5-string P pickups with mismatched coils and hum cancelling

[sunbeast]

I think my issues with this bass (Jackson David Ellefson 30th Anniversary reissue) in the end are that this one is much touchier when it comes to both technique and setup than I am used to, and that these EMGs (and maybe active pickups generally) are sonically further away from my expectations than I would have guessed (I knew I was making a bit of a leap, but might have misjudged the magnitude). But I think I have the instrument to a place where if it doesn't sell, I don't mind; while his career seems to have ended in embarrassment, Ellefson was one of the players who got me playing and I continue to enjoy his work, and I don't think there's anything wrong with the instrument or the electronics in it. I just suspect I would get more use out of a Yamaha like @JimmyM or @Kro has.

The first guitar mod I ever did was putting a set of EMGs J pickups into my first bass after a studio engineer complained about the buzz, and that sound ended up being "my sound" for several years til I wore the frets out on that bass and started nerding out about gear and collecting/modding the crap out of instruments. I will say that I tended to stray away from the EMG/active (and Jazz Bass) world for a long time after retiring that first bass, but lately I've been delving back into the traditional design EMGs pretty happily (still don't bond with J basses though). They are definitely their own thing, but what they do really just seems to "work" really well in a mix to me and the low noise is a big bonus as someone who likes pushing gear into compression (which of course raises any existent noise floor significantly). My EMG'd PJ also has an ACG/East filter preamp that can really help those pickups cop more of a passive vibe than the standard EMG electronics, though I have another PJ with EMGs and just straight Vol/Vol/Tone setup and love that tone too. Maybe an acquired taste!

 

[bigtone23]

Well it took you guys forever, but finally we have a discussion! My conclusion from it is that I'm not the least bit worried about any hum issues whatsoever. So many times you hear of something that sounds like a huge issue on paper, but in reality affects my life zero. I believe this to be one of those cases. Apparently Duncan does too, or else they wouldn't have sent me the pickup.

BTW, why I didn't ask EMG about it despite being an endorser...Rob Turner, EMG's founder, does not care for passive pickups whatsoever, had to be talked into designing the Geezer set in the first place, and others have asked them about doing a 5 set that sounds like Geezers and Rob has steadfastly refused. Duncan, OTOH, said, "Sure, we'll make you a 5-string SPB-1!" If the Geezer didn't exist, I'd be using SPB-1's on all my basses anyway.

There you have it!
The Geezer set is damn killer. For being passive avoidant, EMG really nailed it with that one!
FWIW, I also love EMGs. Been using them for over 30 years!

 

[Riff Ranger]

There you have it!
The Geezer set is damn killer. For being passive avoidant, EMG really nailed it with that one!
FWIW, I also love EMGs. Been using them for over 30 years!

Do you have 5-string Geezers?

 

[Riff Ranger]

The first guitar mod I ever did was putting a set of EMGs J pickups into my first bass after a studio engineer complained about the buzz, and that sound ended up being "my sound" for several years til I wore the frets out on that bass and started nerding out about gear and collecting/modding the crap out of instruments. I will say that I tended to stray away from the EMG/active (and Jazz Bass) world for a long time after retiring that first bass, but lately I've been delving back into the traditional design EMGs pretty happily (still don't bond with J basses though). They are definitely their own thing, but what they do really just seems to "work" really well in a mix to me and the low noise is a big bonus as someone who likes pushing gear into compression (which of course raises any existent noise floor significantly). My EMG'd PJ also has an ACG/East filter preamp that can really help those pickups cop more of a passive vibe than the standard EMG electronics, though I have another PJ with EMGs and just straight Vol/Vol/Tone setup and love that tone too. Maybe an acquired taste!

Hey, you and I are the same age! When I started playing in 1993, I thought this bass was exactly what I wanted, and I happily played a passive, bolt-on, 4-string approximation of it for years (though it did take a back seat to the aforementioned ATK 5-string that I've had since '95, and eventually got traded well). Now that I have this bass, I can confirm that yes, it is exactly what I would have wanted in 1993

 

[JimmyM]

There you have it!
The Geezer set is damn killer. For being passive avoidant, EMG really nailed it with that one!
FWIW, I also love EMGs. Been using them for over 30 years!

Honestly, they're the only active pickups I've ever liked. I'm always gone for in your face tones and other active systems were always too polite for me. EMG's could do both.

 

[JimmyM]

Do you have 5-string Geezers?

Nobody does. EMG won't make them.

 

[Riff Ranger]

Nobody does. EMG won't make them.

Ah, hence your friendly conversations with the folks at Seymour Duncan?

 

[Kro]

View attachment 4385609

I'm not sure what the fuss is all about. Different sized coils? Bah, humbug!

I tried something similar to that when I installed a 17mm bridge onto my precision. To my ears I couldn't make it work. While I've long been a proponent of: the magnet field in theory is so big it shouldn't make a difference, nevertheless I found that having the strings inconsistently over the pole pieces (or maybe the coils) did in fact make a difference.

Jury is still out as to why, but I personally didn't like it. I don't doubt that it could work for countless others though.

 

[Kro]

and others have asked them about doing a 5 set that sounds like Geezers

Me. I did. I was steadfastly rebuffed.

 

[JimmyM]

Ah, hence your friendly conversations with the folks at Seymour Duncan?

Exactly. EMG doesn't care if I use other pickups. Not like they've ever demanded I stop using lipsticks in my Longhorn or anything And IMHO, the SPB-1 is a sure thing to getting as close as I can to a Geezer without spending a fortune. They're quite close in tone, except the SPB-1 is a tiny bit less middy.

 

[JimmyM]

BTW, I do have to point out as a new endorser to Yamaha (despite only Dino, Hodgy, and Dom at Ampeg knowing or caring) that the stock pickups in the BB235 are not bad at all I've done some test recordings with some music-minus-bass stuff, and they're a little smoother and darker sounding than a typical vintage style pickup, but they hold up in a mix. But I kept listening to vids of all their BB basses (same guy playing same thing on all of them), and the pickups in the BB735 and BBP35 are so much more to my liking that I knew I had to replace at least the P pickup. There's something about alnico 5 pickups that just works for me. So it's going under the iron. That's why they went to trad P and J shapes...so they're easier to mod. Demand creates market.

 

[sunbeast]

Honestly, they're the only active pickups I've ever liked. I'm always gone for in your face tones and other active systems were always too polite for me. EMG's could do both.

Off topic, but agreed for the most part. The old Duncan "Active EQ" pickups with the switches could also get pretty aggressive, but in a different way. The old-school EMGs run at 9V but played hard are a nice blend of clear and rude I think (so that you are mildly pushing the headroom of the internal pre). Kinda like playing through a cranked 800RB vs an SVT (maybe that's a terrible analogy though it makes sense to me).

 

[JimmyM]

Also, this whole discussion reminds me of the Rig Rundowns that ZZ Top's guitar tech turned bassist Elwood Francis did. Billy Gibbons uses an old Digitech programmable rack EQ to set every guitar he uses to sound as close to Pearly as possible in every way, regardless of what it is or how different it sounds. He does it by playing a G chord on something that scans the EQ of Pearly at every venue, then plays every guitar and tries to match it with the Digitech, and saves it when he gets it. He freely admits to it being a somewhat imperfect method, but it works, and Elwood had the best line ever about it...

"It's not a perfect science but it's guitar science."

That's how I feel about the mismatched coils. Did from the beginning of the convo and still do.

 

[JimmyM]

Off topic, but agreed for the most part. The old Duncan "Active EQ" pickups with the switches could also get pretty aggressive, but in a different way. The old-school EMGs run at 9V but played hard are a nice blend of clear and rude I think (so that you are mildly pushing the headroom of the internal pre). Kinda like playing through a cranked 800RB vs an SVT (maybe that's a terrible analogy though it makes sense to me).

Yes!!! I saw King's X a couple times and dUg Pinnick really liked those Duncans with the switches and went on a buying binge when he found out they were disco'd. Don't know if he still uses them, but he certainly was an in-your-face bassist at the shows I saw.

 

[Riff Ranger]

Off topic, but agreed for the most part. The old Duncan "Active EQ" pickups with the switches could also get pretty aggressive, but in a different way. The old-school EMGs run at 9V but played hard are a nice blend of clear and rude I think (so that you are mildly pushing the headroom of the internal pre). Kinda like playing through a cranked 800RB vs an SVT (maybe that's a terrible analogy though it makes sense to me).

Which one's the 800RB and which one's the SVT?

 

[Riff Ranger]

It would seem @JimmyM has his answer to his original question, but crosstalk, both coils picking up the same string, and other areas of interest have cropped up. I screwed the DG side of my (reverse) EMG P5 down a bit after all this discussion and voilà, the A now rings out like the rest of the strings (at least with the P and J both on; I still don't care for the sound of either pickup on its own, but that's okay). Was it possible that, even with a shorter coil on the DG side, both coils were picking up the A? Because until I finally nailed the height adjustment, this pickup and the P6X—which definitely had both coils picking up the A—both had the same anemic sound on the A.

 

[sunbeast]

It would seem @JimmyM has his answer to his original question, but crosstalk, both coils picking up the same string, and other areas of interest have cropped up. I screwed the DG side of my (reverse) EMG P5 down a bit after all this discussion and voilà, the A now rings out like the rest of the strings (at least with the P and J both on; I still don't care for the sound of either pickup on its own, but that's okay). Was it possible that, even with a shorter coil on the DG side, both coils were picking up the A? Because until I finally nailed the height adjustment, this pickup and the P6X—which definitely had both coils picking up the A—both had the same anemic sound on the A.

I tried to explain my theory earlier, but perhaps you missed it. If you look at the booklet included with the P5 (or PDF on the EMG site), they show the magnet location for the pickup with the long magnet on the BEA and short on the DG and I think with the assumption that your A string will run basically down the centerline of the pair of coils where it would then only be running over the long magnet. In your picture you can see that your A string is instead running near the bottom edge of the BEA coil and far more into the DG coil, so it appears it would be sitting near the edge of both magnets. I think in your case putting the long magnet on the DG side of the split might be the best course of action (this is also what I needed to do on my 4 to 5 conversion PJ to get the best alignment for the center string).

 

[sunbeast]

Which one's the 800RB and which one's the SVT?

My bad analogy was the SVT being the "passive pickup" and pushed 800RB being the "active EMG run at 9V", both sort of copping a slightly compressed and harmonically-rich tone in different ways haha

 

[Jefenator]

Just played out my trusty old Yamaha BB5000AF last night: a design from the early 1990s with active 5-string P/J pickups. I dislike their [gaudy '80s] outer appearance, and the fact that you can't easily swap in something else. But they really hit it out of the park on the internals IMHO. The blend is perfect right on the detent, the soloed P is warm but still growls enough to carry the low B and I've never had to touch the bass or treble knobs at all. That's how you do it...

 

[micguy]

It would seem @JimmyM has his answer to his original question, but crosstalk, both coils picking up the same string, and other areas of interest have cropped up. I screwed the DG side of my (reverse) EMG P5 down a bit after all this discussion and voilà, the A now rings out like the rest of the strings (at least with the P and J both on; I still don't care for the sound of either pickup on its own, but that's okay). Was it possible that, even with a shorter coil on the DG side, both coils were picking up the A? Because until I finally nailed the height adjustment, this pickup and the P6X—which definitely had both coils picking up the A—both had the same anemic sound on the A.

The handoff between the two coils in a split hum canceller is an area where geometry matters. One thing that a P pickup does much better than a split J pickup (on a 4 string) is avoiding the "magnetic valley" - if you bend your D string towards your A string on a 4 string J with split pickups, when the D string gets halfway to the A 's position, the volume will drop off a lot. The magnetic field on a split J has field lines that run "sideways" in that area - the thing just can't give you output from a string in that location. The stagger of the pickup halves on a P mitigates this a lot - you can go looking for a magnetic valley, and you won't find much evidence of it. The stagger in that second dimension helps a lot

With a 5 string, that valley has to be offset - you can't run that down the centerline of the instrument, because the A string is located there. How offset should it be? Half of the distance between strings. Ahhhh - there's the rub. Some 5'er have 19 mm spacing (at the bridge, calculations have to be done for where the pickups are, which ends up being a smaller distance), some have 18, or 17, or 16 (mine are 17.5). As a result, the pickup needs to be designed specifically for your string spacing. If it isn't (I've had this issue), the magnetic valley is much more of an issue - you can have a weak string even without bending it.

So, there can be issues in the handoff between pickup halves - what some here are calling "crosstalk" (where both halves of the pickup hear a string, and you get a different tonality to that string), and you can also have a "magnetic valley", where the string gets lost in the transition.

Why do I like sidewinder pickups (Nordstrand Zenblades) or stacks (Seymour Duncan makes some J shaped stacks that are quite good)? Because they don't have imbalance issues, they don't have crosstalk or magnetic valley problems, they don't hum, and they sound like single coils.