Experimental rail pickup construction: wiring question

[Beate Ritzert]

Back to the issue of the mellow / muddy sound:

Did You check how the resistive / capacitive load would effect that, i .e. if increasing the load resistance and lowering the load capacitance would already help? Simple and cheap test: attach one pickup directly to the output jack and/or use shorter cables.

If that will go in the right direction, You might use 1 Meg pots and possibly a "no load pot" for the tone control.

These measures will of course not cure the "muddiness" and slower response caused by eddy currents - and these may be induced in ANY conductor within the magnetic field, including the base plate, and of course the blades (You might need thinner blades, as i did when i turned my Gibson TBPlus into a sidewinder).

It will be a process of trial and error and needs a lot of experience (which i do not have as well).

[Jason Rodgers]

Beate, I majored in music education, so I'm still trying to get a handle on the electronics jargon. In other words, I don't know how to go about inducting or capacitating these pickups. I am incapacitated.

While at the GAL conference this summer, Veronica Merryfield hooked some fancy meter up to the leads, pushed a bunch of buttons, crunched some numbers in her head, declared "You've got about five Henries there," and then proceeded to graph out a resonance curve on a whiteboard. When she was kind enough to dumb that down for me, her conclusion was that, yes, they're a little muddy. We talked about reducing the iron in the cores next time, and she encouraged me to try ferrite.

I am learning through a good deal of reading on the MEF (I see you participating in the low-Z discussions), though, what I might be able to do about this issue without tearing them apart too much. The first step will be pulling a couple magnets off the cores. I'll do that when I get around to pulling the whole guitar apart for some modifications in other areas. Trying ceramic magnets would be an option, too. And yes, upping the overhead on the pots was another consideration I've recently read about.

At the end of the day, I'm still really having a lot of fun with this guitar. The Fender Cyber Twin that John Sonksen lent me has some amp models that work really well with the pickups' tone. Being such specific pickups, built to the guitar's design, it would be a bit of work again to rewind or replace them, so I may get them sounding as good as I can and leave em for the foreseeable future.