New pickup technology?

[NickC]

Another FZ: "The meek shall inherit ......... nothing."

[xtian]

Hasn't some company already done laser pickups?

[VacuumVoodoo]

Hasn't some company already done laser pickups?

Old news already

[Reeltarded]

When the pickups aren't bobbins with magnets and coils, these aren't guitars anymore. We could all get an xbox. It's not only charming and classic. It's more than half of the freaking thing to begin with.

How many of us have tried all the good ideas and ended up back to basically stock?

Me.

Anything else is a subversive waste of time. Only good to experiment if you want to understand why there have been no real changes in the last 80 years.

[Jana]

Me too.

I wish I had all the money I have wasted on chasing "more better". Call me crazy but my favorite pickups are the single coils that came in a 2004 American Standard strat.

[Jana]

Well, my "more favorite" pickups are the ones that came in my 66 strat which I pulled out in the "more better" chase and subsequently "lost" them along the way.

[Reeltarded]

The lesson we both learned. Yep.

[Structo]

Yes, I wonder how many vintage guitars and electronics suffered through the 70's when humbuckers became popular and guitars were butchered or modified however you see it.

I'm guilty as hell.
I have a 63 Jaguar in sunburst that I stripped and stained it for the "natural" wood look that was popular.
I've been threatening the thing for years to do a refin back to sunburst.
But alas, it sits disassembled, neglected in it's case.

[Reeltarded]

That is why Scarface is pretty special. Sandpaper, brass, and poly. Most didn't make it.

[Danny_J_Glover]

There are only two PCB manufacturers in North America who can guarantee 3.5 mil specs, and a small multi-layer board will cost you a down payment on a house.

Even then, they mess up.

A more (technically less) novel approach to modifying your pickups may lie not in reinventing the wheel, but adding slight changes to the performance of already widespread technology.

Wal, for example, uses a separate coil for each magnet under each string.

I've been toying with the idea of using a small DC current in a second coil around the pickup magnets to offset the quiescent flux through the poles making the core saturate at a lower voltage in one directional swing of the AC signal. This would theoretically induce 2nd order harmonic distortion at the signal transduction point when you really hit the strings.

It would require a great deal of math and experimentation to get the circuit tailored to the sensitive zone required to precisely saturate the core (which in a production environment would inject some variability).

You could just use an active preamp (or better yet, a hot-biased class A tube preamp) biased on a non-linear section of the curve. But novelty quickly becomes compromised as you are literally returning to classic methods.

A more cost effective method might be to try using different wire gauge/magnet combinations in your pickup winding.

I got an interesting and distinct tone from a P-Bass pickup pair in series with a single coil bridge that I wound with N-42 neodymium and 40 AWG magnet wire.

EXPERIMENT!

DREAM!

LET NOT THE NAYSAYERS AND THEIR PRACTICALITY THWART YOU!

[Structo]

Hello Mr. Glover.

I enjoyed one of your later movies last night.

"Donovan's Echo"

Excellent movie.

[doveman]

Both my Strat and Tle guitars have an Ilitch coil. Noiseless and I can use my favorite pickups. On the Tele, OVs. On the Strat, Allen Big Cats. Best noiseless ... not cheap but my hunt is done now.

I even put a mini-switch to disengage on the Tele - it stays engaged.

[Teleguy61]

When the pickups aren't bobbins with magnets and coils, these aren't guitars anymore. We could all get an xbox. It's not only charming and classic. It's more than half of the freaking thing to begin with.

Yes.
Exactly.