All About Pickup Magnets
This is an excellent article on guitar pickup magnets, how they work, magnet types and pickup construction, courtesy of Pete Biltoft at Vintage Vibe Guitars. Thanks Pete for the permission to post this here!
Update: also see Pete’s article on Alnico Magnets In Depth.
In addition to explaining the history and use of the various magnet types, this article also describes the differences in pickup construction between P-90’s, Fender-style single coils, blade pickups, and humbuckers.More
Splitting The Coils
Following up on my previous post about humbucker wiring, here is a quick look at how humbuckers work, and how to split the coils and use parallel wiring.
A humbucker pickup is really just a a pair of single-coils, electrically out of phase and magnetically reversed from each other. The two coils are wired in series, and the end result is that electromagnetic hum/noise is phase-cancelled.
You may have heard this idea referred to as RWRP – Reverse Wound, Reverse Polarity. With a humbucker, one of the coils is RWRP relative to the other.
On many Stratocaster style guitars (three single coils), the middle single coil pickup is RWRP relative to the other two pickups. So when you blend the middle pickup with the neck or bridge pickup, you get the same kind of hum cancellation you get with a humbucker.
It is possible to wire up a humbucker with a switch to allow you to isolate (“tap”, or “split”) one of the coils, silencing the other coil. Listening to one of the coils in isolation will achieve more of a strat-type single coil sound.
You can also wire up the two humbucker coils in parallel instead of in series, which will sound more like a pair of single-coils on a strat, rather than a single humbucker. You’ll still get hum cancellation, but you’ll get less output power than the series wiring- a unique and useful voicing you might like.
You can go crazy making your guitar über-flexible with switches and push/pull pots to control series/parallel and splitting. Check out the the humbucker circuit diagrams at GuitarElectronics.com
And here’s an article by Kevin Smith for more in-depth information on coil splitting: The Magnificent humbucker coil tap-coil/split
New Rock Band Squier Gets Release Date
According to a teaser page at Fender’s website, the new Squier electric guitar for Rock Band is now officially set for release on March 1, 2011 for $279.99.
I was interested to see that the guitar appears to have a standard MIDI port on the side, and will work as a MIDI controller outside the game.
It will be interesting to see how well this works for learning guitar, with the new Rock Band 3 “Pro” guitar mode. They say:
“Use the Squier by Fender Stratocaster Guitar and Controller in conjunction with Rock Band™ 3’s Trainer Modes to learn scales, chords, skills, drills and more.”
Fun fun fun!
The Cap’s New Clothes
Today, let’s take a look at some really fancy boutique tone capacitors. You can hear these in the yesterday’s tone cap shootout.
The Luxe Grey Tiger is billed as “a faithful recreation of the famous Cornell-Dubilier Grey Tiger from 1956” and typically sells for about $40.
The Gibson Bumblebee is marketed as being “specially designed to replicate the original parts used by Gibson in the late 1950s”, and typically sells for over $100 for a 2-pack.
Have you ever wondered what special manufacturing and fabrication techniques they use to make these ultra-boutique capacitors?
Well, Steve over at Kernel of Wisdom has taken a knife to the little guys. And what have we here? Inside a Gibson Repro Bumblebee is really a Wesco polypropylene film cap, all wrapped up in black and stripes And inside a Luxe Grey Tiger, we find a General Instruments PIO cap.
Consider that a typical polypropylene film cap sells for maybe fifty cents. Gibson is selling this for about $50, so let’s see— that’s only a about a 10,000% markup 🙂
Here’s an interesting letter from 2004 about the reissue bumblebees from Edwin Wilson, Historic Program Manager at Gibson, as well as another tear-down of the reissue bumblebee.
This is not to say that these caps don’t sound good. However, what is clear to me (as if it wasn’t clear already) is that there is very little reason to spend this kind of money on a capacitor, unless you’ve got money to burn and it gives you warm fuzzies inside 🙂
Yet Another Tone Cap Shootout
Back in July, I mentioned a tone cap shootout by Steve over at KernelOfWisdom, which included some more boutique caps that I hadn’t included in my tone cap comparison project.
Well, Steve is back with another meticulously prepared and more comprehensive comparison.
In the ring this time are a Russian T-1 Teflon, Russian K4Y-9 PIO, Cornell-Dubilier PIO, Goodall PIO, Luxe Repro Grey Tiger, Gibson Repro Bumblebee, Sprague Vitamin Q, Jensen PIO, Sprague Orange Drop as well as a generic brown polyester film and ceramic disc caps.
He also has a blind comparison page (don’t peek at the answer key til after you listen).
Great work Steve!
Update: Alas, the KernelOfWisdom website seems to be gone, but you can still see the discussion at the mylspaul forum.