Noiseless strat pickups: What's good these days?

Dave_Mc

OilCityPickups said:

A little while ago I built a noiseless prototype that I thought was pretty close ... then I A/B tested it with one of my Pre-BS 62 Strat pickups wound with NOS Heavy formvar wire (early 70s).
I put the noiseless prototype in the bin. The subtlety, harmonic content and general strattyness of the real thing convinced me to stop reinventing the wheel. 

That's always been my (limited) experience. You try the noiseless ones, think they sound pretty close... and then you plug in something with "real" single coils (not even fancy ones!) and they sound way better.

(I haven't tried any of the newer ones, though.)

JayGee

OilCityPickups said:

ToneControl said:

OilCityPickups said:

ToneControl said:

surely a noiseless single coil must sound exactly the same as a pickup made in the 50s, or else it is completely useless, and it is impossible to improve on the first pickups Leo had made

;-)

Personally I wish folks would get over this obsession of sounding exactly like the 50s, I could get on and build more exciting pickups then :-)
For example ... take the Heavy Formvar wire that sounds so good in traditional Strat pickups, and use it to make a triple coil, hum cancelling Jazzmaster replacement ... or a 7 string P90 ... or any bloody thing interesting :-)

It's the same with everything about guitars; some people just want to believe that no one has invented any improvements in guitar design since the 1950s.
I'm glad they aren't so daft about cars, hifi, TVs and calculation engines ;-)

I could just do with a nice steam powered, mechanical calculation engine ... to go with my camera that has a tiny imp inside who paints lifelike pictures very quickly. 

Can you imagine how much better digital modelling would sound if you could throw away all that soulless silicon and replace it with a tiny high speed Babbage analytical engine driven by a miniature reciprocating steam engine fed by an itsy-bitty coal fired boiler. Much more organic I feel, and it would let the haunting mids bloom unemcumbered… :-)  

JayGee

Returning to reality and coming back a little closer to topic than my previous piece of cheap snark…

This is going to be one of those “if it was that easy somebody would have done it already…” things (because if it was then I’m pretty sure they would), but, I’ve occasionally speculated about doing noise cancellation in the active (these days maybe even digital!) domain. You’d have a sensor coil mounted in the guitar as close as practical to, in the same orientation as, and with similar geometry to the actual pickups and you’d feed the output of that into a black box (could be in the guitar, could be off-board somewhere) alongside but isolated from the output of the actual pickups so that the pickups themselves didn’t see any loading, inductance, or other influence from the sensor coil and you could do the noise cancellation there before sending the (hopefully noise free) result down the signal chain. You wouldn’t even have to replaced your precious Abbigail Ybarra or original pre-CBS pickups, or, if the Magic Cancellation Box was offboard and the sensor coil sat, say in the trem rout change the guitar at all…

Obviously this brings the same issues as putting an active buffer in the guitar or on the front of a pedal chain, but quite a lot of players manage quite happily without even considering buffering (or even use wireless) so I’m guessing there must be some other factor (beyond the innate conservatism of guitarists) in play which I’m missing…

ToneControl

JayGee said:

OilCityPickups said:

ToneControl said:

OilCityPickups said:

ToneControl said:

surely a noiseless single coil must sound exactly the same as a pickup made in the 50s, or else it is completely useless, and it is impossible to improve on the first pickups Leo had made

;-)

Personally I wish folks would get over this obsession of sounding exactly like the 50s, I could get on and build more exciting pickups then :-)
For example ... take the Heavy Formvar wire that sounds so good in traditional Strat pickups, and use it to make a triple coil, hum cancelling Jazzmaster replacement ... or a 7 string P90 ... or any bloody thing interesting :-)

It's the same with everything about guitars; some people just want to believe that no one has invented any improvements in guitar design since the 1950s.
I'm glad they aren't so daft about cars, hifi, TVs and calculation engines ;-)

I could just do with a nice steam powered, mechanical calculation engine ... to go with my camera that has a tiny imp inside who paints lifelike pictures very quickly. 

Can you imagine how much better digital modelling would sound if you could throw away all that soulless silicon and replace it with a tiny high speed Babbage analytical engine driven by a miniature reciprocating steam engine fed by an itsy-bitty coal fired boiler. Much more organic I feel, and it would let the haunting mids bloom unemcumbered… :-)  

agreed, it would stop it feeling so "sterile", especially if you used mahogany woodchips instead of coal
;-)

ToneControl

JayGee said:

Returning to reality and coming back a little closer to topic than my previous piece of cheap snark…

This is going to be one of those “if it was that easy somebody would have done it already…” things (because if it was then I’m pretty sure they would), but, I’ve occasionally speculated about doing noise cancellation in the active (these days maybe even digital!) domain. You’d have a sensor coil mounted in the guitar as close as practical to, in the same orientation as, and with similar geometry to the actual pickups and you’d feed the output of that into a black box (could be in the guitar, could be off-board somewhere) alongside but isolated from the output of the actual pickups so that the pickups themselves didn’t see any loading, inductance, or other influence from the sensor coil and you could do the noise cancellation there before sending the (hopefully noise free) result down the signal chain. You wouldn’t even have to replaced your precious Abbigail Ybarra or original pre-CBS pickups, or, if the Magic Cancellation Box was offboard and the sensor coil sat, say in the trem rout change the guitar at all…

Obviously this brings the same issues as putting an active buffer in the guitar or on the front of a pedal chain, but quite a lot of players manage quite happily without even considering buffering (or even use wireless) so I’m guessing there must be some other factor (beyond the innate conservatism of guitarists) in play which I’m missing…

Also, AFAIK you can just put a dummy coil next to a real one? and just use op amps like EMG to sum them

OilCityPickups

ToneControl said:

JayGee said:

Returning to reality and coming back a little closer to topic than my previous piece of cheap snark…

This is going to be one of those “if it was that easy somebody would have done it already…” things (because if it was then I’m pretty sure they would), but, I’ve occasionally speculated about doing noise cancellation in the active (these days maybe even digital!) domain. You’d have a sensor coil mounted in the guitar as close as practical to, in the same orientation as, and with similar geometry to the actual pickups and you’d feed the output of that into a black box (could be in the guitar, could be off-board somewhere) alongside but isolated from the output of the actual pickups so that the pickups themselves didn’t see any loading, inductance, or other influence from the sensor coil and you could do the noise cancellation there before sending the (hopefully noise free) result down the signal chain. You wouldn’t even have to replaced your precious Abbigail Ybarra or original pre-CBS pickups, or, if the Magic Cancellation Box was offboard and the sensor coil sat, say in the trem rout change the guitar at all…

Obviously this brings the same issues as putting an active buffer in the guitar or on the front of a pedal chain, but quite a lot of players manage quite happily without even considering buffering (or even use wireless) so I’m guessing there must be some other factor (beyond the innate conservatism of guitarists) in play which I’m missing…

Also, AFAIK you can just put a dummy coil next to a real one? and just use op amps like EMG to sum them

A dummy coil is still a coil ... it just doesn't contribute to the sound ...while the wire on it filters out the nice harmonics. 
I've done some work with triple coils which are super close to a proper single coil sound ... however you simply can't shrink em down to Strat size. 

JayGee

OilCityPickups said:

A dummy coil is still a coil ... it just doesn't contribute to the sound ...while the wire on it filters out the nice harmonics. 

That (in my head at least) is where doing the summing in an active rather than passive circuit comes in, in that you can isolate the pickup from the noise sensor so it doesn’t “see” the inductance/impedance of the sensor coil. Since in principal a clean, wide bandwidth, unity gain summing amplifier isn’t a big deal I’m sure there must be more to it than that though…

ICBM

JayGee said:

This is going to be one of those “if it was that easy somebody would have done it already…” things (because if it was then I’m pretty sure they would), but, I’ve occasionally speculated about doing noise cancellation in the active (these days maybe even digital!) domain. You’d have a sensor coil mounted in the guitar as close as practical to, in the same orientation as, and with similar geometry to the actual pickups and you’d feed the output of that into a black box (could be in the guitar, could be off-board somewhere) alongside but isolated from the output of the actual pickups so that the pickups themselves didn’t see any loading, inductance, or other influence from the sensor coil and you could do the noise cancellation there before sending the (hopefully noise free) result down the signal chain. You wouldn’t even have to replaced your precious Abbigail Ybarra or original pre-CBS pickups, or, if the Magic Cancellation Box was offboard and the sensor coil sat, say in the trem rout change the guitar at all…

Obviously this brings the same issues as putting an active buffer in the guitar or on the front of a pedal chain, but quite a lot of players manage quite happily without even considering buffering (or even use wireless) so I’m guessing there must be some other factor (beyond the innate conservatism of guitarists) in play which I’m missing…

You’re not missing anything other than the conservatism of guitarists. If the guitar pickups are buffered, then the hum-cancelling signal mixed with them - you could even adjust the amount - then the result will sound exactly like the original pickups (plus buffer) but without the hum.

The question then is whether or not a small amount of subtle hum is actually a part of the ‘tone’.