Designing a guitar with hot-swappable pickups
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This is a strange statement. Many pickup designs have springs as part of their mounting mechanism, but it's not for dampening vibrations - it's to allow the height of the pickup to be adjusted.
Certain pickups (notably, off the top of my head, Fender Jazzmaster & Jaguar pickups) don't even use springs for this - instead there's a block of foam placed underneath the pickup that compresses as the pickup is screwed down.
Of course, it's possible some cork-sniffer guitar nerds will claim that they can hear the effects pickup springs have on tone (and the effects of different metals in the springs, no doubt), but these are the same people who will claim that they can hear the difference different glues make on tone, or will swear up-and-down that a real $5000 Klon has a richer and fuller sound than a $100 clone made from the exact same circuit with the exact same components, or that tube amps sound better because "electrons can't survive in a crystal lattice" [0] (so buy my $100K tube amp!), or...
I can believe that spring mounted vs solidly mounting to the body can make some difference (physics says there should be) but I can also believe the difference can be so small as to be negligible.
People gravitate towards combos that are known to be successful. Since they don't understand the exact mechanisms at work it's safe to say let's have a mahogany body, a certain pickup, mounted a certain way, a bone nut, certain fingerboard material etc. and expect certain results.
- technique (absolutely the most important)
- amplifier
- pickups + strings
- everything else (debatable whether you can even notice it)
I don’t know if there’s hard evidence but I think folks who think wood and nut types and whatever make a difference are nuts. The relative difference in stiffness between the strings and the body is so huge that believing that the neck and body effect tone seems to me like believing that asphalt vs concrete effects how a tennis net vibrates.
Ideally you’d have the same care put into making the “cheap” body. So that we can isolate the difference to just the material.
I also suspect that bridge placement makes a big difference in the amount of energy transfer that goes on. Electric guitars generally have the bridge near a node, so that limits the energy transfer somewhat. Basses have the bridge further back; partly that's due to ergonomics, but it also has the effect that more vibrations transfer to the body, which ought to reduce sustain. In a guitar you usually want more sustain, but in a bass too much can be a problem.
Nut material makes more of a difference on open strings, but in general a plastic nut is squishier and it absorbs more energy than something like bone, causing the note not to sustain as long. The saddle is the same way, but plastic saddles aren't typically used in electric guitar so it's not usually an issue.
I've got a guitar that is pretty unlike a Strat headless, neckthrough, full floating trem with a wide range...and it sounds pretty straty. Of course, I specced it with single coils, a maple neck, an alder body.
technique > SPEAKERS > amplifier > pickups + strings > everything else
Most people don’t have a lot of speakers to swap in and out so don’t notice it, or they use combo amps, or they just leave an amp hooked up to the same speakers. If you switch between an open-back 1x12 and a closed-back 4x12 stack with completely different speakers, the difference is HUGE.
I run a pure digital modeling rig that can emulate a range of speakers.
The difference between a sim of say, Greenbacks or Creambacks and an Alnico Jensen is night and day.
In terms of whether you want to listen to it, technique reigns.
The best gear in the world won't make you a good player and a good player can make even crap gear sound ok, but I'm not sure I agree with technique being most important to tone.
Not saying that technique isn't important (obviously it is), but the same player with the same technique is going to sound completely different on a single coil going into a vintage combe versus an active humbucker going into a hi gain stack.
I have an Ibanez BTB670 bass with neck through construction. In practice it's a very long, 35" neck with two big blobs of wood glued for body. Its sustain is amazing. It just goes on unless you mute it with your fingers.
Similarly pickups have a default tone, but it can be tuned upto a point. Out of the box, a BTB670 and Fender Jazz Bass sounds so different in their default, direct to amplifier configurations. Everything has an influence in that tone. Some things have bigger influence, some less, some negligible.
> I think folks who think wood and nut types and whatever make a difference are nuts.
I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt here and assume that you meant “solid body electric guitar” and not just “electric guitar”.
However, anyone who has even come close to an archtop knows your statement to be false - any guitar which does not sound good acoustically will generally also sound poor electrically. This is definitely _more_ noticeable on guitars with air inside them, but is also true of solid guitars.
Under extreme conditions the little steel adjusting springs are free to rattle at all frequencies and resonate at some. They are so close to the permanent magnets of these high-impedance pickups that you can really hear it sometimes.
Once you know your desired pickup heights, some players have these springs replaced with precision-matched lengths of flexible plastic tubing instead. Gives a much more limited range of height adjustment though.
Somewhat like the whammy-bar springs in a Stratocaster, if you really crank it with their cover off you can hear it if you "strum" the springs. They can also be dampened.
Bad news is that the most important connections to be well-soldered are in the guitar where everything should be solid as can be, with all dissimilar metals encased by the molten lead alloy.
Changing pickups and changing speakers will still have the biggest effect compared to the slight nuances.
Anyway, guitars with a spring vibrato bridge, have this faint but audible natural spring reverb inside their body which by contact affects the strings too adding more warmth to their sound.
It would be worth experimenting with a set of all different springs so that the force applied to the bridge is the same, but they would resonate on different frequencies therefore making the reverb effect bandwidth wider.
Does the author mean ‘trawling’?
> The basic difference between these two similar terms is that trawling involves a net and is typically done for commercial fishing purposes, while trolling involves a rod, reel, and a bait or lure," and is typically done by recreational fishermen.
I wonder though, based on the professional/enthusiast fishing definition, could you call someone who is paid for (digital) trolling, a trawler?
Here's an example:
I went trawling through your HN comments to find something I didn't like so I could downvote it.
Naw, I didn't really do that, I'm just trolling you!
I've seen "trolling" in the metaphorical fishing sense used in the context of online forums before.
https://www.projectguitar.com/tutorials/electronics/repottin...
You don't have to be a cork sniffer to hear small things affect your tone. You just have to play very loudly on half-broken instruments - which isn't everyone's cup of tea.
It's ridiculous that someone would call out 'tubes' as somehow being a kind of nerdy/fake/poseur guitarist connoisseur melodrama. It's literally the most important point differentiation of amps, to the point that almost all tube amps sound better than almost all solid state (at least in the same class).
While someone might possibly take umbrage that 'tubes are not always better' - there's basically no room for someone to say it's a 'petty concern'.
I’m struggling to work out what you mean by “warm” here. By a musician’s definition, low impedance pickups and solid state electronics (usually those with input transformers) have produced some of the warmest guitar tones on record. Even a mid-tier archtop plugged directly into a solid state amp produces _incredibly_ warm.
Distortion (in the musical sense), sure.
The downside is that all of those 100W amplifiers sitting in hobbyist living rooms often don't get enough power to achieve this without being too loud. The solution is just to buy a smaller amplifier or apply attenuation to the output circuit.
Edit to further elaborate I've heard that solid state amps are used in metal more commonly because they have a different tone then tube amps which would be more common in a bluesy type sound.
One thing that can make even modern solid state amps sound bad is crappy speakers. The bulk of solid state guitar amplifiers are combo amps with a single crappy 10” or 12” inch speaker in a cheap cabinet.
Partially false. The general trend in metal has gravitated towards tube amp distortion (and digital modeling of it) precisely because of the different tone and responses vs solid state amps.
As a guitarist there's a certain response you get with a tube amp vs digital and solid state.
As an HN reader, I struggle to describe and quantify this quality besides the generic descriptors of 'response' and 'feel'.
Poets around the world throughout history have tried to quantify beauty and failed. I always find it humorous that guitar players think they can succeed when they are far less well-equipped to the task.
However, a couple of points:
1) Old solid-state amps were mostly built to be cheap, so they sucked. Modern ones are constructed significantly better.
2) Vintage tube amps often have more variation (and may or may not have been repaired faithfully which increases the variation) so you occasionally get one that has "magic".
The downside is that most of the amps don't have that magic--you will probably never encounter the "stage queen" personally. Another downside is that you can lose the "magic" pretty easily.
This is something that the vintage amp guys all gloss over. If you got the "stage queen"--congratulations! Of course the other 300 in the production batch don't sound anywhere near as nice.
3) Dimebag Darrell, for example, liked his solid-state Randall sound very much. Who are you to argue?
4) Modern modeling amps are getting REALLY good at mimicking the tube amps. This means that you CAN have that "stage queen" that you will never encounter personally. And you can create sounds that the stage queen can't. Whether they're "pleasing" is a different story.
5) Each individual amp has a "sound"--whether solid-state or tube. The question at the end of the day is: "Do you, personally, like how that amp sounds?" And, if the answer is "Yes", plug your guitar into the amp, play what you want, and tell the poseurs to go pound sand.
Dimebag was paid to play Randalls. When the deal expired, he swtiched to tubes.
Those Randall JFET amps sound like "chainsaws" when they break up, and I'm pretty sure he liked that. And he used them from way back when he wasn't famous.
The KRANK stuff came MUCH later in his career and KRANK paid him quite a lot. And there's lots of discussion about how he didn't really like the KRANK stuff all that much.
They've gotten quite good, they're about 90-95% of the way there... but that 5% is pretty stark if you know what it is.
That said, convivence, portability, reliability, etc...
Having said that, for the average bedroom/small gig player these subtle differences are too minor to bother with. Especially when a modeling amp can accurately emulate so many different valve amps. Sounds good and you can save a lot of money!
BUT - I would be remiss to say that you shouldn't own at least one valve amp. Take the one you emulate the most and buy it. You'll be happy!
In the 90's they were trying to sell these to guitar players. Nobody seemed to care that if you sent a regular wave down the line and measured it at the receiving end, then did the same thing after chopping out the magical bit of fake electronics, the signal still came out the same.
For another thing, the foam turns into goo after 40 years, which is how long it's been since I set up the instrument.
https://farm4.static.flickr.com/3130/2319685814_b648ce0118.j...
https://cdn.mos.musicradar.com/images/Product%20News/Guitar/...
Gentle suggestion: try to see how many different tones you can get out of one sole pickup by varying your technique (angle and strength of attack, angle that your finger is fretting the string, the part of your finger you fret with, amount of vibrato, type of vibrato, gentle bends, etc). Try practicing with the amp cranked so you can play notes at normal volume just by brushing the pick against the string and listen to the errors it reveals in your technique. The electric guitar is an extremely sensitive instrument. Pickups do make a huge difference (particularly switching between singles and humbuckers), but I got this advice from a teacher and it has totally changed my perspective on tone. If you can develop a deep understanding of the relationship your technique has to tone, you can find a tone that is yours on any guitar, I guarantee it.
Here's another approach: https://youtu.be/pZaTbCBvcOI?t=39 (it's in Russian, but the mechanics is very simple)
Takes 30 seconds-ish to swap mine, you pull it out, unplug the jack, plug the jack into the next one, slide it in. Not "on stage" easy, but definitely "messing around in my garage" easy.
If you want to drill straight holes without a drill press there's this little guide doohickey you can buy that you hold against the piece and put your drill bit through the guide.
I've been playing for over 10 years, and I still don't really care. I have a strat with the standard three single-coil pickups and a Gibson with two humbuckers. I'm sure it makes some difference, but where I'm at, I can't hear enough of a difference beyond the big things that it just doesn't matter.
Also Nyquist–Shannon.
Even amongst fairly traditional humbuckers, there is a huge range...compare an Alnico 2 humbucker wound to say 5kohm with a 20k ceramic...
In my rig I have an SSH guitar with a higher output neck and bridge with a coil tap and run it straight into a blackstar HT40. The pickup selection and volume knob give me all my clean/dirty/overdriven tones without pedals, so there's less noise and less that can fail. It would be really hard to achieve that without the time I spent to find a set of pickups that works.
Personally I think that if all the time I spent reading “sound descriptions” on pickup manufacturers’ websites I would instead have spent playing, not only would I play much better, I would also sound much better.
Sound comes out of your fingers more than out of anything else. Billy Gibbons would sound like Billy Gibbons no matter what pickups one puts in his guitar. He would surely notice the difference, the vast majority of his audience wouldn’t.
Problem is, I wouldn’t have any money to pay for gear, let alone a roof over my head.
By the way I thought I had expressed clearly in my comment that I found the post amazing. Sorry if this didn’t come through.
Here’s a video from Know Your Gear on their product: https://youtu.be/Vj2uJBeSHt4
Ampeg Dan Amrstrong guitar and bass are just cool, look them up.
One thing missing (for me) from the article is a rough idea of what the effect could be. Why would you care about easy swapping at all? Why not find the right one(s) and stick with that/those? Why does changing speed matter - would you change them between songs?
(Yes, I didn't know about pickups before this article)
The biggest change would be between dual coils ("humbuckers") and true single coils. Most modern humbuckers have four leads (you only need two to make a sound, you get two leads per coil) which allow you to wire a switch on the guitar called a "coil tap" which allows you to disengage the secondary coil. This allows you to have a dual coil that functions sonically as either, and it is very desirable for musicians that need a diverse range of tones for their set list (good example is if you ever play a wedding and take requests).
You're also never happy with it. I've changed all the pups on my three guitars multiple times.
A good true single coil has this chime to it that I never get from a split (or tapped) 'bucker.
Beyond what was mentioned about single and dual coil, each pickup has a unique resistance and inductance, which at first glance might affect the frequency response of the typically crude circuit in the guitar. And the magnetic field may also produce some damping of the string motion. Those are some things that might affect tone quality.
But on a more serious note - it's because woods sound very different, and pickups will sound very different depending on what guitar they're in. It's a pain to take the strings off, de-solder a pickup, solder in a new pickup, and put on the strings - only to discover that the pickup doesn't sound any good. Being able to swap them out in mater of seconds is an all-around improvement.