Always Do
I’m having a lot of fun with faces lately.
Well, here is the latest incarnation of my faithful Stratocaster:
As I mentioned earlier, the humbuckers are “Classic II” pickups from GFS. They use Alnico II magnets, which are weaker than most pickup magnets. They are also wound with fewer windings than most modern rock pickups. generally, this means that, though the output strength of the pickups is lower, the frequency response is flatter. This makes them sound very detailed and clear, which is great for clean tones and moderate distortion. When it comes to very high gain, however, you generally want pickups with a narrower frequency response (a peak in the mid frequencies), or things can get unpleasant (bass frequencies tend to distort in an ugly-sounding way, and treble just gets overbearing).
What this all means is that these pickups sound amazing at clean to moderate distortion levels. I’m floored, really. Previously I had Van Zandt single coils installed, which were low output single coils – pretty much the best pickup you could ask for when it comes to clean tone. Honestly, I like these better. This probably means I am a humbucker guy.
As an added bonus, the neck pickup sound under heavy distortion is … breathtaking. I’ll have to get things dialed in properly before it is truly usable, but so far I LOVE the neck pickup tone for lead work.
I do have to fix one thing in the wiring. When I looked up schematics for the classic Ibanez-style 5-way switching method, I mistakenly thought that the middle pickup was NOT RW/RP (reverse-wound, reverse-polarity, for hum canceling when used with the non-reversed bridge or neck pickup on a strat). I had ordered a RW/RP middle pickup, so I wired the guitar to use the opposite coil as usual for the coil-tapped-parallel-combination positions (2 and 4 on the switch). Well, that was wrong. The schematic DOES call for a reversed single coil. As a result, in positions 2 and 4 are out-of-phase. This applies a comb filter that kills most low tones and lets some highs through. They are very quiet and trebly – not very usable (though Brian May from Queen is rather famous for making good use of out-of-phase pickups).
To fix this, I’m just going to sub in the original bridge pickup from this strat into the middle position. This will fix the phase cancellation issues, and actually improve the output balance between the pickups. The humbuckers have more output than the single coil I have in there now, so putting in a slightly higher output single coil will help balance this out.
Wow, that got pretty long and rambly. I guess I’d be a hit at Rachel’s party too. Have a great weekend everyone!
It looks like Derek and Rachel have diametrically opposed responses to emotional overload. 🙂
I bet you’d be a hit at the party–except with Brett, who wouldn’t know what you were talking about. 😀
I know I could Google this, but I’d rather hear you explain.
What’s a neck pickup? Is that the pickup up at the base of the neck?
And your faces are very cool.
Exactly correct. Similarly, the one by the bridge is called the “bridge pickup”. And then, equally creatively, the one in the middle is called the “middle pickup”.
You get different sounds from each position because of the way the string vibrates. If you think about the different harmonic components of the vibration, the fundamental has the biggest amplitude at the center of the string, while the higher and higher harmonics are more evenly distributed out.
This page I just found on google has a good diagram of string vibration and harmonics near the top. The figure is labeled “modes of a vibrating string”
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~demmel/cs267/lecture20/lecture20.html
Because of this distribution, it means that pickups that are closer to the center of the string will pick up more of the fundamental (as well as more and less of certain harmonics, depending on the position and the note being played, because, after all, fretting the string changes its length). However, it won’t generally pick up any less of the higher harmonics since the smaller wavelength vibrations have peaks spread evenly across the string. It may hit a trough or a peak depending on placement, but you can generalize by saying that pickups closer to the center of the neck are “bassier” than the bridge pickup, because the bridge pickup reads less of the fundamental and lower harmonics.
This means that if the neck and bridge pickup are identical in construction, the bridge pickup’s output will be much higher (since the string is moving more at that position). For this reason, bridge pickups are usually wound “hotter” than neck pickups, with more windings, which increases the output and lowers and intensifies the resonant peak.
Traditionally, the much “brighter” bridge pickup is used for lead playing, and the “darker” (bassier) neck pickup is used for rhythm playing. In high-gain use cases (hard rock, metal, etc), this is often reversed, as the lower bass output of the bridge pickup keeps it sounding “tight” under heavy distortion. By contrast, bassier neck pickups can end up sounding muddy or “farty” as the bass frequencies are overdriven. However, when you’re playing higher notes on the fretboard, one note at a time, the neck pickup ends up sounding very nice for high gain lead playing. I THINK this is because your fundamental frequencies are high enough that they don’t sound like mud when distorted, and you’ve got less highs (And less frequencies in general), so the distortion comes out smoother and sweeter.
*disclaimer: A lot of the frequency-related-to-distortion business above is sort of guesswork. I’m reading a book on tube guitar preamps right now, so I expect I’ll have more accurate info to spread around the internet in the near future.
Wow. Thank you for that, Phil.
I really didn’t know anything about this. And you do explain things goodly.
My pleasure. Rambling about guitars is pretty much my favorite thing to do.