What really makes one (passive) pick up better than the next?

[Pablo Fanque]

Aren't all single coils, for instance, pretty much the same construction and material? It's all wiring, right?

[mjolnir]

Well, there's the number of windings for one, more or less raises or lowers the resistance of the pickup. Width of the pole pieces, type of magnet, whether or not the coils are waxed, I hear that may make a difference...

[JustOpenYourMind]

IT might be the quality of the components and the manufacturing process, much like a squier jazz bass won't sound as good as a 6000$ custom shop fender jazz bass even if they look the same.

I'm just thinking out loud, I never really thought about it.

Maybe high grade magnets are more expensive as well as higher grade copper wiring and maybe the winding process differs from a company to another.

In the end, all pickups are made with three things,

cardboard, magnets and a long copper wire.

[Pablo Fanque]

Originally Posted by JustOpenYourMind

In the end, all pickups are made with three things,

cardboard, magnets and a long copper wire.

Which makes me wonder how the sounds can be so vastly different

[Diogenes]

Originally Posted by JustOpenYourMind

IT might be the quality of the components and the manufacturing process, much like a squier jazz bass won't sound as good as a 6000$ custom shop fender jazz bass even if they look the same... Maybe high grade magnets are more expensive as well as higher grade copper wiring and maybe the winding process differs from a company to another...

If only things were simple, cut and dry.

It depends upon what you consider 'better'. From a construction/materials standpoint inexpensive pickups may use plastic flatware which is easier to manufacture rather than one of fiberboard because the plastic one can be injection molded whereas the fiberboard has to be cut, shaped and glued to a bobbin or directly to the poles being used which is more time consuming. However the average low cost plastic flatware does not withstand the heat of soldering so the leads need to be soldered directly to the coil wire and then taped up for protection whereas fiberboard pickups usually have solder lugs attached where the leads and wire are soldered together... a less fragile way to attach leads. That's just the most basic difference that can make one pickup better than another.

As for other material considerations the copper wire itself can differ and affect the sonic qualities and reliability of a pickup. Some wire is coated with poly... others with Formvar or a myriad of other types of coatings. Depending on the coating, the wire's thickness changes (on a microscopic level) which may not mean much alone but once wound thousands of times onto a bobbin the winding's size and therefore the coil's apperature can differ. Also, the coil's physical properties, height and width, has an effect on how the pickup will sound.

So, for instance, are vintage Fender pickups better than modern inexpensive pickups? Many people will say yes but then Fender used Formvar coated wire which can get brittle with age, crack and allow the copper wire to oxidize and fail or short out the coil but inexpensive pickups usually use poly which supposedly won't get brittle. Also vintage Fender pickups had their coils wound directly onto the poles which made them fragile and prone to failure if the pole pieces were inadvertently bumped or an owner tried to adjust their height... not so with many inexpensive pickups using plastic one-piece bobbins. So I guess it all boils down personal interpretation and what qualities make one pickup better or worse than another.

Check out Seymour Duncan's FAQ pages. It's a great read.

[JTE]

The ear of the listener. "Better" is so subjective that it's meaningless. I like what I hear with Duncan's vintage style PUPs, and Fender's vintage style stuff. Others find that Barts or DiMarzio is "better" than those I like.

What makes PUPs sound different, leaving value judgements aside? Everything. Magnets, wire, how they're physically put together, the way they're wound, etc. While there's a lot of physics that describe what happens, being able to consistently create a speciific sort of sound is as much art as science.

jte

[SGD Lutherie]

Originally Posted by JustOpenYourMind

In the end, all pickups are made with three things, cardboard, magnets and a long copper wire.

Yes and no. Some also have steel in them.

There is no best pickup, just different pickups.

What makes them different is first off the design of the pickup, the type and quality of the magnets, gauge of the magnet wire and how many turns, type of steel used if it has steel poles, geometry of the coil, and a lot of other little things.

And everything is interactive, so when you change one aspect, you change another, so you need to keep all those things in mind when designing pickups.

Now if you narrow it down to say just Jazz pickups the difference could be as simple as how the coil is wound and strength of the magnets.

They are simple devices, yet people can come up with countless variations in tone, much like the 12 notes of the chromatic scale can come up with endless variations in music.

[walterw]

i'm no winder like david is, but i think of traditional pickups like i think of wine, or chili recipes. there's only a few ingredients, but the way they're put together makes all the difference, between "bad" and "good" as well as between the different flavors of "good".

when you get to "modern" pickups (active, neo-d, what-have-you), all the rules change, making it a wide-open field for new tones.

[Greevus]

i'm wondering about the "hotness" of passives. i play loud and aggressively against a wall of guitar. what do you guys recommend in regards to 'how hot' they need to be? i have used an old school DiMarzio white P pup, and it sounded fairly powerful to my ears versus the active EMG I replaced it with. Seems like it had more range really.

[SGD Lutherie]

Originally Posted by Greevus

i'm wondering about the "hotness" of passives. i play loud and aggressively against a wall of guitar. what do you guys recommend in regards to 'how hot' they need to be? i have used an old school DiMarzio white P pup, and it sounded fairly powerful to my ears versus the active EMG I replaced it with. Seems like it had more range really.

The DiMarzio has more midrange. The EMG P is wired in parallel, so it has a different tone, less mids and more highs. The EMG probably has about the same amount of wire on it as most passive pickups.

The hotter you wind a passive, you end up with more lows and mids and less highs, and the resonant peak (in the upper mids) is lower.

[greenboy]

I generally prefer pickups that are wound less hot, because putting that resonant peak higher up seems to make them tonally more flexible. If I want "hot", I use the pre-gain knobs on my preamps/heads - knobs that were designed especially for that purpose ; }

[4Mal]

Originally Posted by greenboy

I generally prefer pickups that are wound less hot, because putting that resonant peak higher up seems to make them tonally more flexible. If I want "hot", I use the pre-gain knobs on my preamps/heads - knobs that were designed especially for that purpose ; }

+1


all the low mid's or upper bass that seems to come along with hot J pickups just serves to mask real low and and upper mids detail - If I want it, I can dial mud in, it the original signal is muddy, getting it clarified is near to impossible.

[4Mal]

What really makes one (passive) pick up better than the next?

The ears of the builder
The quality of his or her construction
The ease with which I can communicate what I'm looking for to them.

The degree to which those criteria are met, will directly correlate with my satisfaction with the final product. Clearly I am not a fan of 'off the shelf' at this point.

[SGD Lutherie]

Originally Posted by 4Mal

What really makes one (passive) pick up better than the next?

The ears of the builder
The quality of his or her construction
The ease with which I can communicate what I'm looking for to them.

The degree to which those criteria are met, will directly correlate with my satisfaction with the final product. Clearly I am not a fan of 'off the shelf' at this point.

+1