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Pickup Tricks 1

Prepare to dispel the myths surrounding guitar pickups

In the first of an exclusive series, Seymour Duncan's Evan Skopp will be offering the benefits of his huge
experience to advise guitarists concerning pickups and suggesting a hatful of tips and tricks along the way. Keep
tuned for many more instalments and, here, Evan looks at ways to hear a new pickup before it's on your guitar. He
must be psychic...
So many pickups, so little time...
Imagine you had unlimited time and money; you could spend your days listening to all the pickups available and
then determine which is the right one. Most of us aren't blessed with such resources, so it's important to know
what a pickup will sound like before you shell out and take time installing it in your axe. Listening to descriptive
words like 'buttery,' 'chunky,' and 'monster -meltdown-from-the-netherworld tone' is a start. But understanding the
relationship between DC resistance and resonant peak is a better way to assess a pickup's voice and tone.
A pickup is a coil and magnet that work together to transduce string vibrations into electrical energy, which will
eventually come out of your amplifier in the form of a sound. The coil is merely a long strand of insulated copper
wire, wound thousands of times around a bobbin (or coil form) that has magnetic pole pieces at its core or a bar
magnet at its base.
Wind up
The number of turns the copper wire is wound around the bobbin greatly affects the performance and overall tone.
All things being equal, the more turns, the more electrical current it will generate and the 'hotter' or more powerful
it will be. A pickup with too many turns will have high output, but this output will come at the expense of dynamics
and high-end. And if it's really over -wound, it will actually lose output.
On the other hand, an under -wound pickup will come across sounding weak and thin. Getting the right number of
turns with the right wire gauge for a great sounding pickup falls, in terms of difficulty, somewhere between
neurosurgery and transcribing an Yngwie Malmsteen solo!
DC resistance is resistance to the flow of direct current and accounts for the relationship between the gauge of
wire and the number of turns it's wrapped around the bobbin. DC resistance is measured in ohms. Generally, the
thinner the wire gauge and the more turns, the higher the DC resistance. Higher DC resistance usually means
higher output and lower treble. For single coil pickups, the DC resistance generally ranges from around 6.5k ohm
for a vintage tone, to 15k for a high output tone. For hum-buckers, the range is around 7.5k-16.5k.
DC resistance should not be confused with impedance, which is the resistance to the flow of alternating current
and which varies according to frequency. The frequency at which a pickup's impedance reaches its highest level
is called the resonant peak. A resonant peak of around 3kHz to 4kHz tends to sound more mid-range heavy with a
lot of punch. Up to a point, the higher the frequency of the resonant peak, the clearer and brighter its tone is. But a
pickup with a resonant peak of 10kHz or higher would have a very flat sound.
Fortunately, many pickup manufacturers publish the DC resistance and resonant peak of their pickups. As an
example, if you looked at Seymour Duncan's tone chart and saw that an SSL-2 Vintage Flat for Strat has a
significantly higher resonant peak (9 kHz) than, say, an SHR-1 Hot Rails (3.5 kHz), you would see that the
Vintage Flat has a much brighter tone and the Hot Rails has a more mid -range intensive tone. Or, if you saw that
the Vintage Flat has a much lower DC resistance (6.6k) than the Hot Rails (16.9k), you would understand that the
Vintage Flat has less output and more treble response compared with the Hot Rails.
Sound test
It's most informative to compare DC resistances and resonant peaks between similar pickups, that is, between
single-coils or between full -size humbuckers, for example, and not across broad categories. This is the best way

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to guess how the pickup will sound - or even better, listen to it!
It's often impractical to listen to a pickup, install a new pickup in the same guitar, listen to it, and then compare the
new pickup to the original - since at least half an hour will have passed between listening sessions and your tone
memory will have lapsed - but why not record the pickups playing the same riffs in the guitar, by the same player,
with identical strings, amp settings and mic location?
Some pickup makers do this for you, releasing the results on CDs. Check with your local music store to get your
hands on such a CD.
'Till then, go for the tone!

http://www.intermusic.co.uk/print.asp?ReviewId=4168&ArticleTable=Features&Feature...

25/06/2001