Category: Wiring & Pickups

Old Guitar Pickups, is it worth the sound?

This question is bothering me sometimes. I’m sort of a retro-music style fan and likely I’d like to have a set of vintage guitar equipments which i can bring them on stage and meet these days’ standard live performances. Reason i have for this is Legendary songs were built in old times with that times’ technology. Old Amps and cabs, old guitars, old pickups.(while I know nowadays the old equipment is aged by time and some of their quality are decreased) So I made a simulation with old and rusty stuff, and i only have an old guitar pickup, a 1×10″ cabinet and a my tiny Xenyx 502 Behringer mixer for this purpose.

Old Guitar Pickups
Old Guitar Pickups

here’s my old cabinet

And I installed this old guitar pickups to my first guitar

now it’s ready for shoot out. here’s the video:

now, here’s the thing. I use Boss GT 8’s preamp modeler which i shouldn’t in this shootout, but i made no equalizer setting for this, so i guess it’s fair enough because i meant to play this with my own stage setting.for the pickup, i added a magnet bar below the pickup to increase the audio signal capturing.

the conclusion:
– about old guitar pickups. It’s the matter of technology. better pickup wiring and shielding, pole pieces positions determine the result. This old pickup has a huge microphonic feedback which is unacceptable on stages. still it has nice sound i guess. On the video I used both direct line in record to my Zoom Q3HD and using Zoom Q3HD built-in microphones. You might want to use old pickups for recording purposes to get some unique old audio signal then you can process it later on recording softwares.
– about old n rusty cabinet. well this is interesting. The speaker speaks uniquely. It maybe rusty(it has holes on its cone) but that’s what became the sound color. you can check on the video and listen the differences basically between direct recording and mic recording. noted that no matter what the amps are, the cabinet and speakers have big role in sound coloring for mic recording

well, you can consider this post is a junk and a worthless experiment, but i made it originally for the cure of my curiosity and for my guitar learning purposes. see ya later 🙂

HumBucker Pickups, Pick Up What You Like

Bright tonality, tight sound, and Hum-free. Humbucking pickups made history in modern rock and metal genres. they are versatile and well-known as best in delivering distortion into Amps.

seymour duncan pickups on spalted maple tele
seymour duncan pickups on spalted maple tele

around us guitarists there are alternating magnetic fields which create hum, as we know that alternating current electrical equipments such as amps produce magnetic fields, and, the humbuckers reduce alternating magnetic fields’ interference via phase cancellation by connecting the coils together out of phase.

Other Humbucker designs

– Stacked humbuckers.

Stacked humbuckers
Stacked humbuckers

this is an alternative humbuckers design to compensate old guitar designs which has single coil size hole on its body. instead of put the pickups side-by-side, stacked humbucker saves size into single coils’ size and can be installed to stratocasters model.

hotrails and quadrails on Fernandes FR 55
Hotrails and Quadrails on Fernandes FR 55

– Rail humbuckers. this design divides single coils pickups size in half. These pickups are just like a normal, a bit smaller, humbucking pickups. the two pole pieces resemble a rail. currently I put these pickups into my Fernandes FR-55 guitar which has awesome-looking.

 

– Coil splits. actually this is another stacked humbuckers which can be separated into single coils using the coil tap. my Fender Special Edition Custom Telecaster Spalted Maple Top HH uses this concept and i applied it to my Fernandes too. sounds great with more tone options.

Gretsch Mini Humbucking Pickups
Gretsch Mini Humbucking Pickups on Gretsch G5236 electromatic pro jet 125th anniversary

other design you might notice is mini humbucking pickups. basically they are resized humbuckers and this design is cute! :))

various humbucker pickups on guitars
various humbucker pickups on guitars

The main idea of humbuckers is reducing hum, so we can have no worries about overdrive hum and distortion noises. we can hit the blues note clearly. But it also creates another sound which is different from single coil pickups’ and become recommendations for modern rock and metal guitarists.

For the sake of my life-time guitar learning, Here I made Humbucker pickups shoot out on YouTube, focused on bridge position. Each type produces slightly different sound but generally it’s bright. I’m using ZOOM Q3HD for capturing the videos, while I connect its Line-In directly to my Behringer Xenyx 502 mixer’s Main Out. I was not using any DirectBox, I only use BOSS GT 8 as my guitar effects processor connected to my mixer.

Bridge Humbucker pickups ShootOut

so, have you consider your humbuckers pickups choice for your guitar? hope you like my video shootout and get some better consideration after you watch it. have nice day, metalheads!