Humbuckers - really - do we need the proliferation of all these different so called "voicings"

Rox

jd0272 said:

Underwound, overwound

Ah!!  I see you've discovered Womble Pickups.

Underwound, overwound Wombling free,
The Wombles of Wimbledon wind pickups you see,
Making good use of the magnets they find,
Winding to specs that Seth Lover designed...

meltedbuzzbox

Rox said:

jd0272 said:

Underwound, overwound

Ah!!  I see you've discovered Womble Pickups.

Underwound, overwound Wombling free,
The Wombles of Wimbledon wind pickups you see,
Making good use of the magnets they find,
Winding to specs that Seth Lover designed...

awesome!

impmann

Yeah I'd buy them.

Joking apart, I *can* hear differences. Possibly because I don't lather my sound in metric fuckloads of gain and/or fuzz...

I hate middly muddly humbuckers and the vast majority of production humbuckers fall into those categories. Including the Gibson ceramic magnet jobs...

monquixote

I've tried quite a few different pickups and they all sound different to me and I would say more so at band volumes this may be because I mostly play clean or just edge of breakup. 

Adam_MD

I've been a bit of pickup whore in the past and really enjoy trying different pickups in guitars. I've got set specs which I know just work for me now. I really like sites like mojos which lists PAF with different magnet options and Modern with magnet options.

Granted if you give 5 different winders the same 42 gauge wire and Alnico v magnets you'll get similar pickups but they'll all be slightly different due to scatter patterns, tension and how many turns they put on each coil. But if I know the spec of the pickup I'm looking at I usually know what ballpark I'm going to get i.e 7.75 to 8k paf style with alnico ii or alnico iv are going to have different characteristics because of the magnets.

DrJazzTap

I try not to get involved with speakers and pick ups. It's all a bit snake oil for me. If it sounds good to my ears then that's good enough for me.

When I got my Tokai, i started looking around for replacement pickups. I then read this on a forum "do you think the lady in the second row is going to sleep with you because of your lindy fralins??" :P
That was it, the pickups in the tokai sounded good enough for me. What's the point in spending another £140-250 if you feel you don't have to?

I do understand pickups to a point, but I've never replaced any on my main guitars. I did have an enjoyable day in PMT one day going through all of the American Vintage strats. And actually hearing the differences between a 56 and 59. I'm sure that was down to the pickups.

I have some awesome pickups in my partsocaster which I bought from ebay, no name hand wound, bee wax, vintage specced parts etc etc. I bought those for £45. And they sound lovely. They just aren't made by seymour duncan or BKP.

Neil

I agree about the proliferation of pickups, all very confusing but fair enough people make a living by winding them. 

However when you think about it I daresay all the classic rock tracks were played just using what came in the guitar in the first place.

guitarfishbay

Neil;515196" said:

I agree about the proliferation of pickups, all very confusing but fair enough people make a living by winding them. 



However when you think about it I daresay all the classic rock tracks were played just using what came in the guitar in the first place.

Same with a lot of modern stuff. Stock Les Pauls, SGs, Strats and Teles are all over popular music. If not stock then the chances are it'll be the 'standard' Duncan or Dimarzio for that genre (I'd imagine a lot of Duncan JBs on record!).

Teetonetal

You could same the same about guitars, amps, pedals, strings... (I mean how many different types of string do we really need)

But that's the thing... we are all looking for that magic ingredient that's going to make us suddenly be better than before, or is going to kick us out of the rut etc...

99% of all gear discussed on this forum is completely pointless and unnecessary. But on we go...

Above all though, getting new things is fun

Sassafras

If I buy a £600-1000 guitar I'd expect it to have decent pick ups in it and if I wasn't happy with them I wouldn't have bought it.

And for the price of say, Bare Knuckles or other high end pups, I'd put that towards getting a better guitar.

Phil_aka_Pip

richardhomer said:

Life was much simpler as you had a pretty good idea of what sound to expect from your purchases.

Shitty tizz if the pickups were DiMarzio

Teetonetal

Sassafras said:

If I buy a £600-1000 guitar I'd expect it to have decent pick ups in it and if I wasn't happy with them I wouldn't have bought it.

And for the price of say, Bare Knuckles or other high end pups, I'd put that towards getting a better guitar.

I think the number of people buying a new guitar then immediately changing piuckups is small - mostly I think this type of upgrade is done after a couple of years, or a change of band, style. If you like a guitar but need it to do something different, chnaging pickups is much cheaper than buying a new guitar. Also I think a huge amount of upgrades are on Squire, epi and other "budget" guitars.

imalone

Neil said:

I agree about the proliferation of pickups, all very confusing but fair enough people make a living by winding them. 

However when you think about it I daresay all the classic rock tracks were played just using what came in the guitar in the first place.

While I'm sure that's true, they'd have (particularly from the classic rock era) been played with higher end guitars which had decent pickups in there to start. There's a bit of marketing to GAS involved, on the other hand I have a truly awful bridge pickup that I can send to anyone who doubts they exist.

Chalky

I love pickups. You can never tell how they are going to sound with a particular guitar. The combination might be great or shite or anywhere in between! )

p90fool

I have 1500 quid guitars that I've immediately changed the pickups on.
Not because the weren't any good but because I liked the guitar but it didn't sound the way I wanted.

hobbio

Chalky said:

I love pickups.

Me too. They certainly make guitars easier to hear.


I'll get me coat...

bingefeller

Rox said:

jd0272 said:

Underwound, overwound

Ah!!  I see you've discovered Womble Pickups.

Underwound, overwound Wombling free,
The Wombles of Wimbledon wind pickups you see,
Making good use of the magnets they find,
Winding to specs that Seth Lover designed...

lol!

Gru

Its funny, I have had various h/b guitars never really worried about the sound they give.

My 335 has Gibson 57 &57+ pickups. That's good enough for me. In my house I play it and maybe adjust the tone on the guitar or amp. I have no business spending £80+ or more on pickups for my own pleasure, in the same way I don't see the point of buying looms etc if the current one still works (building a new guitar is different)

If you are performing maybe this is an issue? But seriously!

Sometimes I am so glad I don't worry about these things.

imalone

Gru said:

Its funny, I have had various h/b guitars never really worried about the sound they give.

My 335 has Gibson 57 &57+ pickups. That's good enough for me. In my house I play it and maybe adjust the tone on the guitar or amp. I have no business spending £80+ or more on pickups for my own pleasure, in the same way I don't see the point of buying looms etc if the current one still works (building a new guitar is different)

If you are performing maybe this is an issue? But seriously!

You've got decent pickups that do what you want. But a simple tone control wont, for example, add treble that's simply not there. You can't completely change the voicing and gain, though maybe a parametric e.q. could get closer. I really do have an awful muddy humbucker that someone is welcome to if they either don't believe it's possible or really don't care how it sounds.

crunchman

I've changed pickups on 4 of my guitars over the years for different reasons.

One was because of noise issues with the hearing aid induction loop at church so I put Kinmans in the Tele I had at the time.  The Kinmans had something nasty about the sound so I replaced them with Fralins which made the guitar sound stunning - and much much better than the original stock pickups.  I didn't like the neck on that one and I ended up selling that one when I bought a Custom Shop but it sounded amazing with the Fralins.

One was a very lightweight but bright sounding Les Paul which the previous owner had put Seth Lovers in, which are quite bright sounding pickups.  It was not a good combination.  I managed to improve it a bit by changing the bridge pickup, but ultimately it was the wood that was the problem and I sold it on.  It was just a very bright, cutting sounding guitar.  You could hear it unplugged.

I changed another one because the stock bridge pickup was too hot.  It made if very difficult to get the kind of dynamics I want.  I'm going to change the pickups on my SG for the same reason.  I bought it second hand and the previous owner put some kind of over hot monstrosity in there (DC resistance in the 17kOhm region).  If sounds great but it's not got the dynamics I want.

I don't keep chopping and changing though just to try something different. The Tele with the horrible Kinman experiment is the only one I changed the pickups in more than once.   Of the 7 electrics I've got at the moment, only one has not got the pickups that I bought it with, although that will soon be 2 with the SG.  There are a couple of others I might change at some point.

The Fralins in that Tele showed me what a difference good pickups can make but the stock pickups were Texas Specials which are pretty nasty.  If you've got decent pickups in the first place then I think there is very little point in perpetually changing them.  I think the differences between SD Antiquities, Bare Knuckle Mules or Stormy Mondays, Fralins, Lollars or whichever expensive PAF style pickup is flavour of the month on TGP are pretty minimal.