Tweaking pickups, MikeM style

MikeM · 2013-08-07T20:16:11+00:00

Hey folks I know most people aren't that hands on, and prefer their techs to do some stuff. However for those of you that don't mind putting some time in to get exactly what you want, replacing, modding and tweaking pickups is something that has one of the biggest effects on your tone. I bought some pickups from Andre, on the clearout special and actually, my opinion of Tonerider has increased a bit. They're pretty well made! Anycase, I got an A4 set and a Rocksong bridge. This first post is going to be detailing my work on the neck of the A4. It's specced as a 7.9k "hotrod 60's humbucker". I'd say this is pretty accurate. It's a decent spec, although a bit hot. I believe fundamentally, you can always turn treble down, but you can't restore treble detail that has been lost. Because of this, I typically prefer bright pickups (And bright guitars). Nowadays after using really hot neck pickups for a long while, I've realised that A. One should set up their tone control properly. Try using a cap that's around 1/10th of your current value, at the bottom of the sweep, it'll actually still be usable. B. 7.5k is as hot as a neck pickup needs to be, unless you are in a GnR tribute band. So here are the first few pics. Fancy shmancy new pickups fresh in their boxes. Ok so firstly, lets see what the coils each read, going to check the screw coil first, as I prefer them being hotter to emphasise that cool ass 24th harmonic neck tone. Hmmm, 4.1k. That's fine as long as the slug coil is 3.8k as per the specs. Also 4.1k? Strange. I'd say maybe it's the temperature difference, but it's quite moderate here. It's not even 5% off, no worries. So what do they add up to together? Hehehe, that's pretty curious. Didn't think that soldering etc can add up to 120 ohms. Well it's pretty much too high for me. Not bothering to measure capacitance because I know what these sound like. And I can't measure the henries cause I don't have the means to. Now before you continue the thread. I'm pretty dumb and I do dumb things. If you're dumb like me, there's a chance you break pickups when you do things like this. If you attempt this, be careful, work slowly and methodically and most importantly, don't be dumb. Firstly, unscrew the baseplate screws. Pop the baseplate off, slowly pressing on the screws from the coil and feeding the wire through the baseplate. Wow, lots of wax. I'd say that's disappointing, but this is a production pickup that needs to work for the masses. This is FAR too much wax if you don't play with much drive, but they do it so as to avoid any kind of issues for folks that do want to crank the gain. I'm not fond of all of it, so scraping it off. Then I opened up the wires from the coils. This is where shit gets serious. Be gentle, don't treat it like a baby, cause you can kinda knock babies around and stuff, if you knock this coil around, bye bye pickup. Separated the slug coil. Far too hot for me. I like a nice big mismatch, the different resonant frequencies makes for a better sounding pickup. Now after removing all the protective tape, I gently got a hold of both wires. This is the slightly impressive bit for me. I killed a pup a while back by breaking the beginning coil wire. It usually comes out of the bottom of the coil, through the square hole. What TR have done is have beginning lie underneath all the winds. This holds it relatively tight and gives you a small chance of recovering the pup if you do break it. Then I began to unravel it. There are a couple thousand turns on this. The wire is marginally wider than a human hair, thinner than a beard hair though ? How I start it off is to wrap it around my hand, and try to keep my fingers roughly the same circumference as a bobbin. Then I do that for a couple of hundred turns until most of the wax and glue is off the pup, and from there I pull perpendicular to the face of the bobbin, you can get wire off MUCH faster this way. And that's where I have stopped. After cooling down, the pickup is reading 3.33k, which along with 4.11k of the screw coil brings me almost spot on to my target of 7.45k. In fact it might read that once assembled again. More in the next installment ?

MikeM

Exactly what I was trying to get at Norm ? Most people never use their tone control all the way down, what I have been suggesting is to try and make the usable too.

The bigger the cap, the lower the resonant peak is shifted. Like I mentioned earlier, a peak of 500-700 is usually a much more usable tone than the blanket covered 200 that comes from using a 47nF.

This has actually been quite beneficial for me too, 22nF would most likely sound good with quite low output pickups. Got some more investigating to do on my side with different kinds of pickups!!!

Norman86

Thanks for that ?

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