Can a four pole pickup be made into a two pole by removing poles?

[Flux Jetson]

I've been watching various You Tube videos that show how different companies and small-shop winders manufacture their pickups, and it got me to thinking about all of this.

Include other ideas I've had ricocheting around in my head (like dummy pickups to have humbucking properties with single coil sound) and the whole thing is beginning to boil over in my buckit-ovva-hed. Many great suggestions here for some excellent "other-than" ideas. I'm usually one to embrace ideas other than what the popular culture has been fed or has demanded. I think most builders (of anything musical) tend to stay within the pop-culture rut to ensure high volume sales, which I can fully understand.

But that doesn't mean I like it!

Hence this quest to produce "my last bass guitar ever" that will embrace as much as possible everything that rings ~good~ in my mind. And that ethos includes the ability to change my mind at will!

I may even attempt to design a five-module ~frame~ that up to five pickup module plates could easily bolt into. Kindof like a miniaturized version of your standard Rack, with the rack being the frame that is installed in the bass, and modules would be like the rack-mount devices that would screw/bolt into the frame. The ultimate expression of that idea would be pickups that "snap" into place, making their electrical connections at the same time. Preamp/control plates with various wiring/controls/preamp-types could also just ~snap~ into place. Obviously this idea would require some srt of standardization that all of the big-shot pickup makers and guitar makers would need to comply with for it to work out with any kind of power and ability. Just dreamin' here.

I actually HAVE thought of making standard aluminum (plastic? Vinyl?) 2.25 inch wide plates that any pickups would fit into (pre-cut shapes in just the plates to form-fit various pickup types .. J, P, soapbar, MM, and so on). Then the plates could be attached to the bass via threaded rails that run parallel to the strings. Threaded holes running all along each rail permitting personalized location of the pickup plates, blank plates to fill the unused "slots". This is something I may even adopt. EMG-type connectors and headers on everything would optimize the setup.

Wow ... seriously babbling again. Dang it! I have such a bad habit of doing that. My brain just goes into freerun and everyone suffers for it!

Sorry.

Thanks for the help so far everyone!

NOTE: I didn't think that ~metal plate to block out a given pole~ idea sounded solid. The plate just becomes part of the ~generator~ at that point.

[Flux Jetson]

Originally Posted by walterw

look for older fender american standard pickups; they built them with the polepiece magnets inside a plastic bobbin, insulated from the coil-windings.

you can push them right out of the bobbin without hurting anything.

this is not true for most fender-types (including those duncan-designed, i believe), which wrap the wire right onto the magnets; move a polepiece and you get a busted coil wire and a dead pickup.

any pickup with a screw-down polepiece you can of course just unscrew it right out.

either way, it should do what you're thinking, allow a pickup to sense some strings but not others.

Just to be clear, I hadn't planned on molesting the Duncan Design pickups for this (I actually quite like them!). Like I had said earlier in the posting run I planned on using sacrificial ebay pickups that had only four poles and plastic bobbins. But thanks for pointing out the differences, after all, there's more people than just ~me~ reading this thread! So it's a good thing you illuminated the differences.

[Flux Jetson]

Originally Posted by xaxxat

In that case, you need one of these Atlansia basses:

This is my kind of off-path design approach! Aesthetics and popularity be damned! Function, flexibility, and choice is priority one in stuff like that! The perfect expression of a research device.

Combined with a fully modular preamp and signal router, and we're studio bound!

My modular synth and audio processor, this is the main unit ....



This is the signal routing unit and a little bit of the EQ setups ....



I recently added some ~pretty~ by installing all allen-head screws throughout the system, each one made of 7075-T6 aerospace aluminum and hard anodized red to match the LEDs and some of the pushbuttons.



Oddball stuff .... yea, I know. Consider the source!

[xaxxat]

You might find this interesting:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vI8B92SADJY

http://www.thechameleonguitar.com/Ch...itar/Home.html

[khutch]

Originally Posted by Flux Jetson

Hmm .. perhaps so. How thick does the plate need to be?

I don't really know. I tried the idea once and whatever I tried worked. I would start with whatever you have laying about the house. I am certain it does not be as much as an eighth of an inch to get a pretty good suppression of the pickup output.

Ken

[Flux Jetson]

Originally Posted by xaxxat

You might find this interesting:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vI8B92SADJY

http://www.thechameleonguitar.com/Ch...itar/Home.html

That's a neat innovation. It's outside of my interests but that makes it no less innovative. I wonder what it (and things like the Kemper Profiling device) will render over time? Digital physical modeling has it's purposes, and some of the applications have treated us to some seriously useful devices.

Soon I will be posting some SoundCloud tracks that will challenge analog purist notions (is it analog, or is it my POD Pro?). While not everything within my POD Pro is "perfect", there are without any doubt some highly useful (and very convincing) sound abilities within it's boundaries.

Thanks for exposing me to that. Cool!

[Flux Jetson]

Originally Posted by khutch

I don't really know. I tried the idea once and whatever I tried worked. I would start with whatever you have laying about the house. I am certain it does not be as much as an eighth of an inch to get a pretty good suppression of the pickup output.

Ken

Well I'll at least have to try it. The worst possible result will be that it doesn't work. Compared to the best possible result, it's certainly an equitable risk. I defintely have various thicknesses of different steels around here, so it will be "free" as well!