> On every electric guitar, the pickups have dampening springs. From trolling online guitar forums, it sounds like these are pretty important for dampening some vibrations from affecting the pickup.
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...
"Tone" is the sum of many little things (and then some bigger things). There can certainly be differences between guitars that seem quite similar. Since part (most?) of "tone" comes from the player there can be subtle "UX" things that have an influence or even the mental state of the player and what they believe to be true.
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.
One of my favorite "did you know?" relates to early shoegaze bands using "vintage" jazzmaster and jaguars. The bands would buy those, sometimes original 60's instruments, because they were cheap. And the foam under the pickups would be almost gone so the pickups would be almost bottomed out and be much further away from the strings than originally intended. The guitarists didn't know this of course, but that became part of the "shoegaze" sound so people now buy brand new jazzmasters and dump the pickups all the way to the body.
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.
I'm an electric bassist, and springy pickups unnerve me. For one thing, I sometimes rest my thumb on the pickup. So I've replaced the springs with hard spacers, cut to the desired length. As a result, my pickups are solid, and not adjustable.
For another thing, the foam turns into goo after 40 years, which is how long it's been since I set up the instrument.
I think you don't want your pickup to vibrate. Not sure what happens if it does, is there some interference. I bet you could test it, just take the strings off, vibrate the body somehow and listen to the signal closely.
Guitars with dogear P90’s don’t have any springs at all. They’re just screwed right to the body of the guitar. They were made that way because it was cheap, (and then of course as you say it became magic mojo later..)
I don't know about dampening screws on pickups as I don't think I ever saw them; they use springs on each screw to keep them pushed up and reduce screws play, but I'm not sure they're the same thing.
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.
Are you sure that tube amps don't sound better than solid state amps? This is such a common knowledge in the "guitar world" that I can't believe that it's not true. And I swear that I've heard the difference myself...
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.
Small point - 'tube amps' unconditionally sound better than solid state. It's a marked difference that doesn't really require a trained ear or anything, if you played a few chords on a 'warmed up tube amp' vs. 'solid state' to someone who's never seen an electric guitar in real life, they'd be able to hear the difference.
Nice to see some electric guitar geekery on HN :). I started playing last year during the pandemic too, but I had learned a bit in elementary school and I played alto saxophone for around a decade in various school jazz groups.
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.
Jimi went from a $5 acoustic in 1958 to being dead in 1970. That's less time than what it takes most of us to go through our GAS (gear acquisition syndrome) and just enjoy playing the darned thing.
Ooh that one is easier than mine. Would have been outside the scope for this project though (likely needs custom connectors).
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.
It's extremely tempting to try to speed up your progress on the guitar using your existing engineering skills (e.g. what we have here), mathematics skills (e.g. learning music theory), or other resources (e.g. buying loads of gear), but the only way reliably to make progress is practice, practice, and more practice playing the guitar itself.
Often the cheap necks can be made quite nicer with a bit of extra fret work. If the edges feel sharp then it's a matter of filing/sanding them to get them smoother. If there's buzzing then re-level and re-crown. There is a wealth of information on guitar building. If you want a bigger challenge, build your own neck. It is doable with hand tools though the right power tools certainly make it easier.
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.
Another trick for straight holes is to put something on the bit (like a washer or something that moves freely) and it should stay in the same spot. If it slides forward/backward the bit isn’t level. This probably isn’t a good technique for drilling pilot holes for a neck but it works well for things where a Good Enough™ tolerance is acceptable.
Thanks for the tips! I actually tried the guide doohickey but I still failed to get good straight holes. The hard part was that the guitar is not a really level surface to rest the guide on, so I had some complication getting it to sit well.
> Lately I’ve been learning to play guitar. I wanted to be able to try out a bunch of different pickups on my guitar, to get a feel for what sound I prefer.
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.
It makes a big difference if you have a good amp that doesn't have a dull preamp stage. Some of the newer tube designs are extremely responsive to a change in how they're loaded (same goes for all the shitty unbuffered drive pedals that inexplicably sound good).
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.
I think Stratocaster single-coils and Gibson humbuckers cover almost all of the sounds you can get out of an electric guitar. The bridge pickup on a Telecaster is overwound and a bit louder than the bridge on a Strat, but the difference is pretty subtle if the Strat is setup correctly. The only other really distinct sound is the P-90, but it's not nearly as common as the other two, and it's also a variation on single-coil tone.
I'm 70 years old. My ability to hear subtle differences in sound is probably at least 20 or more years in my past. This is why I have no intention of buying a PonoPlayer, or any of the other outrageously expensive high resolution music players.
It’s awesome to see this—the post makes it look quite straightforward to build your own guitar!
But: As a guitar player myself I have learnt that GAS is ever-tempting, especially pickups.
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.
Somnium Guitars [0] also makes guitars with easily hot swappable pickups. They have a mounting system where you can put most pickups into their mounting module and click it into place from the back of the body. It’s still a bit pricey, but starts at a less expensive $2,495 MSRP vs $4,500 from Relish.
Very cool DIY. Was hoping to see what it looks like from the back with all the electronics in place? And maybe a video of how the swap works in practice would be helpful to illustrate.
An interesting idea, but not convinced, as they don’t look very adjustable for height, for example, my Tele pickups are higher on the treble side, compensating somewhat for the higher output of the bigger strings. You could cut this into the mount, but that defeats the purpose of being able to test things quickly, the moment one variable is fixed, you have an instant constraint. This experiment is a trade-off, I get that. He’s not an experienced guitar player and wants to fiddle with pickups. Fine, enjoy, EVH was all about getting the sound to match what’s in his head anyway, whatever it took.
They have the same height adjustment options that most guitar pickups do, the pickups are held on to the mount with two screws and you can screw in/out to adjust the height accordingly. It works in reverse of the normal system since the screws are backwards, but it works
For those like me who didn't know: a pickup is a thingy that generates a tiny electrical field around a string. This allows electronics to translate string vibrations to an audio signal.
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)
It's a laborious process that has a significant impact on tone. You usually have to restring the guitar when you change them out.
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.
Perhaps for a bit of additional explanation, a guitar pickup is a variable reluctance sensor. It's a coil wrapped around a magnet. The magnet sympathetically magnetizes the string, and then the vibrating magnetized string induces a voltage on the coil. The strings have to be made of a magnetic material such as steel, nickel, or one of the magnetic stainless alloys.
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.
Because we guitarists enjoy the wild goose chase that is the never-ending quest for ultimate tone, and thus need to try as many pickups as possible.
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.
Faraday’s law of induction: when a magnetic field (generated by the guitar's pickups)is changed (by the metallic strings) a current is induced (this current is the signal that is created in the pickup and goes to the amp).
Might want to look at Somnium Guitars for a more refined (not DIY) version of this. They have a really nice system. Not cheap, but the build quality is excellent.
Not an expert, but I did recently upgrade the pickups in an older guitar. I learned that not all pickups are wired to the guitar the same way. Seymour Duncan HotRails had to be connected differently than Seymour Duncan VintageRails, for example. This would be a complicating factor to any hot-swapping system.
One could get a Line 6 Variax and play with endless variations on body types, pickups, tunings and recordings of vintage guitars. Old ones can be had for very little these days.
[+] [-] wk_end|4 years ago|reply
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...
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVTj08qTwGw
[+] [-] YZF|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rograndom|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stirfish|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] analog31|4 years ago|reply
For another thing, the foam turns into goo after 40 years, which is how long it's been since I set up the instrument.
[+] [-] Gravityloss|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fallingfrog|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] squarefoot|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lostlogin|4 years ago|reply
Does the author mean ‘trawling’?
[+] [-] sunshineforever|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jbverschoor|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frenchie4111|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jollybean|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TrackerFF|4 years ago|reply
https://farm4.static.flickr.com/3130/2319685814_b648ce0118.j...
https://cdn.mos.musicradar.com/images/Product%20News/Guitar/...
[+] [-] jolux|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] utopcell|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] galkk|4 years ago|reply
Here's another approach: https://youtu.be/pZaTbCBvcOI?t=39 (it's in Russian, but the mechanics is very simple)
[+] [-] frenchie4111|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kjgkjhfkjf|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frenchie4111|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] YZF|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] duncan-donuts|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frenchie4111|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dehrmann|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hctaw|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jolux|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inetsee|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] periheli0n|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tuxie_|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jackseviltwin|4 years ago|reply
Here’s a video from Know Your Gear on their product: https://youtu.be/Vj2uJBeSHt4
[0] https://somniumguitars.com
[+] [-] frenchie4111|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattacular|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZoomZoomZoom|4 years ago|reply
Ampeg Dan Amrstrong guitar and bass are just cool, look them up.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] vr46|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frenchie4111|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Beldin|4 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] hctaw|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] analog31|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] TrackerFF|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lazyant|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mike_red5hift|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] weirdkid|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] utopcell|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] papandada|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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