I just had to do this, to repeat some of the most moronic claims heard on YouTube or written in popular magazines. Hope this will be entertaining…
Oh, I meant educational…
There is a long list of issues in the guitar world that by some video makers have been described as “myths” and it appears to me that a few have done a great job at debunking these myths, but way too many myths have survived and even been revived. A good one is the myth that the color of the pickup bobbin will alter the “tone” of the guitar, same thing with the finish of the guitar, both are simply nonsense. The same with things that are actually true, such as the way a pickup sounds, the “tone”, depends on how they are constructed (single coil versus humbucker). Even though sound and “tone” are very much subjective, it is true that the pickups will sound different. Differences in magnet material will not have that much influence on the sound, which some authors and video makers have pointed out, despite other people’s claims that it makes a big difference. The list is long, but we will leave it to another sections to tell the real story. All these are based on magnetics and follow the same laws of physics and electronics. Don’t worry if you read some of the same on other pages, I have repeated some stuff because readers may not want to go through everything. Consider yourself warned…
There are a few words that I have a really hard time with, by far the “worst” one is “tone”. I have come to dislike that word and I dislike it more and more every time I hear it used. You hear various things like: Tone me this and tone me that, this is what you do to your pickup to nail the tone you want, this is how you “design your tone”. Do this and you get a better tone and so on and so forth and finally, “let’s listen to some tones”, whatever that means, I do not know!
Have you noticed what is missing when this meaningless and non-descriptive word is used. I notice, because they do not ever define what they mean by “tone”. It has just become such a thing that encompasses just about everything you can think of in connection with guitar and amplifier. It is one of those things that some describe as “suspension of disbelief”, which means that you will believe everything you hear as long as it is said with authority. Something that far from make things true! Like a wise man said: “Even if you think it’s so, doesn’t make it so!”
To that end, I have renamed this widely used, misused and meaningless word to “enot”, something that is just as abstract and undefined!
After a decent dosage of information via YouTube, I started searching for scientific documents concerning guitar pickups and it just happens that there are actually quite a few out there that are very detailed and go in depth when it comes to physics, electronics and math. Very good material, but they do, however, contain a lot of equations and problem solving that can be described as being on a high university level, something that most people cannot decipher or make anything useful out of and if they try, it usually ends up being wrong. I am in the lucky position of being able to understand the contents of these documents; I am also in the position to verify the correctness of their contents, solely based on my education and long experience.
This section is entirely about guitar electronics and magnetics, which means that I will concentrate on this alone. That means, influence of other parts of the system will be discussed in a different section down the road. So, only influence of volume pot and “tone” circuit, jacks, shielding, guitar cable, maybe amplifier or the most ambiguous and subjective of them all, the human ear and how the received is processed in the human brain. To some extent, I have mentioned the player when it comes to setting the string in motion, because that is such an important part of the sound, otherwise I have concentrated on what can be reproduced by lab equipment. All the mentioned stages have a great influence on the sound we hear. Concentrating on just the output of the pickup is the purest and most honest way to characterize a pickup and any changes you make to it without the influence of anything else. In other words, we can avoid the terrible and misleading word “tone”. When looking at it raw, there is no need to hide any aspect of it.
My intent here is not to repeat the math and physics of the papers, but to break them down and extract the information and present it in such a way that this can become useful to the most people that have an interest in this subject. Doing so, I hope to debunk a large number of the myths out there. Maybe that is too much to aim for, because as I have come to find out, just about all high priced pickup makers out there rely greatly on myths and groundless claims to sell their pickups. They also claim a number of “secrets” they possess that make their pickups stand out and be above the rest in “tone”, whatever that word means. I don’t know what it is, it has not been described or otherwise elaborated on. Just “tone”, that is the only explanation you get. I am going to do my very best to avoid mentioning any names in connection with this, mainly because it is pretty much irrelevant for the purpose.
The natural spin-off of discussing guitar pickups is to get into wood and other materials. Now, this is solely for solid body guitars and the only means of sound transport from this type instrument is a magnetic pickup. One very important thing that seems to be overlooked completely is the strings and how they take part in the total sound. Maybe there is a good reason for that, because the behavior of the string vibration and how that is transformed into an output from the pickup is a mathematically complicated issue, I will however attempt to get into detail about this subject later. Why it is ignored? I can only guess, something I do not really like to do. What I will bring out in the open here is based on facts, not guessing or assumption. Also, there are a lot of buzz words flying around out there, most are inaccurate and misleading. One word that is very common as a discussion item is “vintage”. There is a lot of mystique involved and therefore a lot of room for making outrageous claims in the name of vintage. Quite a few are so farfetched that it will make your head spin! Just about the entire bunch of buzz words out there that I have come across are meaningless if not downright wrong. There are several YouTube videos made by people that, I am sad to say, explain things wrong. Unfortunately, quite a few of these are pickup makers themselves, meaning it is their business. In one case, it was concerning vintage pickups and the video I caught first was a music store tech trying to explain why vintage pickups are so much better than modern pickups and what he was saying was complete BS, in the end, he was referring to a pickup maker and as it turned out, the entire BS was from him! I will address some of the vintage hype in a moment along with some other whoppers! Reading the comments to these videos is even more painful, the commenters seem satisfied and even happy thinking they have been told how it really works! They have not been told how it really works, and now they will spread the false information.
Before we get into the heavy stuff on other pages, let us address some of the statements made. Sad to say, I had to be very selective here.
First, here is one that I cannot seem to forget. It was made in an article about how guitar pickups work and it goes like this:” Maybe you remember from 5th grade physics class that if you wrap electric wire around a steel nail and send current through the wire, you have a magnet”. So far true, but he continued:”Well, that explains about 90% of how a guitar pickup works!” Here is my take on that: It does not explain it at all, but if I should put a percentage to it, I would say less than 1%. Namely, it is insulated wire wrapped around a core of magnetic material. After that the similarities stop.
How about this one, the word or maybe I should call it the concept, “vintage”. This description has been attached to just about anything having to do with guitars and related things, such as guitars themselves (of course), pickups, “tone” capacitors and amplifiers. These items are or will be discussed elsewhere on this site. Originally, I did not plan to get into amplifiers, but it looks like it is unavoidable. My question is, what does vintage mean? Right here, talking about this, we can narrow the question to what is vintage and what is “vintage sound” or a phrase that I do not particularly like, “vintage tone”. As far as I can find out, it has not been defined and no clear description is to be found anywhere. Does anyone know? Lately, especially, I have come across a lot of hype about vintage PAF guitar pickups, the original humbuckers from Gibson and the serious effort to duplicate these and the sound (or “tone”) of these and that is absolutely without knowing of having any clear definition of the sound of these. Now, you hear someone say that it is “the best tone on record”. Where does that come from, old recordings from more than 60 years ago? A lot more than pickups were involved in those recordings, including amplifiers and recording equipment which are much more dominating in the total sound of a record.
So we do not really know exactly what that vintage sound is, but quite a few folks out there are trying to duplicate this sound. How do you go about that? Trying to make pickups sound like they did that long ago. Here is the best part, the way it is done is putting a lot of effort into finding the same materials used back then, sometimes down to the chemical composition of a material because if you can use all these types of material as close as you can to the original product you can make a brand new pickup sound like a “vintage”. All the work put into this is commendable, but laughable if not tragic. You are trying to make everything match but ignoring the overall, without knowing the goal, the sound. As I will try to show in the different sections, most if not all of these factors are irrelevant to the output of a pickup, there are many other factors that count more than material. Well, all I can say is that these pickups look “original”, but when it comes to that, who cares what the pickup looks like, you can’t see much of it anyway.
And the biggest insult of them all, if that is possible, the demonstration or proof of how much better this or that improvement is performed by this person playing the guitar before and after and claiming that there is a “big difference” and a “huge improvement” where no change can be heard. Don’t even get me started on the meaningless adjectives these geniuses like to throw out. Pretty much meaningless without any possibility of proving or disproving what the real change or even improvement. Nobody that I know of have ever offered any scientific arguments or produced any test results that could show a difference.
OK. Time to dive into the more technical stuff! Good luck!