Part of this is mentioned under “Myths Gripe”, it is also included here just in case you missed the “Gripe”. Not an oversight…
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.
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. Here we are discussing pickups, but the other 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 pickups, 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 following, 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.
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.