After having been a guitar player for many decades, I actually started building guitars and therefore got very interested in different aspects of the guitar world. Besides the specific mechanical issues and technical data involved in guitar building and design I started looking into the details concerning electronics, pickups and shielding or putting it differently, the signal quality of the entire system. Deciding to do this was based on a few aspects, first and foremost, as mentioned elsewhere, because of a formal higher education and long work experience in the area of electronics, magnetics and electrical noise (EMI), designing three phase motor controls running off 480VAC and up, so the idea was that there was most definitely a bunch of experience that could be applied and passed on in this case. For reasons I do not quite recall, it might have been guitar shielding, but I started watching videos online and reading about the specifics, it was my conclusion that there is a lot of misinformation floating around out there, myths if you wish, but also information that is dead wrong. The reason for this is not so much that people do not want to help others to understand and perform the actual shielding and dealing with the associated electronics, it is because the people that make these videos do not have deeper background so they are basing their statements on myths, hearsay, tradition and mistakes. It looks like a lot of ways the internal wiring of the guitar is performed has been pretty much unchanged for many, many decades and is performed in this way because “this is the way we have always done it”, in other words, tradition. This is, of course, the way you would do it, because you do not possess the knowledge to change the way it is done. There is a long list of issues in the guitar world that by video makers have been described as “myths” and it appears to me that they have done a great job at debunking some of these myths, but never the less these myths keep returning. A good one is the myth that the color of the pickup will alter the “tone” of the guitar, same thing with the finish of the guitar, simply nonsense. In the beginning, my emphasis was on shielding, but since it is a difficult subject, the sources ran out fairly quickly. My astonishment was to a point that it triggered a desire to use my vast theoretical background and decades of experience in electronic research and development that also included shielding radiated electro-magnetic noise. The fact that the people making the videos acted like they sincerely were conveying the facts to the audience led me to think that I had to do something like this to set a few things straight. Now, I have seen just about any EMI problem that electronic equipment can throw at you dealing with VFDs, they are the noisiest kind of electronic equipment you can think of. And they had to be very carefully designed and in most cases even shielded to meet often very strict requirements in order to be accepted by customers.
Watching guitar shielding videos, other subjects started cropping up, guitar pickups is a big, big subject out there in YouTube land, also big are the myths and misinformation that you see brought forth, same thing with wood. I will concentrate on solid body guitars, I am after all a solid state physicist.
Just to make it clear, I am not doing this to gain anything and I have nothing to sell, so I feel fairly neutral. On the other hand, the more I look into this the more information there is to go through. For example, the guitar pickup science is extremely difficult and in order to understand the many papers I have read, it takes a higher university education in engineering to understand. I am in the lucky situation to be in possession of exactly that. And no, I do not want to use my background to repeat the very technical papers and books I have read to dupe you with the same high level stuff, my mission is to break it down to a point that it is easily understandable with a little math as possible. After all, you could read the articles yourself, but most people would give up half way down on page one. What I want is to have you read it all, well, not the articles, but what I have researched and written here.
As it may have become clear, I am a scientist, a profession description that is not very well understood at all, in fact mostly misunderstood. And even looked down upon, something I will make my best effort at rectifying.
Of all the information I have gone through to get the most information to back up what I am writing in these pages, it can be characterized as Ph.D. dissertations, Master of Science thesis’s, research project papers, books written for university level readers, websites and as mentioned earlier, YouTube videos. Not to forget, reading through the original patents, especially for pickups and not to forget the PAF patent.
The time spent on these activities? I have no idea, did not count or keep track in any way. It can probably be added up to months before I even started to write stuff down.
Since my approach is scientific, maybe I should spend some time explaining what this encounters. For many reasons, one being that only few people realize what is involved. Since this is science, based on mathematics and physics, both known as exact sciences, unlike many other types of science that can be considered inexact which means that there can be more than one explanation to a specific subject. This ambiguity does not exist in math and physics, which means that it is meaningless to state “I don’t believe in this or that”, something you can say about religion, not about this branch of science.
OK, so here it is, the scientific approach, rules if you wish.
First the subject of investigation is defined, and then you study and search all literature on the subject you can find. This material is closely read and analyzed and for university level literature, you pretty much need an education that puts you in the position to evaluate high level math and physics, you need to master it to an extent that brings you in a position evaluate its validity. That the same conclusions in form of equations or other have been reached by others following different paths is very reassuring that the result is correct. On top of this, you should be in a position to, if called upon, being able to set up the process to extract the results leading to the same conclusions as others. The process now is to make the necessary claims and set up the equations and argue the validity of these and any simplifications and other conditions that will lead to a solution of these equations. Finally, any scientist sets up a series of physical experiments and measurements that can be compared with the theoretical solutions that have been derived from the constructed equations and their solution. If the agreement is excellent within certain margins of error, the scientist determines that the theory that he had developed in fact describes the in-nature system that was set out to describe.
In the world of science there are no unsubstantiated claims. Everything postulated can be backed up by scores of test results from experiments set up to simulate the system, these experiment are also very accurately documented and described in order to give the reader the ability to verify, if needed.
The same science that covers guitar technology is used in many other disciplines, mainly because the equations covering the guitar are based on physics laws and equations that have been developed through the past 250 years or more, or more correctly, the mathematics that has been applied to set up and solve the equations. Sometimes the solution to an equation cannot be found by math alone, before computers, this was sometimes very difficult, but now we have ways, called numerical solutions to these equations. The nice thing about that is that a large number of calculations can be performed giving rise to the possibility of performing iterations in the process. Iteration is the process of “zeroing in” on the result, something that is now possible with the high speed of performing calculation.
Finally, it should be mentioned that not much in physics can be solved without the mathematical discipline called calculus, differential equations and Fourier analysis. This is what I have set out to decipher in such a way that it can be used by guitarists and hopefully increase the understanding of what makes a guitar sound like it does and even more importantly make your guitar sound the way you want it to. And, of course, kill as many myths as possible to cut down on all the misinformation.
At some point in this, my scientific curiosity came in and I was beginning to see the need for setting up some tests to verify the many things I had read. First, I began to conduct some guitar shielding experiments which also included changing the fundamental way guitars are wired. This is described elsewhere.
After that, it really got out of hand, especially when I started looking into pickups. For that, I have designed and built various test equipment, a few guitars for testing pickups and string vibration (they don’t look like guitars but the work like guitars!). I have built equipment for measuring pickup magnets, and how they interact with strings. Care was taken so that these measurements were accurate. I have also built (through a number of design iterations) a “pickup tester”. With this equipment I can create a sinusoidal string motion and measure the pickup output voltage under a lot of different conditions and frequency ranges to evaluate pickup differences and demonstrate the way a pickup processes the string motion and show the amount of distortion created in the process. Other pickup testers exist, but mine is the only one that I know of that is based on actual guitar string movement. To be completely covered, I also designed and built a pickup winder, just in case.
No, I am not “getting nerdy” or getting “nerded out” here. These are for people making pretend “technical” videos on YouTube, I will stick to science, as it will become clear. I will state things as they are and I do not guess or presume anything, theory needs to be clear and understandable and, most importantly, backed up by experiments.
It is very likely a work in progress….