Getting the Best Tone From Your Humbucker Guitar Pickups

Jun 122012
 

One of the most versatile pickups around is the DiMarzio Humbucker from Hell, and we’ll tell you how we set things up in our studio to get the right kind of sound for recording all of the different types of music we enjoy.

It’s all down to tone

Your guitar pickup tone is the starting point for the vibe and feel of your music, and it’s extremely helpful to know how to get the sound you’re looking for without wasting a bunch of time, especially if you’re paying for studio time.  Here’s how we do it.

Warm tone

If you’re looking for warmth without too much presence, humbuckers are perfect for the job.  Where a single coil might give you much more quack and bite than you’re looking for, you can get sweet, smooth, almost “dripping” tones out of a humbucker.  That’s based on the inherent frequency response of the humbucker circuit design, but you don’t really care why – you just care that it sounds amazing in the middle of your masterpiece.  When I’m looking for warmth and body, I select the neck pickup, as it will pick up more of the fundamental frequencies and fewer of the harsher harmonics that live down by the bridge.  Then, I set the volume a bit below full-bore.  Many volume circuits also inadvertently shape the tone of the signal as well, and in my experience there’s more warmth available with a slightly lower volume setting on the guitar.

If your guitar has a tone knob, rolling it off to about mid-range will take some bite out of the sound.  Play this by ear, because as you continue to roll the tone knob toward zero, you’ll also start losing presence, and the tone will feel muffled and far away.  Warmth lives in the middle of your tone knob (all guitars are a little different, of course).

Tone is in your fingers, as well, so it’s important to learn how to let your technique help create the tone and feel you’re hoping for.  When I need warmth and body, I’ll often put the pick down and use my fingers, and strum with my thumb.  If I need the articulation capability that a pick gives me, I’ll be sure to strum with the pick at an acute angle with the guitar body in the direction of my strumming.  Holding the pick perpendicular to the body gives you a more biting sound, and a more angled pick presentation to the strings helps the pick to slide across the top of the strings.  This attenuates some of the higher frequency harmonics that give your guitar its bite, which results in a warmer, smoother tone. Give it a try…

Quack

Sometimes you just want some quack.  While humbucker guitar pickups aren’t famous for quackiness, it’s still possible to get that twangy, biting sound out of your ‘bucker.  Set the tone all the way up, select the bridge pickup (the one closest to the place where your strings attach to the guitar body, in case the “bridge” terminology is confusing), and pluck or strum the strings near the bridge.  For even more bite, you can even lift the strings slightly as you pluck them.  When you release them, they will bounce off of the fretboard.  The result of this impact between string and fretboard is an impulse, which sends a ton of high frequency harmonics through the string and gives you more quack.

Grind

Dude, admit it.  You love that growl.  Me too.  Sometimes I set the amp to “bone crushing,” get my white man overbite going, and grind away at something vicious-sounding.

But this part might blow you away:  you don’t necessarily want your guitar at its brightest, loudest setting.  To get that growl going, you’re going to have to get your amp to do a lot of the work, and your effects rack will be busy as well.  Because heavy sounds are often compressed and distorted (both beyond the scope of this article, but great topics in and of themselves), you don’t want a huge amount of harmonic information going through your amp and effects.  In other words, set your pickup and tone controls almost the same way you did for your “warm” tone – use the neck pickup, and set the volume and tone slightly down from full open.  Palm muting is the key to that tight, percussive rhythm sound.

When it comes time for your solo, slap the pickup selector over to the bridge pickup, open up the volume, and get to it.  Why the difference?  Because rhythm work usually uses more than one string at a time, and chord information cranked through a crushing amp setting gets muddy and overbearing very fast if you’re sending too much of high-frequency harmonic information through the amp.  Solo work, on the other hand, relies on that same high-frequency information in order to cut through the mix and stand out.  You want the extra signal flow to help the strings sing out above the rest of the band.  Also, if you’re a fan of pinch harmonics, you’ll usually get better results from the bridge humbucker.

What about slightly milky but with plenty of articulation and not too much quack?

Umm, yeah.  You just gotta tweak it a bit, adjust your playing style, and listen closely for the right vibe and feel.  But don’t make a hobby out of finding the right tone.  Music is all about feel and expression, and your time is much better spent practicing your chops than hunting for the perfect Guitar God tone.

Thanks for reading.  Send us your comments!

Here are a few more smoking deals on humbuckers.

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Humbucker vs Single Coil Guitar Pickups – Which Should You Choose?

Aug 082011
 

Featured Pickup:

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How to pick between a humbucker and a single coil pickup

Those of us not blessed with infinite resources are often forced to make difficult choices. While it would be great to have the cashola to buy as many guitars as your tone hunger could possibly conjure desire for, most of use don’t have that luxury.

So we have to make tough choices about our tone, and the classic debate many of us have with ourselves is this one: should I choose a humbucker or single-coil pickup to best express my inner mega-music star?

To help you decide between a single-coil pickup and a humbucker pickup for any given guitar or position, here are a few generalities that describe most representative pickups from the categories. As always, the electric guitar pickup world is riddled with exceptions to the rules, so you’re probably going to have to try out a couple of different pickups in your particular axe to find the sound that you like best. In other words, your mileage may vary, but hopefully this discussion will help you get started.

Humbucker guitar pickup sound characteristics

There are three main characteristics that generally describe a humbucker, relative to its single coil cousins.

1. Low hum. That’s the main point of the humbucker design. Two coils are added in series to the same signal set, but wired with opposite electrical polarity relative to each other. The opposite electrical polarity cancels out the ambient electrical noise that’s caused by power lines, wall outlets, TVs, monitors, and just about any alternating current electrical device. The magnetic polarity is the same, however, which means that when the magnetic field surrounding the coils is disrupted by the movement of the strings above it, the coils each pick up the signal. Because the magnetic polarity is the same, the signal from both coils is added together. The result is a high signal-to-noise ratio, and very little annoying hum.

2. More power. Because the two coils a humbucker are added together in series, it’s relatively easy to build a pickup with very high signal output (compared to single-coil pickups). There are even humbuckers powerful enough to begin to overdrive your amp’s clean settings, which makes for some very interesting and useful sonic possibilities.

3. “Smoother” or “fatter” sound. Because humbucker pickup coils are usually placed adjacent to each other above the magnet, there is more effective area of magnetic influence through which the strings move. This generates a fuller, richer signal, full of more signal harmonics (not the ZZ-top kind of pinch harmonics, but the nerdy kind of harmonics that form the “voice” of the music and give each instrument – and human being – a unique sound). There’s also a stronger bass frequency signal, which rounds out the sound of a humbucker.

Single coil pickup sound characteristics

Compared to their humbucker cousins, single-coil guitar pickups have the following characteristics.

1. “Punchier” sound, which is often described as the “single-coil quack.” This sound is a function of the reduced inductance and resistance of a single coil vs humbucker pickup, which would otherwise tend to attenuate the higher frequency sound harmonics. Single coils let these higher frequencies pass through more easily than humbuckers do, which gives the single coil sound a “bite” that’s famously present in many classic rock and blues styles. The small effective area of magnetic influence (single coil pickups are about half the area of a humbucker) also contributes significantly to this kind of warm, open sound.

2. Lower output. Fewer effective coil windings generally means lower signal strength. As always, though, you can find certain single coil pickups that have higher signal output than certain humbuckers, but single coil pickups don’t generally generate the same amount of signal.

3. Noisier. Most single coil pickups aren’t designed to “buck the hum” like humbuckers are, and tend to be noisier. Modern single coils have come a long way toward reducing the amount of unwanted noise, but many of the harmonics that make the classic single coil sound live in the frequency range attenuated by the filters installed to reduce the hum, which changes the sound a bit. Many people can’t hear the difference, but others feel that it’s significant.

Do you have to choose between single coils and humbucker pickups?

As in many areas of life, the old humbucker vs. single coil debate isn’t just black and white, and pickup designers have found ingenious ways to combine the favorable characteristics of either into a sort of “hybrid” pickup.

First, there are single coil sized humbuckers. They are genuine humbuckers, either with two miniaturized but complete coils, or with two blades running the length of the pickup, that produce the characteristic humbucker noise canceling effect. The tone and temperament of these pickups vary widely – there are single coil sized humbucker options that sound very much like a warm, bluesy single coil pickup, and there are others that sound a lot like monster high-output full sized humbuckers.

Second, there are noise canceling single coil pickups. While technically, these electric guitar pickups would also “buck the hum” like a traditional humbucker, they accomplish the noise reduction through filtering techniques. Many of these techniques are very effective, but as we mentioned above, there are folks who claim they can tell a discernible difference in the character of the single coil tone.

Third, there are humbucker sized P90 single coil pickups, as well.  They’re designed to give you classic single-coil P90 tone in a humbucker-sized housing.

Finally, there are “stacked humbuckers” that behave a great deal like single coil pickups, but actually have a second, opposite-polarity coil placed directly beneath the primary coil. The function of the second coil is still to reduce noise, but its location beneath the primary coil means that it doesn’t contribute nearly as much to the tone of the pickup as it would if were placed adjacent to its partner as in a traditional humbucker configuration. The result is a single coil sound with humbucker noise canceling, accomplished without attenuating parts of the natural guitar string signal.

How to make sense out of it all

The single coil vs humbucker pickup debate can get very academic and very confusing if you let it. We’ve described a few general characteristics of both styles of pickup, as well as the general characteristics of a few humbucker-single-coil hybrid options, which will hopefully help you to narrow your search for the perfect sound for your guitar.

But here’s the key point: it’s sound that you’re after. All of the fancy product descriptions, technical explanations, and user reviews may help you feel better about making a purchase in the first place, but at the end of the day, it’s all about the tone.

That means two things. First, don’t be afraid to invest in your guitar’s tone. It’s worth a few bucks extra, if it means you’re going to get a tone that you totally dig, and that sends shivers down your spine. There’s a lifetime of enjoyment ahead of you when you get your axe sounding just like you want it to sound.

Second, don’t be afraid to experiment a little bit. To do that, you’ll probably have to buy more than one pickup to try out in a particular spot on your guitar. Many pickup manufacturers have a liberal return policy for this very reason – they want you to be happy with your tone, and they totally understand if you just don’t fall in love with the way a particular pickup sounds. Many of our pickup vendors at JustHumbuckers.com will offer a full refund, no questions asked, and most others will offer full store credit at a minimum.

That brings us to the Golden Rule of Guitar Pickups: It’s all about tone. Period. End of story. Find the tone you love, and you’ll be in guitar heaven for decades.

Seymour Duncan Hot Rails – Read This Before You Buy

Aug 032011
 

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Hot or not – Seymour Duncan Hot Rails

So you have a single coil-sized hole in your guitar’s body or pickup guard, and you have a humbucker-sized hole in your sonic repertoire.

What do to?

Well, we’ve written a bunch about single coil humbuckers and the options available to you for humbucker love in a single coil space, or hum-free single-coil voicing. That’s a big decision, but for this discussion we’re going to assume you want the former – a real live humbucker, with all its hot output, low noise, and fatter lower end – that’s sized to fit in a single coil pickup space.

Hello Hot Rails.

If you’re looking for a distinctive humbucker tone, one that can’t be mistaken for a slightly bulked-up single coil, we think Seymour Duncan Hot Rails are worth a listen. This will take your single coil guitar to new sonic territory, but it won’t really be the same guitar you had when you started.

Here’s what we mean.

A single coil humbucker, particularly a blade bucker like Seymour’s Hot Rails, is neither a single coil pickup nor completely the same as a normal humbucker. Sonically, it’s somewhere in between, with the Hot Rails leaning decidedly more toward a higher output, lower-voiced humbucker than toward a bluesy, warm old single coil.

It’s often dropped into the bridge position, which works nicely, because the hotter output and greater inductance means that it’s less sonically sensitive to the higher frequency harmonics. The bridge position has a lot of natural bite to it, so the combination makes for a well balanced effect that has plenty of high frequency power to cut through the mix on a solo, no magnetic pole-induced string dropoff as you bend your strings away from their resting position while you play, and lots of ballsy crunch and low-end growl to make your point in clearer parts of the mix.

What we would NOT do with the Hot Rails pickup

We wouldn’t drop it in a mid or neck position looking for a warm, bluesy feel when you’re playing clean or with only a little gain. It ain’t that kind of pickup. It hears all your pick and finger noises on the strings, and it leans a bit too much toward the classic metal sound to be a competent blues, heavy blues, or classic rock feel.

Where the Hot Rails excels

Metal. Grind. Thrash. Lots of growls, powerful crunch at mid gain settings, and enough clarity under extreme gain – with enough high freq love to get the job done but not so much that you think “who snuck a single coil into the metal party?” Iron Maiden use Hot Rails, if that tells you anything.

You can pick up your Seymour Duncan Hot Rails here, or browse for pickups that are sonically similar (we think). As always, guitar tone, like beauty, is all about the beholder, so don’t lawyer up if you think we’re full of it. Just drop us a line to let us know your thoughts.

As always, JustHumbuckers.com strives to bring you the world’s largest selection of humbucker guitar pickups, at the world’s best prices – because we comb the internet for the best prices among the hundreds of online retailers in the guitar-o-verse. If you find a humbucker pickup out in the world that we don’t offer, please let us know. We’ll see if we can’t add it to our lineup.

Humbucker Sized P90 Guitar Pickups

Aug 032011
 

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Humbucker Sized P90s?

So you’re looking for that vintage P90 sound, are you? A bit gritty, lots of detail, some sting in the highs, and a bit of punch in the mids, with enough growl to stir that inner rock and roll animal – we totally understand. You want that P90 like tone when you’re looking to unleash some gritty blues or slow, open, sorta-angry and undeniably in-your-face tone on the world.

So here’s the deal. P90s are single coil pickups from Back In The Day. You know, from when you fell in love with rock and roll and gritty electric guitar music that hasn’t been processed all to hell. But those P90s behaved (still behave, that is) a bit differently than your average set of single coil pickups. Sure there’s that bit of bite and jangle, but they’re fatter than other single coils, and they have a bit more sonic depth (because they pick up a few more of the lower harmonics. How? Pure freaking magic, that’s how).

So you’re reading this because you have a guitar with a hole for a humbucker, and a hole in its soul that can only be filled by a P90 kind of groove. We understand.

There are two ways to go about it.

Buy humbucker sized P90 pickups, or P90-like single coil pickups.

You can choose from quite a few humbucker sized P90-esque single coil pickups. Here’s a quick list of those that we think qualify to potentially fill that void in your sonic life:

  • Gibson P-94s. These are a darn close replica of the old school P90 sound – maybe the closest out there. The highs seem slightly less detailed, but all in all, it’s a great choice. They look pretty distinctive, too.
  • Kent Armstrong WPU 900Cs. Not a bad replica of the sound; not quite as faithful to the originals, with a more compressed, focused sound and a little bit less of the distant harmonics that make up the grittier old P90 sound, but a great choose.
  • Harmonic Design Z-90s. These kick serious ass. They have many of the sonic qualities that made the P90s famous, but they dirty up amazingly well, and they have much more harmonic spread and depth than the P90s. It’s what we’d have made the P90s sound like, if we were boss.
  • Seymour Duncan Phat Cats. Also serious ass-kicking pickups. Uber cool vibe, and hauntingly similar to the Z-90s – with the added bonus of a nickel pickup cover option, which completes the early rock look. Killer pickups.
  • Rio Grande Fat Bastards. We didn’t love these, but lots of people do. Maybe a bit muddy, a smidge too compressed, and way too much mid for our taste. But like I said, it’s a taste thing, and there are lots of people who swear by them. Plus, they’re freaking gorgeous looking.

Go for modern humbucker guitar pickups with P90 characteristics

Another way to go about finding that P90 sound is by going after a moderate output humbucker with similar tone qualities to the P90. Here’s the short list of humbuckers with P90-like sonic performance, or at least the contenders as we saw them:

  • Timbuckers. Dude. If P90s died, hung out at the Pearly Gates for a few days, then came back down to the rock-o-sphere reincarnated as humbuckers, this is what they’d sound like. Real, real, real close to the old P90 sound. But at their core, they’re humbuckers, which means that they have more low end growl, a bit less clarity under a lot of gain, and rolled off high end stuff (meaning less intense highs). That’s not necessarily a bad thing – an old single coil to the eardrum can be the sonic equivalent of an icepick to the eyeball, depending on your taste, so a bit less urgency in the upper register can make the pickups a bit more civilized and ear-friendly. Damn nice pickups.
  • DiMarzio Bluesbuckers. These are great pickups, but they’re not quite the real P90 deal. Something about their sound wasn’t quite throaty enough – maybe not enough lower end harmonics, and not enough lower signal, which might be another way to say that they have a bit too much midrange to be a real dead ringer for the P90, I don’t know. But make no mistake – these are great sounding pickups, and DiMarzio is usually pretty easy on your pocketbook. They just don’t quite replicate the P90 sound.
  • DiMarzio Humbuckers from Hell. We’ve covered these guys in an earlier post. Unlike what the name might imply, the HFHs are a medium-output humbucker with gobs of character. A smidge more bottom than a single coil, a smidge less top register (which is the frequency range that gives a garden variety single-coil pickup its quack, bite, and/or punch) than a classic single coil, and a lot more fatness. It’s a great pickup for those who want a single coil like sound with bigger, um, balls.

At the end of the day, it’s all about tone.

Which is to say, it’s all about how your axe’s tone sounds to your ears through your amp(s).

Getting the particular P90 sounds you’re looking for is as much a function of the guitar your pickups are sitting in, as it is a function of the pickups themselves. So you need to be prepared to experiment a little bit to find the right sound for your ears. Folks like DiMarzio and Duncan (usually) make it easy – if you buy a pickup, try it out, and don’t like it, you can often return it for store credit or a straight-up refund (crazy, we know, but some retailers actually still care about customer service).

JustHumbuckers.com has put together a collection of humbucker pickups that we think harken back sonically to the P90s of old. You can also browse the largest selection of humbuckers for sale online in the entire Milky Way. That’s our story anyway. And we do the legwork for you – we scour thousands of humbucker electric guitar pickups on the internet to bring you the best prices available. If it ain’t at JustHumbuckers.com, it probably ain’t a humbucker for sale online.

Having said that, if we missed a humbucker or two out there, we want you to let us know about it. We want no humbucker left out in the cold.

 

Single Coil Humbuckers – Read Before Buying

Aug 032011
 

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What’s the deal with single coil humbuckers?

Better yet, what does that phrase really mean? Is it a single coil pickup, or is it a humbucker? Because it really can’t be both.

Or can it?

Well, technically, it can be both. Here’s the deal. Humbuckers are pickups that employ electrical techniques to minimize the 60Hz hum that forms the electromagnetic background of our plugged-in lives, which ends up as an annoying “hum” in your amplifier. It’s a totally uncool sound, particularly when you’ve got the volume and gain cranked up.

There are some single coil pickups that use smart equalization to cancel out hum, which, by definition, makes them “humbucker guitar pickups.”

But that’s not usually what people mean when they say “single coil humbuckers.” That phrase usually connotes one of two things.

A humbucker that fits into a single-coil slot

Many pickups are designed with two coils, or sometimes two rails or blades, that are wired out of phase with each other to cancel noise.

They operate in the same way that their larger humbucker guitar pickup cousins do: wire pickups in series, but electrically out of phase to cancel background noise while amplifying string vibration signals.

But the kinds of humbucker pickups that fit into single-coil spots on your guitar’s body don’t have the same characteristics that normal, full-sized humbuckers have. Nor do they have the sonic characteristics of the single-coil pickups they’re designed to replace.

Single coil humbuckers – and I’m talking about the kind that are designed with rails or miniature pole pieces lined up parallel with each other, equidistant from the strings – have a sound all their own. They’re fatter than single coil pickups, but not as fat as their full-size humbucker counterparts. This is because they don’t collect harmonics in the same way, and because they don’t have the same number of wire windings that normal sized humbucker would have. That means that the voicing (a good indicator of voicing is the resonant frequency – lower resonant frequency means a lower voice, with more lower-register harmonics to fill in a “fat” sound) is a little bit higher than a full-sized humbucker, but lower and fuller/richer than a normal single coil pickup.

These single coil humbuckers have less “quack” or “bite” than a straight-up single coil pickup. If you like a twangy sound, you might not like a single coil-sized humbucker. If you like a bit of twang, but a bit fuller, fatter tone, single coil humbuckers of this type – two rails or rows of magnetic poles arranged parallel with each other on the pickup face – might be a great option for you.

How do they dirty up? Pretty darn nicely. Not as much roar as another humbucker, but with more clarity. Single coil humbuckers don’t put out as much output signal as their larger cousins, which means that they stay clearer, longer, as you dial up the gain on your amplifier.

Critics of single-coil humbuckers say “it’s neither a humbucker nor a single coil,” which is half right. The truth is, they’re neither pickup style, and they’r both pickup styles rolled into one, all at the same time. The real bottom line is that they have a unique sound all their own. When you combine the right pickup with your guitar, you can produce an amazingly versatile collection of sounds.

Stacked Single Coils

A second style of “single coil humbucker” pickups do their best to preserve the tonal character of the single coil pickup, yet add some hum canceling characteristics inherent to traditional humbuckers.

This type of single humbucker, called “stacked coils” or “stacked single coils,” attains this sonic and electrical quality by utilizing two coils, electrically out of phase with one another. But in this configuration, instead of the coils lying adjacent to each other, both with equal access to the string vibrations, the stacked single coil humbucker places one coil on top of the other one vertically.

The result of this stacked configuration is that the collection of the guitar string’s vibrational signature, which is the electrical representation of the string’s sound, follows the profile of the traditional single coil pickup. This characteristic means that, sonically speaking, stacked coils have more in common with single coil pickups than with humbuckers.

But the second coil lurking beneath the primary coil means that the electrical signal generated by the omnipresent 60Hz hum (and other electrically-induced signals that aren’t native to your guitar strings’ vibrations) i sat least partially canceled by the out-of-phase wiring of the additional coil.

Hum is best cancelled when the inductance properties of these coils are matched perfectly, but in practice, stacked coils aren’t usually matched perfectly – and this is done for three reasons. First, it’s tough to match properties in coils that experience different noise signal strengths due to their different locations on the guitar, one buried beneath the other.

Second, the slight mismatch doesn’t have too great a sonic penalty (even though a little noise leaks through, it’s nothing compared to a normal single coil’s constant humming).

Third, the unique way in which the electrical properties are not quite perfectly matched contributes to the unique voicing of the pickup.

Meaning what, exactly?

It can be a bit confusing, but here’s the bottom line:

Single coil size humbucker pickups are hybrid pickups that share a bit of the bluesy bite of the single coil, and enjoy a fatter signal output at higher output levels than true single coil pickups. They’re less fat and powerful than pure humbuckers, but less twangy and quacky than pure single coils.

Stacked coil pickups behave most like hotter single coil pickups, with less hum. They have slightly higher output, but appreciably higher signal-to-noise characteristics (which means a cleaner signal and less noise).

Seymour Duncan Hot Rails

These pickups are arguably the most famous single coil-sized humbuckers on the market. They have less bite and twang than traditional single coils, and more power and output. But they’re not as fat and powerful as a full-size humbucker. They tend to be more on the mid- to higher-frequency voicing, with less bottom end than others in their genre, which makes them great for ripping a solo above the mix (your solo would get lost with a bunch of muddy low frequency stuff cranked through your amp).

Of course, these aren’t even close to the only single coil sized humbuckers available on the market right now, so we’ve put together a huge category of them for you to look at and choose from (click here to shop). As always, JustHumbuckers.com has done the hard part – sorting through THOUSANDS of electric guitar pickups for sale online to find you the best prices on the pickups you’re looking for.

Play it loud!

Mini Humbuckers – Read Before You Buy

Aug 022011
 

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Mini Humbuckers: How They Compare to Their Larger Cousins

Thinking about trying out a mini humbucker or two? Your’e not alone. Mini humbuckers have a distinctive tonal style and range that makes them attractive alternatives when you want a brighter, more upper-register pickup voicing.

Humbuckers produce their sound based on the particular magnetic and electrical properties of their construction. The shape and intensity of the magnetic field surrounding the pickups, the inductance properties of the metals used in the pickup housing and poles, and even the conductivity of the wire windings used inside the pickup coils, all influence the tonal quality of the pickups.

How do magnets and metals shape my electric guitar pickup tone?

Good question. Electric guitar function is all about metal strings vibrating amidst a magnetic field, which causes an electrical current to be developed in the wire coils of the pickups. The moving strings cause the magnetic field to wiggle at the same frequency (for you eggheads, there’s very little magnetic field hysteresis, so the magnetic field vibrational frequency is asymptotically close to the actual string vibration frequency); this vibrating magnetic field causes an alternating current (AC) signal to wiggle back and forth within the pickup wiring. This signal is picked up and amplified by your amp. Voila: music. Hopefully good music, if you’ve been practicing.

Anything you do to change either the electrical or magnetic properties of your pickups has a tremendous impact on the tonal quality of the resultant signal. Add more windings and you’ll get a stronger signal and higher output levels, but you’ll also get less high-frequency response due to the greater inductance, or electrical inertia. Create a stronger electrical field, and you’ll have a similar effect – more electrons inside the coils will be excited, raising the signal output level.

Mini humbucker guitar pickups do the opposite. They’re smaller, which usually means two things: first, there’s a weaker magnetic field at play, because there’s a smaller (and hence weaker) magnet in use, all else equal. Second, the smaller housing means fewer turns of the 30-weight copper or aluminum wire can fit within it. These two factors lower the pickup signal’s output level, and they also cause the sonic “midpoint” of the pickup to be at a higher frequency. That means that a mini humbucker emphasizes the higher frequencies more than the lower frequencies.

Kind of makes sense: smaller voice box, higher-pitched voice. Smaller pickup, higher frequency register. But the higher frequency register means that things like pick noises, string scrapes, and other high-frequency sounds are emphasized more than in a conventional humbucker. This has an effect that is often described as “brightness,” “quack,” and/or “presence,” depending on your ear.

These characteristics result in the mini-humbucker pickup having more tonal clarity at high gain settings (lower frequencies with the gain dialed up result in a muddier tone) than in conventional humbuckers, but with less roar and growl.

Of course, mini humbuckers enjoy all the same signal-to-noise advantages of their larger humbucker cousins, which serves to reduce all electrically-induced noise that all guitar players know and hate.

Thinking of picking up a set of mini humbucker guitar pickups?

Bottom line? Mini humbuckers are generally lighter, brighter, and clearer than their heftier humbucker cousins, with slightly higher voicing. They dirty up plenty well, retaining their tonal clarity very well in most circumstances. They’re great for when you want clarity to move to the forefront of the mix, but don’t quite want the full single-coil quack and noise baggage.

Blanket Disclaimer: These are generalities, which are a lot like stereotypes. They’re true in most cases, but you’ll always be able to find exceptions to the norm. You can probably find a heavy, high-output, dirty mini humbucker. But you won’t find many.

Finding The Classic Wide Range Humbucker Sound

Aug 022011
 

 

How to find that Wide Range Humbucker sound

Back in 1971, Fender made what many considered to be a big mistake: venturing into the humbucker guitar pickup world with their Seth Lover Wide Range Humbucker pickup. The pickups were poorly received at first, mostly because Fender had built a reputation for its distinctive single-coil sound, and because it appeared that Fender was trying to pry market share from Gibson – widely recognized as “the humbucker guitar maker.”

The line enjoyed reasonable success over time – nothing to write home about – but was discontinued for good in 1979.

The Wide Range humbucker of old was built around a CuNiFe magnet. If you’ll recall from your chemistry classes, Cu Ni and Fe are all lifted straight off the ol’ periodic table of the elements. Copper, nickel, and iron are the primary ingredients in this magnet, which produces a very distinctive magnetic field. Given that a pickup’s magnetic field is the backbone of its voice and sound, this distinctive voice is not easy to replicate without using CuNiFe. But nobody’s making CuNiFe pickups these days (at least not that we’re aware of).

The old Wide Range Humbucker pickup may have just ridden off into the sunset as a fat but clear-sounding pickup with manly output (10K ohms of resistance), except that a few popular artists made a few recordings with some old axes featuring the Wide Range. Who? Nobody big. Just Radiohead, Franz Ferdinand, Sonic Youth, ZZ Top, and (drum roll please) the Rolling Stones. Yep. Keith Bloody Richards.

What does that mean for you, seeker of the Wide Range Humbucker Holy Grail? Getting an authentic Wide Range Humbucker from Back In The Day will set you back somewhere around $400 to $500 – if you can even find one, and if you can find one whose owner is willing to part with it. There aren’t that many floating around (although truthfully, most of them are probably gathering dust in aging hippies’ attics and garages).

So here’s the dilemma: how to find that fat but clear tone of the CuNiFe in an AlNiCo (iron with aluminum, nickel, and cobalt alloying) magnet world.

It’s not easy to do, because there aren’t any reissue Wide Range humbuckers running around out there that do much justice, sonically speaking, to the original.

However, there are a number of modern pickups that offer a comparable tone combination. FAT and CLEAR at the same time is a bit hard to do, but a number of pickup manufactures have done a great job of combining those features into their mainstream offerings. One pickup guru, Jason Lollar, has even designed a pickup to mimic the original WRHB sound.

The Wide Range Humbucker Tone

Reading about guitar pickups is a lot like reading about wine. You never really know what the author is trying to say, and the words don’t really do the subject justice. So what do we mean by “fat” and “clear”? We’ll try to clarify those tonal qualities for you.

A “fat” tone generally includes an even frequency distribution across a wide spectrum of frequencies. Every note you play on the guitar doesn’t just consist of a single frequency, but actually contains a nearly-infinite collection of even- and odd-multiple harmonics above and below the base frequency. These harmonics provide the unique voice and character of your guitar, and are what enable your ear to identify the tone as that of an electric guitar. In a “fat” pickup, enough of these low-end harmonics are picked up to form a solid underpinning of tonal character and warmth.

A “clear” tone usually means that the tone isn’t “muddy,” or “mushy,” and that you can relatively easily pick out the notes making up a chord, or hear the notes of a solo above the mix. Tonal clarity is best achieved by balancing the strength of the pickup’s response across its usable frequency range. The often-domineering low frequency harmonics can tend to wash out and hide the more delicate high-frequency harmonics (which give a pickup its brightness, clarity, and sometimes that bluesy “quack”), and a pickup voiced for clarity often gains it at the expense of “fatness.”

That’s why people go a little nuts over a pickup with a wide frequency range, but also with great balance across the frequency spectrum. That combination gives you a “fat but clear” humbucker tone. Fortunately, you can get that combination of qualities in a fairly large number of humbuckers on the market today. The tone won’t precisely match the old-school CuNiFe pickup that Fender put out in the 70’s, but that vast majority of listeners – and even the vast majority of guitar players – don’t have enough ear to tell a huge difference.

At JustHumbuckers.com, we’ve assembled a category of wide range humbuckers for sale that we think captures the spirit of that original Wide Range Humbucker. If you’re holding out to discover a long-lost WRHB in Uncle Ted’s attic, or if you’re saving up afford the one you’ve been lucky enough to find, these pickups will keep you rocking with a fat, clear tone until that glorious day.

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Seymour Duncan Antiquity Humbuckers – Read Before You Buy

Aug 022011
 

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Seymour Duncan’s Antiquity Humbucker – Review & Info

Back in the day, when giant steel Chevys and Fords dominated the highways, and humbucker guitar pickups packed Alnico 2 magnets and just a couple of turns around the ol’ spindle, a fella could really get his quack on. Blues and rock were basically the only two kinds of music that cared much about electric guitar pickups, and each featured a bevy of heroes at the vanguard whose style and tone shaped the aspirations of millions of teenage boys, slaving away in their garages, doing their best to mimic those iconic licks and riffs.

Men were men, gruesome gain was just coming into vogue, and pickup output was a bit harsh, biting, and trebly compared to today’s offerings. But that kind of vibe is necessary to replicate A TON of old-school rock and blues numbers with any sort of credibility.

We think that’s why Seymour Duncan threw down with their Antiquity humbucker line – to provide a time machine back to that era of badass rock and blues playing without any digital skulduggery.

Most people think Duncan hit the nail on the head.

Antiquities run in the 7.75K- to 8.76k-ish ohm resistance range, which puts them squarely in the “low output” end of the spectrum of humbuckers. That means a couple of things.

First, Seymour Duncan Antiquities aren’t going to rip your face off with output and gain, and they’re going to go pretty easy on your preamp when you dial up the overdrive. They’ll stay clear and relatively un-muddy, or as their box says, they won’t get “soupy” on you as you dial up the gain on your amp.

They’re exceptionally clear, with a bit of warmth and gobs and gobs of mid-range frequency response. That comes with a potential downside as well, which is that the Antiquity voicing can become harsh and biting – and a little bit thin-sounding – when you’re playing clean. There again, though, that bit of bite shows up in a ton of classic rock hits pounded out by Page, Nugent, and the like.

The pickups even come dressed like they’ve been around the block a few hundred times. Seymour ages the pickup covers to give them a classic look to match their unquestionably classic tone.  Aged magnets, too?  Yep.  Duncan doesn’t play around.  They’re serious about their old school humbucker tone, it turns out.  I dig it.

Wondering whether to take the Seymour Duncan Antiquity Humbucker plunge?

Not sure you’re ready to take a trip into the way-back machine? You can dip your feet in the pool by just dropping an Antiquity humbucker in the neck or bridge position, leaving whatever you currently have in the opposite spot. If it were my guitar, I’d drop it into the bridge spot, and combine it with the highest gain setting on my amp (think “THIS ONE GOES TO ELEVEN”) for that truly classic rock roar from back in the day. Be careful though – if you leave a higher-output pickup in the neck, you might blow the doors off if you inadvertently switch to your neck pickup mid-solo. You’ll undoubtedly notice your mix suddenly get m-u-d-d-y, if nothing else, because the Antiquities do clear tone under high gain unlike almost anything else on the market today.

Summing up the Antiquity

Old school tone, fantastic clarity at wildly overdriven gain settings, and a nice clean tone that only gets harsh under the most urgent of pick attack technique.  Tough to go wrong for your rock, blues, heavy blues, rockabilly, modern country, garage, and punk applications.

Shop all humbucker guitar pickups here.

Alnico Classic Humbucker Sound

Aug 022011
 

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The name sounds like a cross between a New York taxi driver and an Italian restaurateur, but Alnico humbuckers get their name from someplace else entirely: the periodic table of the elements. Yep, the bane of many a high school chemistry student is also the backbone of the modern guitar pickup industry.

Alnico, which is commonly written as AlNiCo, is shorthand to describe an iron alloy that contains Aluminum (Al), Nickel (Ni), and Cobalt (Co) (sometimes also with Titanium and Copper thrown in for good measure). Alnico is desirable for use in guitar pickups because it is capable of carrying an outrageously strong magnetic field, and this field is very long-lasting and stable over time.

Rare earth magnets are stronger but more expensive; ceramic magnets are also stronger than Alnico magnets, but are produced more inexpensively. Both rare earth and ceramic magnets were developed for commercial and industrial use after Alnico, which means that the ceramic magnets that now form the backbone of many high-output humbucker guitar pickups hit the market years after Alnico magnet-carrying pickups had their distinctive voices committed to musical posterity on zillions of hit records.

The high output, high octane, blow-the-doors-off features of modern guitar pickups with ceramic magnets grace just as many albums, but only after the “old school” Alnico family had a couple of decades of rocking under their belts.

That all means that Alnico humbucker pickups have what many describe as a “classic” sound to them.

What difference does the magnet make in a humbucker guitar pickup?

That’s a little like asking “what difference does the ENGINE make in my car?” The magnet is the core of the tone. It creates the magnetic field that surrounds your guitar strings. When those metal strings vibrate back and forth through the magnetic field above your humbuckers, they cause the magnetic field to wiggle with the same frequency – which becomes a direct electrical signal whose “wiggle frequency” is a direct reflection of the guitar string’s vibrational frequency. This electrical signal becomes a way to transmit “sound” through wires, amplify it, and then spit it back out a set of speakers in a face-melting solo.

The qualities, contours, characteristics, and overall strength of this magnetic field hugely influences the character of that signal. More magnetic field strength means a stronger signal-to-noise ratio, which means a clearer overall tone. More field saturation (density) means a more faithful representation of the string’s vibrational quality. But more contours in the field mean a more unique signature transmitted in the pickup’s output signal, which gives each pickup its unique “voice” or “tone.”

In short, the magnet is huge for tone. If you created two pickups with exactly the same number of loops of exactly the same wire, but made them out of different magnets, they would sound completely different.

So what is the Alnico Classic Humbucker sound?

Classic Alnico humbuckers are often described as having a kind of sweetness about them (here we go again, trying to type words to describe sound. How would you describe chocolate, without using the term “chocolaty”? Bear with us though – we think you’ll get the idea). They generally sound warmer and brighter than their higher output ceramic cousins. That’s because they emphasize the higher end of the frequency response spectrum than more overwound, high-intensity magnetized humbuckers do. They feel more at home in a blues, heavy blues, rock, grunge, and mid- to high-gain environment, as opposed to a metal meltdown of gain and grind. They have a “kindness” about their sound that’s less “quacky” or biting than a single coil pickup.

Which artists use Alnico humbuckers?

Really, a better question would be “who doesn’t use Alnico pickups” – nearly all the classic rock heroes you can think of recorded their iconic anthems with Alnico pickups. Pete Townshend (The Who), David Gilmour (Pink Floyd), Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin), and a host of others have each emblazoned their interpretation of the classic Alnico tone on the annals of rock history. In the modern era, perhaps Slash (Guns N Roses) is the most recognizable Alnico proponent, with a style that’s both throwback and aggressively progressive at the same time. And for the sake of completeness, we should point out that Alnico magnets live inside a ton of old-school single-coil pickups, rocked by Clapton, SRV (moment of silence, please), and Jimi (another moment of silence).

Alnico pickups are generally well suited for any genre other than heavy metal. Though they perform respectably in a highly overdriven, compressed metal application, they don’t quite have the throaty, ultra-high output with suppressed high frequencies that their hotter ceramic brethren have. So if you’re a die-hard death metal fanatic, you should consider something other than an Alnico classic sound.

If Alnico sounds like it’s right up your alley, the good folks at JustHumbuckers.com have put together a family of humbucker guitar pickups for sale that each capture the tone, style, warmth, and attitude of those old-school alnico classic humbuckers.

And whatever you play, play it loud!

 

The DiMarzio Humbucker from Hell – Read Before You Buy

Aug 022011
 

When you hear of an electric guitar pickup named “The Humbucker From Hell,” you might think you’re dealing with the highest-gain, highest-output pickup ever invented, capable of melting your face with an upper-register solo and leveling a city block with just one power chord. But that’s not really what this pickup is all about. If you’re surprised to hear that the DiMarzio Humbucker From Hell isn’t all about grinding power and unadulterated output, I’m sure you’re not the only one.

While the Humbucker From Hell does pack plenty of output, it’s actually a much more mellow pickup than its name would imply. It’s known for its smooth, rich clean tones that don’t muddy up when you crank up the gain. The HFH is actually a medium output pickup, with around 7.8K DC resistance. The best way to characterize the HFH is to say that it combines classic humbucker crunch with single-coil clarity, and its primary claim to fame is its amped up single-coil-like warmth.

Come again? “Humbucker From Hell” sounds a lot like a single coil pickup? Yep. Crazy. But it doesn’t sound exactly like a single-coil pickup. It sounds like a medium output humbucker should sound: eye-watering clean tones and attention-grabbing crunch. It dirties up plenty good, and it has plenty of output and signal-to-noise to support all but the heaviest musical styles.

What styles of music does the Humbucker From Hell excel at?

If you like playing the blues, melodic rock, and less thrash-centric punk, the Humbucker from Hell is probably a great pickup choice for you. It’s known for warm, bell-like (or glassy) clean tones that work well for melodic passages, articulated and strummed chords, and fingerpicking. That’s a pretty wide range of styles, you might be thinking. And that’s the point: this is a versatile pickup, with great tone for a wide variety of styles. Dropping one or two in your guitar will make a bunch of musical styles very accessible.

Which position is best suited for the Humbucker From Hell?

Most HFH users place the pickup in the neck position, to capture the warmer, more inviting tone inherent to that position. Its character works very well for this type of tonal output, akin to a single-coil pickup but without the hum and buzz baggage.

Some players feel the HFH is a bit too bright for the bridge pickup, which may lead to a harsher or more brittle tone. That depends on your guitar, but the ancillary harmonics of the bridge position are naturally harsher than the middle and neck positions, which is one reason most players opt for a higher-ouptut humbucker at the bridge. By virtue of their larger inductance values, hotter pickups naturally emphasize the lower frequencies, and “roll off” (another way of saying “reduce the intensity of”) the high-frequency harshness inherent to the bridge position.

If you’re looking to get a brighter variation on a mellow tone out of your bridge position, HFH will do well for you. If you’re looking to “unleash the beast” when you switch from your neck to your bridge position pickups, you’ll probably want something with more output.

Should I “Coil Tap” My Humbucker From Hell?

As with the vast majority of humbucker guitar pickups, the Humbucker From Hell provides the option to wire the pickup to enable both humbucker and single-coil use. This isn’t technically “tapping the coil,” which is done by splicing into the pickup’s coils to siphon off part of the signal to reduce the pickup’s output. Rather, this wiring setup is designed to allow you to only use the signal from one of the two magnet-coil assemblies inside the pickup. Technically, this is called “coil splitting.”

While wiring a switchable single-coil setting provides maximum flexibility, many players feel that this is not necessary with the HFH, because the HFH’s full humbucker tone is sonically very similar to a single coil pickup to begin with. While you’ll be able to tell the difference as you switch in between single-coil and humbucker modes, the tonal difference might not be enough to warrant the extra trouble. Coil splitting is a terrific technique for higher output humbuckers, but it’s probably not necessary for your Humbucker From Hell.

In Summary…

Warm tones, bright clarity, and bluesy single-coil type love without all the hum and bite make DiMarzio’s Humbucker From Hell a great choice. It also dirties up very nicely, retaining tonal clarity under even the highest gain settings. Good stuff – no wonder so many players love it, despite the misleading moniker.

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