterfly). I thought that it would be a good idea to consolidate all of his posts into one on this board since this really is the central location for all things Wilde! Ron was kind enough to grant me permissions to repost everything that he put on TDPRI. It's a LONG read but there's some really good stuff in here. I separated each post with '------------'. So, without further adieu...
Ron Kirn, TDPRI:
Well... I was at NAMM in '08 when Bill chose to debut the Micros.... he said then they still needed a little "fine tuning"... it has taken the past 3 years to do that fine tuning.... now... factor in that Bill is responsible for virtually every "innovation" you see touted in anyone's pickups, or responsible for the theories that lead to those innovations, all of ‘em…. He has that level of understanding about what happens to those little electrons when you wrap wire around magnets . . .and that man took 3 years to fine tune what was a hellova great pickup 3 years ago... theses things have to be incredible... I'm building one now that will have 'em in it...
One thing you should consider when choosing ANY pickup is….. if it’s advertised as delivering a certain “tone”.. it is technically flawed from the outset… that is because a pickup should not impart any “tone” on the information the string is inducing onto it. It should be a totally neutral factor in the transition from the vibrating string, thru to the vibrating speaker cone. Anything that unintentionally adds it’s acoustic skew to that signal is flawed.
Bill’s pickups are designed to be neutral…. THAT DOES NOT MEAN bland sounding…. It means they have “no sound”.. they only relay what the guitar is capable of doing…. Is this good…. Damn straight it is…. Ask any audio engineer… most of ‘em are totally sick of YOU showing up with a guitar your blown out ears thinks sounds good, only to have to whip out a 128 channel equalizer to get the “line” flat enough to be useable. And this is the reason that when ever someone posts a video of themselves playing a whatever through a whatever amp to demonstrate the differences between A and B... recorded with their 300.00 Sony CamCorder’s mike, played back through those Logitech speakers sitting behind your monitor, I fall out of my chair laughing. All of that equipment you have just used for recording and playback put down a totally unacceptable level of acoustic coloration to whatever point you were trying to make.. Yeah, yours too.
So… Neutrality…. This gives YOU the opportunity to modify the sound with the controls and/or FX you have at your disposal… YOU are in total control… How does this differ from pickups designed to yield a specific sound?
For those pups to produce a certain sound.. their output has to be “skewed” in a specific direction…this is done by how they are designed and built…Bright… a boost in the upper frequencies, Spanky…. In the mid upper…. Dark… in the lower frequencies….
What this means… no matter what you do (within reason) you cannot override the pickup’s initial output… you can color it further…. But what ever the pickup designer did, is there always… that’s not the case with Bill’s… you and your audio “guys” get to decide how you sound…. This is also why so many session musicians use Bill’s pickups… the don’t wanna argue with the engineers at the recording studio.
To put things in perspective…. In the world of totally ridiculously high-end home audio reproduction… a darn great phono cartridge can be purchased for a couple hundred bux…. But it still imparts a miniscule bit of it’s flawed coloration on the recording it’s playing back…. To move closer to perfection in the playback, spending 10’s of thousands for a PHONO cartridge (that’s the needle on the end of a tone arm) is quite customary…. For those poo-bahing phonograph recordings… guys spending 50 to 100.000.00 and frankly way beyond for a home stereo aren’t playing CD’s.
This one is considered modestly acceptable. . .
http://www.musicdirect.co...ger-v2-mc-cartridge.aspx
But my point… Bill is handing you that kind of clarity… for “pennies”… Frankly, I have no idea why anyone would even consider any other pickup…
But all that said... some prefer the colorations that define a 57/62. or Texas Specials., or a PAF Humbucker, or any one of a multitude of other very high quality pickups... For them Bill's may NOT be the right choice... it still all comes down to what you personally prefer.... decide... and go with it....
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absolutely true... and one can only wonder if it's because guys with enough expendable cash to venture into such realms typically have ears old enough to be sonically flawed too.
or... If ya cannot hear 6000 hz too well... (or whatever frequency) you might just gravitate toward a piece of equipment that is a little "hot" at that specific frequency thinking you have found sonic utopia... know what... you have.. cause it sounds "right" to you and you are the only one to whom it matters.
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I guess I should "qualify" the above dissertation...
1, there is no audio device made anywhere at any price that is 100% neutral....
2, the pickup is not the ONLY factor in the calculus of a guitar that can and does contribute to sonic coloration... that is the results of a collaborative effect of every part of the guitar coming together.
Sound from a guitar's perspective is much like wishing you had clear water... so you put in it a yellow glass... mix it with a spoon stained with grape juice, pour it of through a tube stained with Cherry Juice... then hold it up an a crystal clear container (the amp) and wonder why there it a definitive tint to it..
In quality audio REPRODUCTION the goal is to keep every thing clear... that's the GOAL... it is NOT attainable... it is only approachable....
In audio GENERATION anything goes... the one doing the generation is the artist.... assuming he thinks of his talent as art.... but for that artist... he gets to choose what his "art" will sound like... he can "skew" it all he likes.... until. . . the Producer, Director, Audio techs, etc etc, walk in... then those guys will tell ya where ya suck.... that's what they get paid for.
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the problem with "basic guitar tone philosophy" is its foundation... that the audio spectrum MUST be skewed to generate acceptable sound... and that “first part” factoid, is that based on empirical data or opinion? Just wonderin’, cause I’d kinda think that completely subordinates the thing that does in fact impart the number one variable to the tone…. Any one ever hear of the AMP? Change a pickup and compare… then change the speaker and compare…. Hummmm…
Further… the tone coloration the pickup imparts can only cascade upon the “back” of all the other factors imparting tone coloration. The guitar is a study in compromises, and any change is only a lateral one… unless the owner likes it, then it becomes a vertical move. It doesn’t matter what “tone” you care to “diss” . . . someone, somewhere likes that sound… and for them a change off that mark would be a step backwards.
Guys that make and sell pickups, stating, to paraphrase, “our pickups have the best tone”, state by inference, that their opinion is of higher value than anyone that would choose otherwise. How lame is that?
as I stated in conclusion…
no one can do that with any two sets of pickups… there are too many variables…. They can give you generalities…. The problem with such general assumptions… is that they’re general assumptions…
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I posted this over in another thread...dealing, once again with "stuff" that's nothing more than a personal preference... such things are meaningless..... but I'll lay it down here too....
"sumbodiez gotta say it, otherwise the forum just becomes a constant drone of the same old bull being said different ways....
The only thing that is actually important regarding the guitar is how much you practice with it..... absolutely everything else is nothing more than "fashion"... wood, paint, pup tone, caps, cable, strings, color, switching options, fret size radius, shape of headstock, type keys, color of the tint, how new or beat up your guitar looks, how old it really is....if it's a parts caster, or one of mine....if it's a set neck or if the pocket is a half inch too wide... none of that matters...
If ya (don't) [SIC] think so, hand the "perfect" guitar to some goober that can't pick his butt... and see how it sounds..."
Bill called last night while I was out... left a message, that he'll call again this afternoon... to "go over this thread.... I gotta go get some beer and a comfortable chair for the "chat".... I'll try to sum up the details in a few paragraphs after the feeling returns to the hand that will be holding the phone... :wink:
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OK... I spent 2 multi hour sessions with Bill Yesterday.... the feeling is just now returning to my hand....
First. Bill asked me to convey Becky and His best wishes for a Happy New Year to you all. He feels a deep affection for all of us that touch his life through our connection, through the guitar. It greaves him considerably that he finds it so very difficult to sit and type his response personally, but, he is watching, reading this thread.... everyone smile and waive..
The next most immediate thing he asked me to clarify is his involvement in so many innovations within the realm of pickups.
He is very uncomfortable with "inventor". He religiously gives credit where credit is due, and usurps none, if not appropriate. He IS comfortable with the word Innovator... and would clarify the definition..
In his world an innovator is one that adapts burgeoning technologies and applies then into seemingly unrelated areas...
One example would be Seth Lover.... accredited with inventing the Humbucker.... However, what actually happened was the application of theories and research began in the early 1800's at the inception of applying electricity to anything. The "canceling" nature resulting from the close proximity of 2 coils under an electrical current was the work of a scientist (i forgot to note his name) in the 1830's. This lead to additional research regarding coils placed in close proximity and the results of such action.
Now... for those saying . .. Bull . . . weren't no 'electricity way back then.... OH...?? I, as would many versed in such history, would encourage a study of said topic....
But to further illustrate the concept of an innovator.... another "invention" comes to mind....
about... 1800, research, if ya called it research back then, began of using electrical current... to produce some result at the other end of a very crude wire....like simply making a Compass react.... it did..... the "scientist" then devised a way to make a magnetically charged needle react to the electrical impulse to point to a specific letter of the alphabet. Thus through innovation, incorporating previous discovery’s, he created the first means of communicating via “wire” over a distance… the message was, “Make that two large, one Super supreme, and the other thin crust with peperoni and mushrooms.” Didn’t know that did ya. “Oh, and an order of those cheese bread sticks…”
But it was on the way….. later, within a few years…it was determined that wrapping wire around a ferrous core, and exciting it with electrical energy created a magnet. If you turned the electricity on and off with a switch, the electro-magnet would revert back to inert…and whatever the magnet was attracting would fall away.
Without going, step by step, through all the innovators that continued to build upon that first piece of wire running through a garden making a Compass deflect…. It did continue until one Alexander Graham Bell.. realized that if the “sounder”, the “receiver”, in a telegraph was light enough.. it could move faster…and faster… and if the “key” was lighter, and even, yet lighter, it could be actuated by a minuscule small amount of pressure… like air pressure.
As the speed of response increased, the “frequency” generated by the sounder moved from a rapid clicking, to more of a tone… and that tone could be altered. (modulated) by making the “key” or source, move faster or slower… this lead to the discovery that the “receiver” didn’t have to have a hunk of metal banging down to make a click, but if a very thin piece of ferrous metal was suspended in close proximity to the receiving electro magnet, it would oscillate fast enough to produce the desired frequency (tone)…and it would cause the air around it to move.
Whether by design or accident ( accident is a major contributor to scientific discovery) it was determined that the reverse happened too.. i.e. if the very thin piece of ferrous metal were subjected to rapid oscillations it would result in a variable current being generated in the electro magnet, that could be extracted, sent along a wire, or actually a pair of wires, to another electro magnet. With a light weight piece of ferrous metal (a diaphragm) suspended in close proximity and it would make the diaphragm vibrate sympathetically in unison with the one on the other end.
What did that do… it caused compression and expansion in the air molecules immediately around the receiving diaphragm.. such variances in the atmosphere would be transmitted, air molecule buy air molecule, colliding with others, until the air against Watson’s ear heard Alex say, “Watson, come here, I need you.” That was an accident… Alexander Graham Bell had no Idea that, at that time he had the protogenic telephone before him.
Thus… Bell did not invent the Telephone, he was its innovator. He took previously conceived sciences, and applied them to a seemingly unrelated exploration, with a new application of those “old” ideas resulting in a completely new concept.
It was other innovators that discovered, shortly thereafter, how to amplify the sound of a vibrating string with basically the same technology… this lead to Seth Lover’s eventual innovations as applied to previously “invented” guitar pickups.
What you have just read is nothing more than the logic behind why Bill prefers to be thought of as an Innovator, not an invertor.
I spent over 3 hours with him yesterday, this is gonna take a while….. more to come…..
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The next aspect of his pickups he wanted me to clarify is the notion of “neutrality”…
A neutral sound is great… as a starting point…. It gives YOU, the artist the creative input to produce YOUR own, or any other sound, you choose to…. But a “flat audio spectrum” as a progenitor of the music is generally …. Ready for this… Flat sounding . . . that’s what the tone controls are for…
Bill’s target “tone” when calculating the parametrics that will yield the final sound is: he wants you to be able to set the Bass, Mid, and Treble, on 5 and have as flat a “line” as possible. By rotating "off" 5, mixing and matching settings you would be able to reproduce about any pickups sound you like.
“Calculating the parametrics” is an important choice of words. Far too many pickup makers simply take a conglomerate of pickup parts, put ‘em together… trying something “unique”, and see what the result’s are. They then give it a sexy name, and begin marketing… the “Ass Whuppin Growlers” or the “Sweet Bayou Belltones” or the “Beale Street Barkers”. When it was more of a “by chance” experiment that produced whatever… but… since the pickups already HAVE a tone… it snatches from you that facet of creativity… you DO NOT get to choose your tone… someone else has done it for ya.
Bill sits down with paper and pencil, calculator and his brain, and knows what the sound will be before the first layer of wire is spun. There are few that have ever demonstrated on their websites that have that level of understanding about the quantum physics involved…. Yeah, Quantum Physics… it’s not just for Nuclear explosions ya know. Ya don’t just change the sound of a pickup by substituting Alnico 3’s for 5’s or using “scatter winding”.
But back to neutrality… Bill revealed, even he does not like neutrality’s “flat line” sound when performing. But by having that as an option, with the micros and the use of the tone controls you may duplicate the acoustic signature of any pickup you choose. You have an infinitely wider range, than that the “Pre skewed” pickups offer.
Go back and re read that last paragraph… I’ll wait a few second… Humm, Humm,,Lallalaallll deedaaaaa,,,, done… “ Got that? Any pickup….
So to answer . . .
Yeah, Bill can…. The sound exactly the same….. if you want them to….
And in response to:
Bardens are pickups … the Micros can duplicate any pickups…. So draw your own conclusion…. ( Side note the Bardens are a derivative of Bill’s designs of the early 70’s, since few sold, he discontinued them and an associate of his, Joe Barden, somewhat later revisited the design and found greater success in marketing them”).
The caveat... this is MY perspective... YOU have to learn a new skill.. that of analyzing what you are hearing, to know where the sonic differences lay, and how to use the controls at hand to “move” that line towards the sound you want..
Often rotating the 3 controls only slightly can offer dramatic variations in sound colorations. You don’t hafta swing from 2 to 8…
So to waddle back toward neutrality...
One pickup maker inferred that he felt it was the maker’s responsibility to select the sound your guitar would produce. Actually, there is nothing wrong with that notion. There are many, and you learn this in “sales” classes, many, far too many people, want someone else with “credibility” to tell them what decision THEY should make. For those, there are “pre skewed” (audio wise) pickups available.
But for those that choose to make a tonal variant part of their art… a more neutral “starting point” allows for more “expression”.
For those yawing… My “very skewed” pickups still respond to tone changes… well yes, right, but from “outside the box” those changes all occur on one side of the proverbial hill? They sound pretty much alike.
A guitar designed to produce a specific tonal coloration still has a preponderance of that tonal coloration despite how much you turn the tone controls.
And to be perfectly honest… even with the Micros… there are a multitude of other factors comprising the guitar/amp symbiosis that is going to lend a specific tonal character to the sound.. That cannot be neutralized… nada chance…
But… a pickup like the micros… at least give you the opportunity to explore tonal caverns not available if a pickup choice has already closed the cave.
In another thread, perhaps this one,,, I forget….. I said there is only one aspect of the guitar that is of any importance… how much you practice, or, your level of skill… absolutely everything else is a “fashion” choice. Therefore those that choose a pickup with a strong coloration are NOT somehow less astute than those choosing neutrality. It’s their choice, it’s their art…
Next I’ll try to share a little about the options available in altering the “voice” of your guitar without ripping the heart out of it.
This notion that you just gotta rip the pickups out to get another sound is just plain stupid… got that…. And I’m being the rare politically correct here.
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It occurred to me (happens sometimes) that I should make clear... while it's obvious I do love Bills pickups... I do understand not all will...for any number of reasons... and that’s fine.. You are not some ill-informed “goober” stuck in “fly over country” because you follow your choice… Hell… I’ve made one or two in my life that still has me scratching my head… whut wuz I thinkin”?
I do not, nor will I attempt to dissuade any from selecting the pickups they prefer in any build I may be doing. I ask ya what do you want, and I give ya that. It’s that simple… Now if ya ask what do I think… well . . . you opened that can ‘o worms didn’t ya?
If you have one in the “works” and you have selected another’s pickups, I’m not thinking, “Dork, whatta looser….” More times than not… I’ll get ‘er done, plug ‘er in, and think, “Damn, that sounds good, really good….”
There are any number of absolutely amazing pickups available for you to choose from, and, more times than not, that choice will be based on input you received from within those comprising your "Circle" of friends... if me, or anyone else feeds ya a "line" to compel you to choose "their" favorite instead of what you wanted originally, they are doing you a disservice. You will doubt that for the duration of your having that guitar and probably hate me.
My problem… and it IS a problem is I’m an Audiophile… there… I admit it… I know what a sound is supposed to sound like… and my reference “tone” is real life… thus when I hear something that has the “line” skewed… I know it immediately… it’s like someone was showing me a picture window… swearing how perfectly clear it was, and I look and the darn thing has a red tint to it… it’s as obvious as looking through some dammm red glass… and no amount of “salesmanship” is gonna convince me its clear…
Further, no matter what you do to it,. It’s going to have SOME kind of tint to it. Green is opposite of Red but… put green over Red and it does not become clear…
But… here’s the kicker… some people just plain love red…
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sure nuff..
Whenever a person uses one of his senses professionally, or even as a dedicated amateur… they can develop a higher level of sensory acuity.
Example…. Many of us like to read… we open the book and absorb the literary content…. However before you get to read it, is has been “read” by someone with a higher level of “awareness” of what was actually written. They are called proofreaders. They actually see the words, as opposed to reading the words.
As a result, with fascinating speed, and amazing accuracy they pick out “typos”, do a “mark up”, and send it on to be corrected. Often upon completion, they couldn’t tell you what the topic of what they just read was if their life depended on it, but the can give you a critical analysis of the actual “copy” that brings you the “story”.
In audio, most simply hear what is going on around ‘em… a dog barks, some one whistles, a car screeches to a halt. They hear it, they recognize the sound, and that’s about it..
Someone that has developed a higher sensory acuity, and often blind people are in this category, learn to automatically notice the dog’s bark and how it reflects off the house across the street. How the whistle is “modulated” by a person in the distance stepping in front of the sound… How the tone of the screech can identify what the road is paved with. They do it automatically. But they DO recognize the spurious audio anomalies that supply volumes of additional information relative to a seemingly insignificant sound.
I was a professional photographer, and videographer…(all of us in this world of guitars had to have a real job at some time ya know). Whenever I watch a movie, I see things that are “glaring” to me… that go completely unnoticed by others watching. That’s not because I’m “better”… it’s because I worked in a field where being aware of such things ware part of the job description. It’s still ingrained in my subconscious today… I can’t “turn it off”.
Running parallel to the Photog “gig” was extensive involvement with the related audio production. I’m not a Barry Gordy, not even close…but I've spent a helluh lotta time in recording studios mess in with 2" wide tape...and watching recording artists, producers and audio engineers argue.... I still know a piece of recorded cack when I hear it… Oh . . . the Producer always wins..he signs the checks...
In the realm of audio, you can “train” yourselves to know what to listen for… In the forum here, guys will often use words like “dark” tone, “muddy”, “scooped mids” “icepicky”.. four terms that represent a very narrow four bands of a very broad audio spectrum. The terms are pretty much useless for making a critical analysis of what needs to be “worked” on. Mainly because there is no base reference…. Someone’s “muddy” may well be some one else’s “Dark”.. or “lacking brilliance” or ”no presence” or, or, or…. Or… depending on how bad the ears are… “Ice picky”. . . it’s for this reason that if YOU are producing your own recordings or directing the “mix” of your own group… you better not loose your “day job”. Why do you think monster acts hire professional producers?
A trained ear will not say “dark” … they instinctively know… boost it “X” dB at whatever hz… or…. Icepicky is meaningless… they hear and know whoever worked the mix, probably couldn’t hear crap at 2400 hz… so they “knock off a few Db at that target frequency…
So familiarity with the “media” you are analyzing is one thing, the other is your ability to hear… and your skill at doing so is another.
Consider “tone deaf”.. that is not an ON/OFF condition,… it’s a sliding scale… Just like plain old deafness… some cannot hear a peep, others, also “deaf”, can make out some sounds that occur in specific ranges where they may still have some ability to hear… There are infinite variables between perfect hearing and zero hearing… we all fall in to that range somewhere.
This is why some couldn’t care less about intonation… they can’t hear the dissonance… while others can never be made happy simply because perfect intonation is impossible on a guitar.
So from an audiophiles perspective, hearing is like standing on a balcony, looking down on a science experiment…. And listening analytically is like being at that table gazing through the microscope. You may not “see” the whole picture, but ya sure as heck know what’s making it up.
And for those that are truly looking for a “better” sound… stop trying to make the determination while you play… and better yet… making it at all… record it…and have someone else listen…and DO NOT prejudice them by revealing what you were attempting to accomplish… I mean, you do want an honest opinion don’t ya?
There are a couple of reasons… first, you cannot make an unbiased deduction. Ya just can’t do it… the next is that for the past generation now, kids have been growing up with a Walkman, and now IPods plugged into their heads… blasting their ear drums… I’m 65 and I bet ya I still hear better than most of you 30-40 year-olds… Man, your tinnitus is gonna be so bad when you’re 50, your neighbors are gonna complain.
So… just because you can hear, and hear well, doesn’t mean by even a remote possibility that an untrained ear has a clue what to listen FOR and how to act accordingly.
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I'll see if I can post another installment this afternoon... takes lots of time to condense and put into words.... but for the present....
Think of "tone" like a chess board.. 64 blocks.... and tone extremes as the points of the compass... In chess each block has a designation running a to h from left to right and 1 to 8 South to North.
Say you purchase a set of a specific set of pickups designed to yield a specific sound…. Bad Bart’s Blubber Belly Boomers… tone-wise they may be figuratively sitting on position b3 around the lower left-hand corner.. Not a bad place to be, sounding fine… you’re loving ‘em…. But…If you find a need to adjust the “tone” further left… because the pickup is already almost “off the board” you have far less room to make the adjustment. You have one block Left and two south constricting your “movement” in those directions.
A neutral pickup would be built to rest more in the center of the board… giving you a much broader range to “play ‘round” with.
But…. As I have stated many times… it all comes down to what you like… and there are some great sounding pickups that may be “on the edge” of the board… ya can’t go too much farther one way, but you do have a pretty broad range in the other direction. And if you like it… that’s the only criteria that must be met…
It doesn’t matter what tone any one block represents, if you, as the artist, prefer it… it’s perfect.
It’s just that Bill likes to design his pickups to sit somewhere around d/e 4 or 5 ‘bout in the middle of the board. That gives you a very broad range in any direction to “choose your sound”.
The reason I’m sharing all this is to help the “uninitiated” get a better handle on why Buck’s sounds different than Lindy’s sound different than Jason’s sound different than Seymour’s, sound different from Curt’s… make no mistake… those are all great pickups… I’ve used ‘em all, and would have not have done so if they sucked.
Bill’s simply offers a different approach… More on how to exploit them coming..
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Let me reemphasize…. It all comes down to what you personally like. This continuing saga is simply to enlighten at a very elementary level, those so motivated to know what goes into producing a quality pickup, and why some “kid” in some obscure province in remote China, probably is not up to speed on exactly what he is doing while wrapping wire around a bobbin.
However… none of this precludes the possibility that YOU may actually prefer the sound of the imported pickup, or any other one you may have settled on.
There is so very much “mysticism” seemingly surrounding pickups… as to what makes one “Bare Assed” or another “Mighty Twangers” and another the “Fifty Wifty Vintage”…. A name is only a designation.. If your Momma had named ya anything else, You would still be you. If a Pickup maker had named his pickups anything else, they would still be whatever they are.
You still get to choose what you like….and you may not like any of this…. But,. . .
There seems to be a recurring notion that a specific “voice” can be “dialed in” a guitar much like you would dial in a certain “station” with your trusty Hallicrafter’s short wave radio… Not so….. too many other factors to consider. Kinda like trying to dial in that radio station on the AM band, in a lightning storm.
With the radio.. each transmitter broadcasts on a specific frequency… It is regulated so that it remains stable, and detectable at the specific location on the “band” every time. No variables to skew ya a few points one way or the other. You know what and where whatever is.
That’s not the case with a guitar….as I have stated before, there are entirely too many variables for such to be workable….
A neutral pickup, however, at the very least gives you a reference point to begin from… rather like cooking… If you want to make spaghetti sauce,… you start with tomatoes…. You know where you are.,..You can build up on the recipe with a specific target in mind… however, if you walk into the kitchen, find a pot “stewing”, assume it’s the sauce, and start throwing in onions, oregano, spices, etc etc. then take a spoon and dip out a taste (plug it in) then taste it… (give it a strum)…. You may be pleasantly surprised, or hi-tailing it to the “porcelain facility” to hurl your guts up… you had no idea where you were starting from.
If you were to remove the pup from the guitar, sit in on a workbench so that all the influence of the construct of the total package were removed from the sonic equation, even then, placing a cap in the circuit would not produce a duplicable sound from multiple pickups of the same make and design with any degree of consistency, depending on how precise your analysis is.
To do that, the pickup has to be “calibrated”, or designed from the ground up., so that the sonic and electrical parameters can be determined, then repeatedly reproduced, validated “on paper”.. and put into production… I know of only one pickup manufacturer that can do that, only one that has demonstrated any awareness of the necessity of doing that.
What does that mean in a real application… say you want to alter the frequency performance around in a certain range… say 1.5 – 2 Khz… you need to know how your guitar is currently performing at that range.
Remember me saying those guys that hold up a body, knock on it, and hear it “ring”, then think, “Great it’s resonant” Well all that ring shows it that the piece of wood is resonant at THAT frequency… so… say THAT frequency is 2.2 kHz, you throw a cap of “X” pf in and shift the performance of the pickup between 1.5 and 2, but due to the parametrics of the guitar, or design of the pickup it gets a “boost” at/to 2.2 kHz, and now you got problems…and no idea why. You need to know where ya are, before you go wandering off in the dark. So now, you’re thinking whoever told you do make the mod must be a numbskull…it sounds awful, when it’s not his fault at all, it’s the “fault” of the sum total of your guitar.
The #1 problem in pickup manufacturer is eddy currents. It creates more incalculable variables in the guitar than about anything else. To visualize what they are, think of a stream, water flows continually in one direction. Note, however, the banks… a branch may have fallen into the water. Note the water’s current.. Small whirlpools “eddies” develop. These “anomalies” in the flow may not prevent the stream from flowing to whatever destination nature has determined, but, they DO disturb that flow. Enough of the “intrusions” and the stream can be reduced to a trickle, just a faint representation of the frequencies available as the string is plucked, to get back to discussing pickups.
Those same kind of “eddys” in the electron flow can create any number of unpleasant sounds from a pickup. Well, unpleasant unless you like the sound, that is a real possibility, and perfectly acceptable.
Much the same thing happens as the electrons are flowing along the copper wire… smooth sailing yields those sweet, almost bell like tones characteristic of the vintage, most notably the early 60’s, pickups.
At this point the most often asked question: Why could they produce those sounds then, and have such a difficult time now… answer… “Greenies” . . “tree huggers”… good old environmental regulation. More about that in a moment…
But… what causes the nefarious eddy current…. “branches” “rocks” and other “crap” in the flow…. Or how the pup is built… and the “stuff” it’s made from.
Copper wire….You could take the sum total of everything about anything printed on the TDPRI, since the TDPRI was the TDP… and it would not compare to what can and has been written about copper wire and conductivity. For you newbies… that’s a boat load of writing… for you old timers… that’s a boat load of writing… or to put in in to words easy to understand…that’s a boat load of writing.
And to help you get a grip on “who Bill is”. . . . Bill serves as consultant to Elektrisola, the world’s largest manufacturer of fine wire. They use his input to validate their research, simply because his test procedures are capable of a higher level of “resolution” than theirs. (read that again)…
To better understand who Elektrisola is… they supply the conductors that are used in CERN, JPL, Lawrence-Livermore, MIT, Cal-Tech, and any other esoteric research lab exploring physics so far out in front of the “leading edge” most of us will not live long enough to even hear about “stuff” they are exploring today… much less, see it’s application. Example… Consider last month’s release that scientists have stopped time momentarily. Think about that one… it was done, to be certain with Electrosola’s wire in the experimental equipment….Heinlein’s Stasis field is around the corner… And while it was only for a fraction of a second… remember, the first “light bulb” only burned a few seconds, too.
Now, I do not point this out to suggest Bill has come to us from Mt. Olympus… I do it so you know he is not simply some guy, good with his hands, wrapping wire around magnets and checking the results. Then selling them as pickups. He is not infallible… I know personally he has made a mistake. One day, he stuck out his hand, said. “Hi, My name is Bill Lawrence, and yours is Jzchak Wajcman?”
So, why do those guys need wire and an application of such, so “refined”? … Because the transformers, coils, chokes, and anything requiring “wire” and the associated electron flows, at those levels of Physics, has to be “pure” beyond imagination.. and to achieve that they access Bills input. You also have access to Bill’s input for your guitar. ‘Nuff said?
So back to Eddy and the Currents. To further help in comprehending the difficulty in computing how and what those electrons will do as they “flow”… consider.. DC current… you know the figure most oft used to determine a pickups “characteristics”, and listed as KO DC. That info is as useless as a Chili Fart in a hurricane.
In copper… DC current flows through the whole body of the conductor. If it’s 12 VDC it reads 12 VDC at the surface of the conductor, and 12 VDC in the dead center of the conductor. This is NOT the case with AC…
AC, Alternating Current, has by definition, a frequency. The Hum we hear so often is the 60 cycle frequency the 117 VAC we have available at the wall receptacle … or 220 VAC (mains) in much of the rest of the world, fluctuating at 50 hz. It’s alternating current simply because it flows one way, for 1/60 of a second, the it reverses, and flows the other way for 1/16th of a second and repeats constantly 24/7 day in, day out,,, continually as long as the Hurricanes stay away.
Now, unlike DC, AC flows at the surface of the wire…. So for a given size wire, it actually has considerably less “area” to travel on. At some frequencies it is virtually undetectable in the center of the wire. Reduce the size of the wire the current has available to flow on, and the resistance goes up… so what may be 6 kO for “x” DC voltage, will be considerably higher for the same value in AC voltage (remember AC is the ONLY voltage at work in your passive guitar.) But… since the “frequency’ of DC is 1 .. it only goes one way,… it’s NOT for AC… In your guitar Open E 6th is 82.407 hz that means the current is reversing itself that many times a second and at the other end, E1st at the 20th fret is 1046.50 hz that’s a lotta scrambling back and forth. But those kind of frequencies in AC do weird things to a simple pickup.
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As the frequencies go up, the resistance goes up… so a low E may read one resistance, say “X” KO but shuffle up the scale to E 1st open and the resistance increases dramatically by several orders of magnitude, thus higher frequencies require a bigger electromotive force or “push”.. to achieve the same volume as lower frequencies.. this is also why we use a bleeder circuit in the guitar…
Note to “scientists” . . . I know there is a hellova lot more than what I have just described and infinite exceptions and variations… stuff it please….I’m trying to keep this at least modestly understandable. If you wanna debate, please go to EienstinewaswrongEdoesnot=MCsquared.com and have at it.
… to further complicate matters, things like the capacitance and resistance of various components, the proximity of metals, ferrous, non ferrous, diamagnetic, and paramagnetic, all come into play, as does those darn little cracks in the Formvar that we will get to….. All of that stuff impacts the eddy currents and is why you cant just go down to your local Radio Shack and buy an Eddy-o-meter… to find the little boogers. The math involved is waaaaaaay above my pay grade. But Bill’s teaching me…
How? What? Huh?? What that gotta do with anything???
In your guitar.. the current that is generated as the string vibrated in the magnetic field is AC. When the string moves across the magnetic field, a current is generated that flows one way, and when it comes back across, that current’s direction of flow is reversed, back and forth, back and forth. If you played A, the current reversed 440 times a second. Think controlling that is complicated… pick two notes simultaneously… now you have currents flowing in both directions At the SAME TIME… Think about setting up your garden hose to allow water to come out the end while water is going in the same end… that’s how complicated the Physics are in something this simple.
So what’s all that gotta do with the nefarious eddy currents,,, any little anomaly creates eddy currents. Any eddy current degrades the pickups performance … again… unless you like the sound of the degraded pickup.. are you getting that… this whole dissertation is just “why”.. it has nothing to do with, if you like what you have, or not.
Disclaimer:…. When I say degrades.. I mean in a scientific context, as the product of data entered. Eddy currents detected, factored into the equations to determine what frequencies can and are impacted and how they are impacted, and those results analyzed to determine how a pickup will sound in a clinical situation when seen in a spectral analysis. But if you want pure, this is stuff you gotta do. But, frankly, some are NEVER going to like “pure”. That’s why there are blended Scotches and Coffees and Chocolates, and so forth.
Since how “good” a sound is received and perceived is entirely up to the one hearing it… there can be some pretty “nasty” (as far as the data shows) sounding pickups that YOU may love.
So to how the greenies impacted the sound of your guitar….
When copper wire is wound, even at moderate speeds many physical things happen to the wire. Most often it simply stretches. If that happens, a 42 AWG wire can easily become a 43 AWG wire … but … remember…. the copper is coated… that’s an insulation to keep it from shorting out. ( yeah I know, very basic but some do not know that). The coating used in the good ‘old days was Formvar… the coating you guys most often request is Formvar… Formvar is kind of, still available. . . Kind of…
In the Good ol days, the wire was coated with the Formvar… people mistakenly called it enamel coated copper wire. Formvar is NOT enamel… it is Formvar. One of the “chemicals” used in its manufacture was Benzene, it was also used in the vintage Nitrocellulose Lacquers. The stuff’s gone now…. As gone as common sense in Washington…and the “cool” of a lotta pickup winders…
The EPA banned its manufacturer several decades ago… They discovered that if you put a lab rat in a box and evaporate several metric tons of the stuff into the 3 cubic foot box.. the Rat didn’t fare too well. . . . Even though that’s a “flip” description, it’s not too far removed from the absurdity in some of the lab tests used to determine if “stuff” is good or bad for ya. Bet you didn’t know you can drink enough water to actually poison ya did ya? But the EPA hasn’t banned it yet…. Bet if it was bug killer they would in a heartbeat.
So . . No more Benzene… Benzene based Formvar was flexible…. Stretch the wire,,, the Formvar stretched…. No problem…. The new Formvar is nowhere near as flexible… stretch this stuff and it cracks.. microscopic cracks to be sure… but open cracks none the less… where do these cracks usually occur… at the ends of the bobbin as the wire spins around the magnets. There’s a lot of pressure there pressing the strands of wire together too. Those cracks are responsible for the eddy currents… they are the rocks and branches in the “stream” that degrade the sound of the pickup.
These cracks are so fine a simple test with a VOM, reading DC Ohms does not tell you a thing, they are completely invisible to such readings. They are not detected as a loss of continuity, or a direct short. For all practical purposes, they do not exist if you are reading DC Ohms. So why not read AC Ohms… OK you wanna go there… well do that.. Let’s get it on… Next time….
Oh, regarding the cracked Formvar… Bill has designed and built his own winders to create pickups free of any cracked Formvar and the resulting eddy currents. He has also developed proprietary methodology to test completed pickups, anyone’s pickups, to determine if eddy currents are present. Sorry, but that information is going top remain proprietary.
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After a mere 200 +- minutes yesterday evening… a correction…. Formvar…. I got my notes crossed… it is flexible…more or less…. Thus, not subject to the kind of cracking I mentioned earlier, as long as certain procedures are followed after production of the coil. Fail to follow those procedures and “crazing” can occur, crazing in the technical sense is not a feature you want as part of your pickups either. It too can act as “booking agent” for Eddie and the Currents.
Leo followed those procedures when he made pickups in the “good old days”. Those “post winding” procedures are outlined in the data sheets available for those choosing to use Formvar coated wire for pickup production. Fail to follow the procedures and electro-mechanical failure is a high probability. If not an outright failure… thus the eddy currents become a real factor.
Also, Bill would like it clarified, he acts as consultant to Elektrisola regarding only the magnet wire used in guitar pickups and related areas. Also, he does not want you to get the idea that he is superior to their research capabilities, he only contributes his input, and often depends on their multi-million dollar equipment to determine design parameters to be incorporated in his pickups and related research.
Further Elektrisola should not be viewed as direct suppliers to those research facilities I mentioned earlier. It’s more an indirect connection, such as supplying those manufacturing the test and experimental gear such facilities depend on to do analytical research. You can buy the same equipment, as long as you have a hundred Million dollar research grant… no biggie.. And I only listed them as examples of the level that their products find a way into. Elektrisola specializes in the manufacturer of fine grade copper wire for use in coils, etc., not “conductor” type wire…. As Bill said, it’s a small point, but accuracy at any level where Bill is involved is paramount.
It is the other coatings available on the wire used for coil winding that can crack at the drop of a hat when misused. And when I say crack, I mean microscopic failure… it cannot be seen except under a microscope. It still maintains insulating properties for “normal” conductivity, it’s just when it comes under the “stress” of performing with AC current oscillating at many, many thousands of times a seconds, do the problems associated with eddy currents, and out right electrical shorts come into play.
Use of any of these wires can require very esoteric procedures to ensure an electronically “flawless” pickup.
Simply put… sure you can use the instructions on the many sites telling how to make pickups, and make pretty good pups with those instructions… but.. there are home made Dune Buggies, and there are Humvees. If you’re buying one, you want to know what’s “under the hood”.. really know.
Also, to further elaborate…. eddy currents are not only produced by poor winding techniques, there are other considerations that must be factored in. I just neglected to mention them.
The close proximity of just about any metal, Steel, Brass, Copper, Stainless Steel, Nickel, Titanium, Aluminum… all are “players” in this saga. Their proximity to the coil can disturb the internal flow of electrons. That “disturbance” can be incorporated into the design and “exploited” to produce a specific outcome, but you must know how to detect them, extrapolate the information, and use it mathematically to know what the final “sound” will reflect.
It is for this very reason I have often said… shielding…. Simple shielding will alter the sound of your guitar…Or, stick a piece of steel or any other metal, on the bottom of the pickup, it too can alter the tone by generating eddy currents within the flow internal of the coil. Use the wrong steel alloy in the adjustable pole screws, for instance, guess what . . . Eddy and the Currents will be playing again. Even the choice of metal the tele bridge is made of can influence the pickup’s sound greatly. Well, greatly from an engineering point of view.
I hope the picture is forming, and why I often say, anything you do to your guitar will alter the sound, it MAY be “good” . . . you like the change, it may be bad, . . . You do not like the change, or, it may be so subtle everyone you have listen to your “improvement” thinks you’re nuts.
This is why Bill’s pickups come with specific screws. Even the “lead wires” are selected for the same reason, i.e. every component found within a Bill Lawrence pickup has been selected for it’s ability to influence, or its lack of influence on the final sound. Even the Epoxy, is a certain type, selected for specific reasons. To know how these “metals” impact the tone, you have to be able to extract data, factor it into the calculus, “do the math”, analyze the results, and adjust accordingly. Do you really think “Bad Bart’s Texas Butt Busters” has gone to those extremes to insure a repeatable sound?
And I hope this is not "scaring" those so inclined, from "experimenting.... fact is… pick any functioning pickup, hook it up, pluck the string, and you’re going to hear the note. If you like what you hear, the pickup is the right choice… Further, YOU can select some of the most objectionable, electrically corrupted pickups, and If you can play, there isn’t anyone gonna be complaining about your “eddy currents”. They’re just going to stand there, slack jawed, amazed at your talent. That’s what ya really want isn’t it?
So if you have decided on a specific set of pickups, perhaps not made by Bill, and they have an enviable reputation, by all means don’t let me, or anyone else dissuade you from your choice. Do so, and you will be nagged by your indecision for the life of those pups. Get what YOU want, not what some goober tells ya you want.
As I have said, there are many very fine pickups, intentionally designed with a specific sound. That means their sound is NOT a mistake… it’s what it’s supposed to be… Some just want a Chevy, or a Ford, they have no interest in the Bimmers and Mercedes.
Also, many of the sonic “variables” I mention are subtle… and often “lost” when playing at rock concert levels… but you guys have consistently shown you are in a never ending “tone quest”… if you are not insisting on ALL OF the sonic information the string is capable of generating, emitting from the speaker, what are you doing? It’s rather like saying I wanna go to the Moon, but I’d rather not leave the neighborhood.
The real purpose of all this is to share why, all the bull on so many pickup manufacturer’s website suggesting, to just buy their pickups and you get a specific sound, is misguided at best.
That would require the ability to reproduce specific electrical parameters within the construct of the pickup. To know how, you have to know how to test to extract data to know what the “electrons” are doing and what they are supposed to be doing.
Far too many “winders” can tell you what their pickups may sound like, but few, if any can tell you why. If you don’t know why, you cannot reproduce them. Each will be different. Simply selecting the same alloy magnets and the same “X” number of turns with a specific AWG wire is NOT going to guarantee anything other than you now have wire wrapped around magnets. Ya gotta know the “science” to make a repeatable sound.
Repetition for emphasis… all of this… at the most complex.. is the tip of the proverbial “iceberg” as relates to producing a quality pickup. This is applied Quantum Mechanics at the molecular level. (redundant again, I know) BUT ….. even at that… this does not mean your pickups suck. If you like them, that’s all that’s required.
The reason I’m harping on a repeatable sound is because if you hear a certain “tone”, either in some other guitar you are witness to, or through a “file” available on someone’s website, you need to be reassured the applied science is such that you are going to receive pickups that sound like you ordered. Make sense?
The problem… to test… requires the application of quantum physics. I can guarantee ya there aren’t a lot of winders that have the ability to take a scientific calculator, extract the data from the pickup, enter the factors into the equation, and produce data that can be applied to the product.
The differences I'm speaking of, or rather, Bill is speaking of, are analogous to what’s available in the world of automobiles… there are Chevys and there are Mercedes, there are Miata’s and there are Ferraris. A Chevy isn’t a Merc and a Miata isn’t a Ferrari… But they do the same exact thing, they keep your butt from draggin’ on the road as ya scoot around town.
Simple fact, if you had no concept of the engineering involved, hop in an up-scale Chevy, then a Mercedes, and you really wouldn’t notice much more than a few “superficial” differences. They both do the same thing…. It’s when you get into the “internals” the real differences show up. Subtleties in suspension design, quality of bearings, application of advanced technology, etc, etc, but turn a corner, and neither is going to flip over.
Point in all this… there are Timex watches, and Girard-Perregaux watches . . . fact is.. a minute doesn’t have a clue on which one it has passed… And if You can play, it doesn’t mean diddly what pickup you are using. But it certainly is nice to actually know what you have bought.
Ron Kirn, TDPRI:
Well... I was at NAMM in '08 when Bill chose to debut the Micros.... he said then they still needed a little "fine tuning"... it has taken the past 3 years to do that fine tuning.... now... factor in that Bill is responsible for virtually every "innovation" you see touted in anyone's pickups, or responsible for the theories that lead to those innovations, all of ‘em…. He has that level of understanding about what happens to those little electrons when you wrap wire around magnets . . .and that man took 3 years to fine tune what was a hellova great pickup 3 years ago... theses things have to be incredible... I'm building one now that will have 'em in it...
One thing you should consider when choosing ANY pickup is….. if it’s advertised as delivering a certain “tone”.. it is technically flawed from the outset… that is because a pickup should not impart any “tone” on the information the string is inducing onto it. It should be a totally neutral factor in the transition from the vibrating string, thru to the vibrating speaker cone. Anything that unintentionally adds it’s acoustic skew to that signal is flawed.
Bill’s pickups are designed to be neutral…. THAT DOES NOT MEAN bland sounding…. It means they have “no sound”.. they only relay what the guitar is capable of doing…. Is this good…. Damn straight it is…. Ask any audio engineer… most of ‘em are totally sick of YOU showing up with a guitar your blown out ears thinks sounds good, only to have to whip out a 128 channel equalizer to get the “line” flat enough to be useable. And this is the reason that when ever someone posts a video of themselves playing a whatever through a whatever amp to demonstrate the differences between A and B... recorded with their 300.00 Sony CamCorder’s mike, played back through those Logitech speakers sitting behind your monitor, I fall out of my chair laughing. All of that equipment you have just used for recording and playback put down a totally unacceptable level of acoustic coloration to whatever point you were trying to make.. Yeah, yours too.
So… Neutrality…. This gives YOU the opportunity to modify the sound with the controls and/or FX you have at your disposal… YOU are in total control… How does this differ from pickups designed to yield a specific sound?
For those pups to produce a certain sound.. their output has to be “skewed” in a specific direction…this is done by how they are designed and built…Bright… a boost in the upper frequencies, Spanky…. In the mid upper…. Dark… in the lower frequencies….
What this means… no matter what you do (within reason) you cannot override the pickup’s initial output… you can color it further…. But what ever the pickup designer did, is there always… that’s not the case with Bill’s… you and your audio “guys” get to decide how you sound…. This is also why so many session musicians use Bill’s pickups… the don’t wanna argue with the engineers at the recording studio.
To put things in perspective…. In the world of totally ridiculously high-end home audio reproduction… a darn great phono cartridge can be purchased for a couple hundred bux…. But it still imparts a miniscule bit of it’s flawed coloration on the recording it’s playing back…. To move closer to perfection in the playback, spending 10’s of thousands for a PHONO cartridge (that’s the needle on the end of a tone arm) is quite customary…. For those poo-bahing phonograph recordings… guys spending 50 to 100.000.00 and frankly way beyond for a home stereo aren’t playing CD’s.
This one is considered modestly acceptable. . .
http://www.musicdirect.co...ger-v2-mc-cartridge.aspx
But my point… Bill is handing you that kind of clarity… for “pennies”… Frankly, I have no idea why anyone would even consider any other pickup…
But all that said... some prefer the colorations that define a 57/62. or Texas Specials., or a PAF Humbucker, or any one of a multitude of other very high quality pickups... For them Bill's may NOT be the right choice... it still all comes down to what you personally prefer.... decide... and go with it....
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The sad truth is that the $10k phono cartridge might be more colored than the $200 one, because so many audiophiles LOVE coloration (though they will never admit that's what it is).
absolutely true... and one can only wonder if it's because guys with enough expendable cash to venture into such realms typically have ears old enough to be sonically flawed too.
or... If ya cannot hear 6000 hz too well... (or whatever frequency) you might just gravitate toward a piece of equipment that is a little "hot" at that specific frequency thinking you have found sonic utopia... know what... you have.. cause it sounds "right" to you and you are the only one to whom it matters.
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I guess I should "qualify" the above dissertation...
1, there is no audio device made anywhere at any price that is 100% neutral....
2, the pickup is not the ONLY factor in the calculus of a guitar that can and does contribute to sonic coloration... that is the results of a collaborative effect of every part of the guitar coming together.
Sound from a guitar's perspective is much like wishing you had clear water... so you put in it a yellow glass... mix it with a spoon stained with grape juice, pour it of through a tube stained with Cherry Juice... then hold it up an a crystal clear container (the amp) and wonder why there it a definitive tint to it..
In quality audio REPRODUCTION the goal is to keep every thing clear... that's the GOAL... it is NOT attainable... it is only approachable....
In audio GENERATION anything goes... the one doing the generation is the artist.... assuming he thinks of his talent as art.... but for that artist... he gets to choose what his "art" will sound like... he can "skew" it all he likes.... until. . . the Producer, Director, Audio techs, etc etc, walk in... then those guys will tell ya where ya suck.... that's what they get paid for.
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is just counter to basic guitar tone philosophy. The tone coloration that pickups impart to the note has always been and will always be part (in fact the FIRST part) of the equation.
the problem with "basic guitar tone philosophy" is its foundation... that the audio spectrum MUST be skewed to generate acceptable sound... and that “first part” factoid, is that based on empirical data or opinion? Just wonderin’, cause I’d kinda think that completely subordinates the thing that does in fact impart the number one variable to the tone…. Any one ever hear of the AMP? Change a pickup and compare… then change the speaker and compare…. Hummmm…
Further… the tone coloration the pickup imparts can only cascade upon the “back” of all the other factors imparting tone coloration. The guitar is a study in compromises, and any change is only a lateral one… unless the owner likes it, then it becomes a vertical move. It doesn’t matter what “tone” you care to “diss” . . . someone, somewhere likes that sound… and for them a change off that mark would be a step backwards.
Guys that make and sell pickups, stating, to paraphrase, “our pickups have the best tone”, state by inference, that their opinion is of higher value than anyone that would choose otherwise. How lame is that?
as I stated in conclusion…
But all that said... some prefer the colorations that define a 57/62. or Texas Specials., or a PAF Humbucker, or any one of a multitude of other very high quality pickups... For them Bill's may NOT be the right choice... it still all comes down to what you personally prefer.... decide... and go with it....
Can anyone describe how the microcoils sound in comparison with the keystones?
no one can do that with any two sets of pickups… there are too many variables…. They can give you generalities…. The problem with such general assumptions… is that they’re general assumptions…
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I posted this over in another thread...dealing, once again with "stuff" that's nothing more than a personal preference... such things are meaningless..... but I'll lay it down here too....
"sumbodiez gotta say it, otherwise the forum just becomes a constant drone of the same old bull being said different ways....
The only thing that is actually important regarding the guitar is how much you practice with it..... absolutely everything else is nothing more than "fashion"... wood, paint, pup tone, caps, cable, strings, color, switching options, fret size radius, shape of headstock, type keys, color of the tint, how new or beat up your guitar looks, how old it really is....if it's a parts caster, or one of mine....if it's a set neck or if the pocket is a half inch too wide... none of that matters...
If ya (don't) [SIC] think so, hand the "perfect" guitar to some goober that can't pick his butt... and see how it sounds..."
Bill called last night while I was out... left a message, that he'll call again this afternoon... to "go over this thread.... I gotta go get some beer and a comfortable chair for the "chat".... I'll try to sum up the details in a few paragraphs after the feeling returns to the hand that will be holding the phone... :wink:
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OK... I spent 2 multi hour sessions with Bill Yesterday.... the feeling is just now returning to my hand....
First. Bill asked me to convey Becky and His best wishes for a Happy New Year to you all. He feels a deep affection for all of us that touch his life through our connection, through the guitar. It greaves him considerably that he finds it so very difficult to sit and type his response personally, but, he is watching, reading this thread.... everyone smile and waive..
The next most immediate thing he asked me to clarify is his involvement in so many innovations within the realm of pickups.
He is very uncomfortable with "inventor". He religiously gives credit where credit is due, and usurps none, if not appropriate. He IS comfortable with the word Innovator... and would clarify the definition..
In his world an innovator is one that adapts burgeoning technologies and applies then into seemingly unrelated areas...
One example would be Seth Lover.... accredited with inventing the Humbucker.... However, what actually happened was the application of theories and research began in the early 1800's at the inception of applying electricity to anything. The "canceling" nature resulting from the close proximity of 2 coils under an electrical current was the work of a scientist (i forgot to note his name) in the 1830's. This lead to additional research regarding coils placed in close proximity and the results of such action.
Now... for those saying . .. Bull . . . weren't no 'electricity way back then.... OH...?? I, as would many versed in such history, would encourage a study of said topic....
But to further illustrate the concept of an innovator.... another "invention" comes to mind....
about... 1800, research, if ya called it research back then, began of using electrical current... to produce some result at the other end of a very crude wire....like simply making a Compass react.... it did..... the "scientist" then devised a way to make a magnetically charged needle react to the electrical impulse to point to a specific letter of the alphabet. Thus through innovation, incorporating previous discovery’s, he created the first means of communicating via “wire” over a distance… the message was, “Make that two large, one Super supreme, and the other thin crust with peperoni and mushrooms.” Didn’t know that did ya. “Oh, and an order of those cheese bread sticks…”
But it was on the way….. later, within a few years…it was determined that wrapping wire around a ferrous core, and exciting it with electrical energy created a magnet. If you turned the electricity on and off with a switch, the electro-magnet would revert back to inert…and whatever the magnet was attracting would fall away.
Without going, step by step, through all the innovators that continued to build upon that first piece of wire running through a garden making a Compass deflect…. It did continue until one Alexander Graham Bell.. realized that if the “sounder”, the “receiver”, in a telegraph was light enough.. it could move faster…and faster… and if the “key” was lighter, and even, yet lighter, it could be actuated by a minuscule small amount of pressure… like air pressure.
As the speed of response increased, the “frequency” generated by the sounder moved from a rapid clicking, to more of a tone… and that tone could be altered. (modulated) by making the “key” or source, move faster or slower… this lead to the discovery that the “receiver” didn’t have to have a hunk of metal banging down to make a click, but if a very thin piece of ferrous metal was suspended in close proximity to the receiving electro magnet, it would oscillate fast enough to produce the desired frequency (tone)…and it would cause the air around it to move.
Whether by design or accident ( accident is a major contributor to scientific discovery) it was determined that the reverse happened too.. i.e. if the very thin piece of ferrous metal were subjected to rapid oscillations it would result in a variable current being generated in the electro magnet, that could be extracted, sent along a wire, or actually a pair of wires, to another electro magnet. With a light weight piece of ferrous metal (a diaphragm) suspended in close proximity and it would make the diaphragm vibrate sympathetically in unison with the one on the other end.
What did that do… it caused compression and expansion in the air molecules immediately around the receiving diaphragm.. such variances in the atmosphere would be transmitted, air molecule buy air molecule, colliding with others, until the air against Watson’s ear heard Alex say, “Watson, come here, I need you.” That was an accident… Alexander Graham Bell had no Idea that, at that time he had the protogenic telephone before him.
Thus… Bell did not invent the Telephone, he was its innovator. He took previously conceived sciences, and applied them to a seemingly unrelated exploration, with a new application of those “old” ideas resulting in a completely new concept.
It was other innovators that discovered, shortly thereafter, how to amplify the sound of a vibrating string with basically the same technology… this lead to Seth Lover’s eventual innovations as applied to previously “invented” guitar pickups.
What you have just read is nothing more than the logic behind why Bill prefers to be thought of as an Innovator, not an invertor.
I spent over 3 hours with him yesterday, this is gonna take a while….. more to come…..
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The next aspect of his pickups he wanted me to clarify is the notion of “neutrality”…
A neutral sound is great… as a starting point…. It gives YOU, the artist the creative input to produce YOUR own, or any other sound, you choose to…. But a “flat audio spectrum” as a progenitor of the music is generally …. Ready for this… Flat sounding . . . that’s what the tone controls are for…
Bill’s target “tone” when calculating the parametrics that will yield the final sound is: he wants you to be able to set the Bass, Mid, and Treble, on 5 and have as flat a “line” as possible. By rotating "off" 5, mixing and matching settings you would be able to reproduce about any pickups sound you like.
“Calculating the parametrics” is an important choice of words. Far too many pickup makers simply take a conglomerate of pickup parts, put ‘em together… trying something “unique”, and see what the result’s are. They then give it a sexy name, and begin marketing… the “Ass Whuppin Growlers” or the “Sweet Bayou Belltones” or the “Beale Street Barkers”. When it was more of a “by chance” experiment that produced whatever… but… since the pickups already HAVE a tone… it snatches from you that facet of creativity… you DO NOT get to choose your tone… someone else has done it for ya.
Bill sits down with paper and pencil, calculator and his brain, and knows what the sound will be before the first layer of wire is spun. There are few that have ever demonstrated on their websites that have that level of understanding about the quantum physics involved…. Yeah, Quantum Physics… it’s not just for Nuclear explosions ya know. Ya don’t just change the sound of a pickup by substituting Alnico 3’s for 5’s or using “scatter winding”.
But back to neutrality… Bill revealed, even he does not like neutrality’s “flat line” sound when performing. But by having that as an option, with the micros and the use of the tone controls you may duplicate the acoustic signature of any pickup you choose. You have an infinitely wider range, than that the “Pre skewed” pickups offer.
Go back and re read that last paragraph… I’ll wait a few second… Humm, Humm,,Lallalaallll deedaaaaa,,,, done… “ Got that? Any pickup….
So to answer . . .
Can anybody speak to how the microcoils compare to G&L MFDs?
Yeah, Bill can…. The sound exactly the same….. if you want them to….
And in response to:
Bardens are dual-coil humbuckers. Apples and oranges, as they say.
Bardens are pickups … the Micros can duplicate any pickups…. So draw your own conclusion…. ( Side note the Bardens are a derivative of Bill’s designs of the early 70’s, since few sold, he discontinued them and an associate of his, Joe Barden, somewhat later revisited the design and found greater success in marketing them”).
The caveat... this is MY perspective... YOU have to learn a new skill.. that of analyzing what you are hearing, to know where the sonic differences lay, and how to use the controls at hand to “move” that line towards the sound you want..
Often rotating the 3 controls only slightly can offer dramatic variations in sound colorations. You don’t hafta swing from 2 to 8…
So to waddle back toward neutrality...
One pickup maker inferred that he felt it was the maker’s responsibility to select the sound your guitar would produce. Actually, there is nothing wrong with that notion. There are many, and you learn this in “sales” classes, many, far too many people, want someone else with “credibility” to tell them what decision THEY should make. For those, there are “pre skewed” (audio wise) pickups available.
But for those that choose to make a tonal variant part of their art… a more neutral “starting point” allows for more “expression”.
For those yawing… My “very skewed” pickups still respond to tone changes… well yes, right, but from “outside the box” those changes all occur on one side of the proverbial hill? They sound pretty much alike.
A guitar designed to produce a specific tonal coloration still has a preponderance of that tonal coloration despite how much you turn the tone controls.
And to be perfectly honest… even with the Micros… there are a multitude of other factors comprising the guitar/amp symbiosis that is going to lend a specific tonal character to the sound.. That cannot be neutralized… nada chance…
But… a pickup like the micros… at least give you the opportunity to explore tonal caverns not available if a pickup choice has already closed the cave.
In another thread, perhaps this one,,, I forget….. I said there is only one aspect of the guitar that is of any importance… how much you practice, or, your level of skill… absolutely everything else is a “fashion” choice. Therefore those that choose a pickup with a strong coloration are NOT somehow less astute than those choosing neutrality. It’s their choice, it’s their art…
Next I’ll try to share a little about the options available in altering the “voice” of your guitar without ripping the heart out of it.
This notion that you just gotta rip the pickups out to get another sound is just plain stupid… got that…. And I’m being the rare politically correct here.
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It occurred to me (happens sometimes) that I should make clear... while it's obvious I do love Bills pickups... I do understand not all will...for any number of reasons... and that’s fine.. You are not some ill-informed “goober” stuck in “fly over country” because you follow your choice… Hell… I’ve made one or two in my life that still has me scratching my head… whut wuz I thinkin”?
I do not, nor will I attempt to dissuade any from selecting the pickups they prefer in any build I may be doing. I ask ya what do you want, and I give ya that. It’s that simple… Now if ya ask what do I think… well . . . you opened that can ‘o worms didn’t ya?
If you have one in the “works” and you have selected another’s pickups, I’m not thinking, “Dork, whatta looser….” More times than not… I’ll get ‘er done, plug ‘er in, and think, “Damn, that sounds good, really good….”
There are any number of absolutely amazing pickups available for you to choose from, and, more times than not, that choice will be based on input you received from within those comprising your "Circle" of friends... if me, or anyone else feeds ya a "line" to compel you to choose "their" favorite instead of what you wanted originally, they are doing you a disservice. You will doubt that for the duration of your having that guitar and probably hate me.
My problem… and it IS a problem is I’m an Audiophile… there… I admit it… I know what a sound is supposed to sound like… and my reference “tone” is real life… thus when I hear something that has the “line” skewed… I know it immediately… it’s like someone was showing me a picture window… swearing how perfectly clear it was, and I look and the darn thing has a red tint to it… it’s as obvious as looking through some dammm red glass… and no amount of “salesmanship” is gonna convince me its clear…
Further, no matter what you do to it,. It’s going to have SOME kind of tint to it. Green is opposite of Red but… put green over Red and it does not become clear…
But… here’s the kicker… some people just plain love red…
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Could you explain this more?
sure nuff..
Whenever a person uses one of his senses professionally, or even as a dedicated amateur… they can develop a higher level of sensory acuity.
Example…. Many of us like to read… we open the book and absorb the literary content…. However before you get to read it, is has been “read” by someone with a higher level of “awareness” of what was actually written. They are called proofreaders. They actually see the words, as opposed to reading the words.
As a result, with fascinating speed, and amazing accuracy they pick out “typos”, do a “mark up”, and send it on to be corrected. Often upon completion, they couldn’t tell you what the topic of what they just read was if their life depended on it, but the can give you a critical analysis of the actual “copy” that brings you the “story”.
In audio, most simply hear what is going on around ‘em… a dog barks, some one whistles, a car screeches to a halt. They hear it, they recognize the sound, and that’s about it..
Someone that has developed a higher sensory acuity, and often blind people are in this category, learn to automatically notice the dog’s bark and how it reflects off the house across the street. How the whistle is “modulated” by a person in the distance stepping in front of the sound… How the tone of the screech can identify what the road is paved with. They do it automatically. But they DO recognize the spurious audio anomalies that supply volumes of additional information relative to a seemingly insignificant sound.
I was a professional photographer, and videographer…(all of us in this world of guitars had to have a real job at some time ya know). Whenever I watch a movie, I see things that are “glaring” to me… that go completely unnoticed by others watching. That’s not because I’m “better”… it’s because I worked in a field where being aware of such things ware part of the job description. It’s still ingrained in my subconscious today… I can’t “turn it off”.
Running parallel to the Photog “gig” was extensive involvement with the related audio production. I’m not a Barry Gordy, not even close…but I've spent a helluh lotta time in recording studios mess in with 2" wide tape...and watching recording artists, producers and audio engineers argue.... I still know a piece of recorded cack when I hear it… Oh . . . the Producer always wins..he signs the checks...
In the realm of audio, you can “train” yourselves to know what to listen for… In the forum here, guys will often use words like “dark” tone, “muddy”, “scooped mids” “icepicky”.. four terms that represent a very narrow four bands of a very broad audio spectrum. The terms are pretty much useless for making a critical analysis of what needs to be “worked” on. Mainly because there is no base reference…. Someone’s “muddy” may well be some one else’s “Dark”.. or “lacking brilliance” or ”no presence” or, or, or…. Or… depending on how bad the ears are… “Ice picky”. . . it’s for this reason that if YOU are producing your own recordings or directing the “mix” of your own group… you better not loose your “day job”. Why do you think monster acts hire professional producers?
A trained ear will not say “dark” … they instinctively know… boost it “X” dB at whatever hz… or…. Icepicky is meaningless… they hear and know whoever worked the mix, probably couldn’t hear crap at 2400 hz… so they “knock off a few Db at that target frequency…
So familiarity with the “media” you are analyzing is one thing, the other is your ability to hear… and your skill at doing so is another.
Consider “tone deaf”.. that is not an ON/OFF condition,… it’s a sliding scale… Just like plain old deafness… some cannot hear a peep, others, also “deaf”, can make out some sounds that occur in specific ranges where they may still have some ability to hear… There are infinite variables between perfect hearing and zero hearing… we all fall in to that range somewhere.
This is why some couldn’t care less about intonation… they can’t hear the dissonance… while others can never be made happy simply because perfect intonation is impossible on a guitar.
So from an audiophiles perspective, hearing is like standing on a balcony, looking down on a science experiment…. And listening analytically is like being at that table gazing through the microscope. You may not “see” the whole picture, but ya sure as heck know what’s making it up.
And for those that are truly looking for a “better” sound… stop trying to make the determination while you play… and better yet… making it at all… record it…and have someone else listen…and DO NOT prejudice them by revealing what you were attempting to accomplish… I mean, you do want an honest opinion don’t ya?
There are a couple of reasons… first, you cannot make an unbiased deduction. Ya just can’t do it… the next is that for the past generation now, kids have been growing up with a Walkman, and now IPods plugged into their heads… blasting their ear drums… I’m 65 and I bet ya I still hear better than most of you 30-40 year-olds… Man, your tinnitus is gonna be so bad when you’re 50, your neighbors are gonna complain.
So… just because you can hear, and hear well, doesn’t mean by even a remote possibility that an untrained ear has a clue what to listen FOR and how to act accordingly.
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I'll see if I can post another installment this afternoon... takes lots of time to condense and put into words.... but for the present....
Think of "tone" like a chess board.. 64 blocks.... and tone extremes as the points of the compass... In chess each block has a designation running a to h from left to right and 1 to 8 South to North.
Say you purchase a set of a specific set of pickups designed to yield a specific sound…. Bad Bart’s Blubber Belly Boomers… tone-wise they may be figuratively sitting on position b3 around the lower left-hand corner.. Not a bad place to be, sounding fine… you’re loving ‘em…. But…If you find a need to adjust the “tone” further left… because the pickup is already almost “off the board” you have far less room to make the adjustment. You have one block Left and two south constricting your “movement” in those directions.
A neutral pickup would be built to rest more in the center of the board… giving you a much broader range to “play ‘round” with.
But…. As I have stated many times… it all comes down to what you like… and there are some great sounding pickups that may be “on the edge” of the board… ya can’t go too much farther one way, but you do have a pretty broad range in the other direction. And if you like it… that’s the only criteria that must be met…
It doesn’t matter what tone any one block represents, if you, as the artist, prefer it… it’s perfect.
It’s just that Bill likes to design his pickups to sit somewhere around d/e 4 or 5 ‘bout in the middle of the board. That gives you a very broad range in any direction to “choose your sound”.
The reason I’m sharing all this is to help the “uninitiated” get a better handle on why Buck’s sounds different than Lindy’s sound different than Jason’s sound different than Seymour’s, sound different from Curt’s… make no mistake… those are all great pickups… I’ve used ‘em all, and would have not have done so if they sucked.
Bill’s simply offers a different approach… More on how to exploit them coming..
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Let me reemphasize…. It all comes down to what you personally like. This continuing saga is simply to enlighten at a very elementary level, those so motivated to know what goes into producing a quality pickup, and why some “kid” in some obscure province in remote China, probably is not up to speed on exactly what he is doing while wrapping wire around a bobbin.
However… none of this precludes the possibility that YOU may actually prefer the sound of the imported pickup, or any other one you may have settled on.
There is so very much “mysticism” seemingly surrounding pickups… as to what makes one “Bare Assed” or another “Mighty Twangers” and another the “Fifty Wifty Vintage”…. A name is only a designation.. If your Momma had named ya anything else, You would still be you. If a Pickup maker had named his pickups anything else, they would still be whatever they are.
You still get to choose what you like….and you may not like any of this…. But,. . .
There seems to be a recurring notion that a specific “voice” can be “dialed in” a guitar much like you would dial in a certain “station” with your trusty Hallicrafter’s short wave radio… Not so….. too many other factors to consider. Kinda like trying to dial in that radio station on the AM band, in a lightning storm.
With the radio.. each transmitter broadcasts on a specific frequency… It is regulated so that it remains stable, and detectable at the specific location on the “band” every time. No variables to skew ya a few points one way or the other. You know what and where whatever is.
That’s not the case with a guitar….as I have stated before, there are entirely too many variables for such to be workable….
A neutral pickup, however, at the very least gives you a reference point to begin from… rather like cooking… If you want to make spaghetti sauce,… you start with tomatoes…. You know where you are.,..You can build up on the recipe with a specific target in mind… however, if you walk into the kitchen, find a pot “stewing”, assume it’s the sauce, and start throwing in onions, oregano, spices, etc etc. then take a spoon and dip out a taste (plug it in) then taste it… (give it a strum)…. You may be pleasantly surprised, or hi-tailing it to the “porcelain facility” to hurl your guts up… you had no idea where you were starting from.
If you were to remove the pup from the guitar, sit in on a workbench so that all the influence of the construct of the total package were removed from the sonic equation, even then, placing a cap in the circuit would not produce a duplicable sound from multiple pickups of the same make and design with any degree of consistency, depending on how precise your analysis is.
To do that, the pickup has to be “calibrated”, or designed from the ground up., so that the sonic and electrical parameters can be determined, then repeatedly reproduced, validated “on paper”.. and put into production… I know of only one pickup manufacturer that can do that, only one that has demonstrated any awareness of the necessity of doing that.
What does that mean in a real application… say you want to alter the frequency performance around in a certain range… say 1.5 – 2 Khz… you need to know how your guitar is currently performing at that range.
Remember me saying those guys that hold up a body, knock on it, and hear it “ring”, then think, “Great it’s resonant” Well all that ring shows it that the piece of wood is resonant at THAT frequency… so… say THAT frequency is 2.2 kHz, you throw a cap of “X” pf in and shift the performance of the pickup between 1.5 and 2, but due to the parametrics of the guitar, or design of the pickup it gets a “boost” at/to 2.2 kHz, and now you got problems…and no idea why. You need to know where ya are, before you go wandering off in the dark. So now, you’re thinking whoever told you do make the mod must be a numbskull…it sounds awful, when it’s not his fault at all, it’s the “fault” of the sum total of your guitar.
The #1 problem in pickup manufacturer is eddy currents. It creates more incalculable variables in the guitar than about anything else. To visualize what they are, think of a stream, water flows continually in one direction. Note, however, the banks… a branch may have fallen into the water. Note the water’s current.. Small whirlpools “eddies” develop. These “anomalies” in the flow may not prevent the stream from flowing to whatever destination nature has determined, but, they DO disturb that flow. Enough of the “intrusions” and the stream can be reduced to a trickle, just a faint representation of the frequencies available as the string is plucked, to get back to discussing pickups.
Those same kind of “eddys” in the electron flow can create any number of unpleasant sounds from a pickup. Well, unpleasant unless you like the sound, that is a real possibility, and perfectly acceptable.
Much the same thing happens as the electrons are flowing along the copper wire… smooth sailing yields those sweet, almost bell like tones characteristic of the vintage, most notably the early 60’s, pickups.
At this point the most often asked question: Why could they produce those sounds then, and have such a difficult time now… answer… “Greenies” . . “tree huggers”… good old environmental regulation. More about that in a moment…
But… what causes the nefarious eddy current…. “branches” “rocks” and other “crap” in the flow…. Or how the pup is built… and the “stuff” it’s made from.
Copper wire….You could take the sum total of everything about anything printed on the TDPRI, since the TDPRI was the TDP… and it would not compare to what can and has been written about copper wire and conductivity. For you newbies… that’s a boat load of writing… for you old timers… that’s a boat load of writing… or to put in in to words easy to understand…that’s a boat load of writing.
And to help you get a grip on “who Bill is”. . . . Bill serves as consultant to Elektrisola, the world’s largest manufacturer of fine wire. They use his input to validate their research, simply because his test procedures are capable of a higher level of “resolution” than theirs. (read that again)…
To better understand who Elektrisola is… they supply the conductors that are used in CERN, JPL, Lawrence-Livermore, MIT, Cal-Tech, and any other esoteric research lab exploring physics so far out in front of the “leading edge” most of us will not live long enough to even hear about “stuff” they are exploring today… much less, see it’s application. Example… Consider last month’s release that scientists have stopped time momentarily. Think about that one… it was done, to be certain with Electrosola’s wire in the experimental equipment….Heinlein’s Stasis field is around the corner… And while it was only for a fraction of a second… remember, the first “light bulb” only burned a few seconds, too.
Now, I do not point this out to suggest Bill has come to us from Mt. Olympus… I do it so you know he is not simply some guy, good with his hands, wrapping wire around magnets and checking the results. Then selling them as pickups. He is not infallible… I know personally he has made a mistake. One day, he stuck out his hand, said. “Hi, My name is Bill Lawrence, and yours is Jzchak Wajcman?”
So, why do those guys need wire and an application of such, so “refined”? … Because the transformers, coils, chokes, and anything requiring “wire” and the associated electron flows, at those levels of Physics, has to be “pure” beyond imagination.. and to achieve that they access Bills input. You also have access to Bill’s input for your guitar. ‘Nuff said?
So back to Eddy and the Currents. To further help in comprehending the difficulty in computing how and what those electrons will do as they “flow”… consider.. DC current… you know the figure most oft used to determine a pickups “characteristics”, and listed as KO DC. That info is as useless as a Chili Fart in a hurricane.
In copper… DC current flows through the whole body of the conductor. If it’s 12 VDC it reads 12 VDC at the surface of the conductor, and 12 VDC in the dead center of the conductor. This is NOT the case with AC…
AC, Alternating Current, has by definition, a frequency. The Hum we hear so often is the 60 cycle frequency the 117 VAC we have available at the wall receptacle … or 220 VAC (mains) in much of the rest of the world, fluctuating at 50 hz. It’s alternating current simply because it flows one way, for 1/60 of a second, the it reverses, and flows the other way for 1/16th of a second and repeats constantly 24/7 day in, day out,,, continually as long as the Hurricanes stay away.
Now, unlike DC, AC flows at the surface of the wire…. So for a given size wire, it actually has considerably less “area” to travel on. At some frequencies it is virtually undetectable in the center of the wire. Reduce the size of the wire the current has available to flow on, and the resistance goes up… so what may be 6 kO for “x” DC voltage, will be considerably higher for the same value in AC voltage (remember AC is the ONLY voltage at work in your passive guitar.) But… since the “frequency’ of DC is 1 .. it only goes one way,… it’s NOT for AC… In your guitar Open E 6th is 82.407 hz that means the current is reversing itself that many times a second and at the other end, E1st at the 20th fret is 1046.50 hz that’s a lotta scrambling back and forth. But those kind of frequencies in AC do weird things to a simple pickup.
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As the frequencies go up, the resistance goes up… so a low E may read one resistance, say “X” KO but shuffle up the scale to E 1st open and the resistance increases dramatically by several orders of magnitude, thus higher frequencies require a bigger electromotive force or “push”.. to achieve the same volume as lower frequencies.. this is also why we use a bleeder circuit in the guitar…
Note to “scientists” . . . I know there is a hellova lot more than what I have just described and infinite exceptions and variations… stuff it please….I’m trying to keep this at least modestly understandable. If you wanna debate, please go to EienstinewaswrongEdoesnot=MCsquared.com and have at it.
… to further complicate matters, things like the capacitance and resistance of various components, the proximity of metals, ferrous, non ferrous, diamagnetic, and paramagnetic, all come into play, as does those darn little cracks in the Formvar that we will get to….. All of that stuff impacts the eddy currents and is why you cant just go down to your local Radio Shack and buy an Eddy-o-meter… to find the little boogers. The math involved is waaaaaaay above my pay grade. But Bill’s teaching me…
How? What? Huh?? What that gotta do with anything???
In your guitar.. the current that is generated as the string vibrated in the magnetic field is AC. When the string moves across the magnetic field, a current is generated that flows one way, and when it comes back across, that current’s direction of flow is reversed, back and forth, back and forth. If you played A, the current reversed 440 times a second. Think controlling that is complicated… pick two notes simultaneously… now you have currents flowing in both directions At the SAME TIME… Think about setting up your garden hose to allow water to come out the end while water is going in the same end… that’s how complicated the Physics are in something this simple.
So what’s all that gotta do with the nefarious eddy currents,,, any little anomaly creates eddy currents. Any eddy current degrades the pickups performance … again… unless you like the sound of the degraded pickup.. are you getting that… this whole dissertation is just “why”.. it has nothing to do with, if you like what you have, or not.
Disclaimer:…. When I say degrades.. I mean in a scientific context, as the product of data entered. Eddy currents detected, factored into the equations to determine what frequencies can and are impacted and how they are impacted, and those results analyzed to determine how a pickup will sound in a clinical situation when seen in a spectral analysis. But if you want pure, this is stuff you gotta do. But, frankly, some are NEVER going to like “pure”. That’s why there are blended Scotches and Coffees and Chocolates, and so forth.
Since how “good” a sound is received and perceived is entirely up to the one hearing it… there can be some pretty “nasty” (as far as the data shows) sounding pickups that YOU may love.
So to how the greenies impacted the sound of your guitar….
When copper wire is wound, even at moderate speeds many physical things happen to the wire. Most often it simply stretches. If that happens, a 42 AWG wire can easily become a 43 AWG wire … but … remember…. the copper is coated… that’s an insulation to keep it from shorting out. ( yeah I know, very basic but some do not know that). The coating used in the good ‘old days was Formvar… the coating you guys most often request is Formvar… Formvar is kind of, still available. . . Kind of…
In the Good ol days, the wire was coated with the Formvar… people mistakenly called it enamel coated copper wire. Formvar is NOT enamel… it is Formvar. One of the “chemicals” used in its manufacture was Benzene, it was also used in the vintage Nitrocellulose Lacquers. The stuff’s gone now…. As gone as common sense in Washington…and the “cool” of a lotta pickup winders…
The EPA banned its manufacturer several decades ago… They discovered that if you put a lab rat in a box and evaporate several metric tons of the stuff into the 3 cubic foot box.. the Rat didn’t fare too well. . . . Even though that’s a “flip” description, it’s not too far removed from the absurdity in some of the lab tests used to determine if “stuff” is good or bad for ya. Bet you didn’t know you can drink enough water to actually poison ya did ya? But the EPA hasn’t banned it yet…. Bet if it was bug killer they would in a heartbeat.
So . . No more Benzene… Benzene based Formvar was flexible…. Stretch the wire,,, the Formvar stretched…. No problem…. The new Formvar is nowhere near as flexible… stretch this stuff and it cracks.. microscopic cracks to be sure… but open cracks none the less… where do these cracks usually occur… at the ends of the bobbin as the wire spins around the magnets. There’s a lot of pressure there pressing the strands of wire together too. Those cracks are responsible for the eddy currents… they are the rocks and branches in the “stream” that degrade the sound of the pickup.
These cracks are so fine a simple test with a VOM, reading DC Ohms does not tell you a thing, they are completely invisible to such readings. They are not detected as a loss of continuity, or a direct short. For all practical purposes, they do not exist if you are reading DC Ohms. So why not read AC Ohms… OK you wanna go there… well do that.. Let’s get it on… Next time….
Oh, regarding the cracked Formvar… Bill has designed and built his own winders to create pickups free of any cracked Formvar and the resulting eddy currents. He has also developed proprietary methodology to test completed pickups, anyone’s pickups, to determine if eddy currents are present. Sorry, but that information is going top remain proprietary.
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After a mere 200 +- minutes yesterday evening… a correction…. Formvar…. I got my notes crossed… it is flexible…more or less…. Thus, not subject to the kind of cracking I mentioned earlier, as long as certain procedures are followed after production of the coil. Fail to follow those procedures and “crazing” can occur, crazing in the technical sense is not a feature you want as part of your pickups either. It too can act as “booking agent” for Eddie and the Currents.
Leo followed those procedures when he made pickups in the “good old days”. Those “post winding” procedures are outlined in the data sheets available for those choosing to use Formvar coated wire for pickup production. Fail to follow the procedures and electro-mechanical failure is a high probability. If not an outright failure… thus the eddy currents become a real factor.
Also, Bill would like it clarified, he acts as consultant to Elektrisola regarding only the magnet wire used in guitar pickups and related areas. Also, he does not want you to get the idea that he is superior to their research capabilities, he only contributes his input, and often depends on their multi-million dollar equipment to determine design parameters to be incorporated in his pickups and related research.
Further Elektrisola should not be viewed as direct suppliers to those research facilities I mentioned earlier. It’s more an indirect connection, such as supplying those manufacturing the test and experimental gear such facilities depend on to do analytical research. You can buy the same equipment, as long as you have a hundred Million dollar research grant… no biggie.. And I only listed them as examples of the level that their products find a way into. Elektrisola specializes in the manufacturer of fine grade copper wire for use in coils, etc., not “conductor” type wire…. As Bill said, it’s a small point, but accuracy at any level where Bill is involved is paramount.
It is the other coatings available on the wire used for coil winding that can crack at the drop of a hat when misused. And when I say crack, I mean microscopic failure… it cannot be seen except under a microscope. It still maintains insulating properties for “normal” conductivity, it’s just when it comes under the “stress” of performing with AC current oscillating at many, many thousands of times a seconds, do the problems associated with eddy currents, and out right electrical shorts come into play.
Use of any of these wires can require very esoteric procedures to ensure an electronically “flawless” pickup.
Simply put… sure you can use the instructions on the many sites telling how to make pickups, and make pretty good pups with those instructions… but.. there are home made Dune Buggies, and there are Humvees. If you’re buying one, you want to know what’s “under the hood”.. really know.
Also, to further elaborate…. eddy currents are not only produced by poor winding techniques, there are other considerations that must be factored in. I just neglected to mention them.
The close proximity of just about any metal, Steel, Brass, Copper, Stainless Steel, Nickel, Titanium, Aluminum… all are “players” in this saga. Their proximity to the coil can disturb the internal flow of electrons. That “disturbance” can be incorporated into the design and “exploited” to produce a specific outcome, but you must know how to detect them, extrapolate the information, and use it mathematically to know what the final “sound” will reflect.
It is for this very reason I have often said… shielding…. Simple shielding will alter the sound of your guitar…Or, stick a piece of steel or any other metal, on the bottom of the pickup, it too can alter the tone by generating eddy currents within the flow internal of the coil. Use the wrong steel alloy in the adjustable pole screws, for instance, guess what . . . Eddy and the Currents will be playing again. Even the choice of metal the tele bridge is made of can influence the pickup’s sound greatly. Well, greatly from an engineering point of view.
I hope the picture is forming, and why I often say, anything you do to your guitar will alter the sound, it MAY be “good” . . . you like the change, it may be bad, . . . You do not like the change, or, it may be so subtle everyone you have listen to your “improvement” thinks you’re nuts.
This is why Bill’s pickups come with specific screws. Even the “lead wires” are selected for the same reason, i.e. every component found within a Bill Lawrence pickup has been selected for it’s ability to influence, or its lack of influence on the final sound. Even the Epoxy, is a certain type, selected for specific reasons. To know how these “metals” impact the tone, you have to be able to extract data, factor it into the calculus, “do the math”, analyze the results, and adjust accordingly. Do you really think “Bad Bart’s Texas Butt Busters” has gone to those extremes to insure a repeatable sound?
And I hope this is not "scaring" those so inclined, from "experimenting.... fact is… pick any functioning pickup, hook it up, pluck the string, and you’re going to hear the note. If you like what you hear, the pickup is the right choice… Further, YOU can select some of the most objectionable, electrically corrupted pickups, and If you can play, there isn’t anyone gonna be complaining about your “eddy currents”. They’re just going to stand there, slack jawed, amazed at your talent. That’s what ya really want isn’t it?
So if you have decided on a specific set of pickups, perhaps not made by Bill, and they have an enviable reputation, by all means don’t let me, or anyone else dissuade you from your choice. Do so, and you will be nagged by your indecision for the life of those pups. Get what YOU want, not what some goober tells ya you want.
As I have said, there are many very fine pickups, intentionally designed with a specific sound. That means their sound is NOT a mistake… it’s what it’s supposed to be… Some just want a Chevy, or a Ford, they have no interest in the Bimmers and Mercedes.
Also, many of the sonic “variables” I mention are subtle… and often “lost” when playing at rock concert levels… but you guys have consistently shown you are in a never ending “tone quest”… if you are not insisting on ALL OF the sonic information the string is capable of generating, emitting from the speaker, what are you doing? It’s rather like saying I wanna go to the Moon, but I’d rather not leave the neighborhood.
The real purpose of all this is to share why, all the bull on so many pickup manufacturer’s website suggesting, to just buy their pickups and you get a specific sound, is misguided at best.
That would require the ability to reproduce specific electrical parameters within the construct of the pickup. To know how, you have to know how to test to extract data to know what the “electrons” are doing and what they are supposed to be doing.
Far too many “winders” can tell you what their pickups may sound like, but few, if any can tell you why. If you don’t know why, you cannot reproduce them. Each will be different. Simply selecting the same alloy magnets and the same “X” number of turns with a specific AWG wire is NOT going to guarantee anything other than you now have wire wrapped around magnets. Ya gotta know the “science” to make a repeatable sound.
Repetition for emphasis… all of this… at the most complex.. is the tip of the proverbial “iceberg” as relates to producing a quality pickup. This is applied Quantum Mechanics at the molecular level. (redundant again, I know) BUT ….. even at that… this does not mean your pickups suck. If you like them, that’s all that’s required.
The reason I’m harping on a repeatable sound is because if you hear a certain “tone”, either in some other guitar you are witness to, or through a “file” available on someone’s website, you need to be reassured the applied science is such that you are going to receive pickups that sound like you ordered. Make sense?
The problem… to test… requires the application of quantum physics. I can guarantee ya there aren’t a lot of winders that have the ability to take a scientific calculator, extract the data from the pickup, enter the factors into the equation, and produce data that can be applied to the product.
The differences I'm speaking of, or rather, Bill is speaking of, are analogous to what’s available in the world of automobiles… there are Chevys and there are Mercedes, there are Miata’s and there are Ferraris. A Chevy isn’t a Merc and a Miata isn’t a Ferrari… But they do the same exact thing, they keep your butt from draggin’ on the road as ya scoot around town.
Simple fact, if you had no concept of the engineering involved, hop in an up-scale Chevy, then a Mercedes, and you really wouldn’t notice much more than a few “superficial” differences. They both do the same thing…. It’s when you get into the “internals” the real differences show up. Subtleties in suspension design, quality of bearings, application of advanced technology, etc, etc, but turn a corner, and neither is going to flip over.
Point in all this… there are Timex watches, and Girard-Perregaux watches . . . fact is.. a minute doesn’t have a clue on which one it has passed… And if You can play, it doesn’t mean diddly what pickup you are using. But it certainly is nice to actually know what you have bought.
