Changing the Personality of a Guitar – Part 2.1

Posted on July 11, 2016 by admin

It seems worth repeating the message another way, showing how to get the most out of humbucking pairs:

For a pickup with 4 matched single-coil pickups, you can have 8 different personalities of 12 timbres each.  The personalities, timbres available from the switching system, are determined by the choices and positions of the N and S poles of the pickups.  They range from all 12 contra-phase to 8 in-phase and 4 contra-phase.  If you switch out poles physically, you can ultimately get 24 different timbres from 4 pickups.  If you can move the pickups physically between the neck and bridge, those timbres can be shaded in a huge variety of ways.

For 5 matched and fixed-position pickups, you can have 16 unique sets of pole placements, or personalities, each of which produce 20 different unique humbucking pair timbres.  The personalities can range from all 20 outputs contra-phase to 12 in-phase with 8 contra-phase.  Among all the personalities, you can get 40 unique humbucking pair timbres.  It’s not thousands, but much better than 3 pickups on a standard 5-way switch.  And if properly done, they are all humbucking, instead of just 2 out of 5 on a standard Strat(tm).

 

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@mailcatch.com banned from new registrations

Posted on July 11, 2016 by admin

Cleantalk.org has tagged half the new users from mailcatch.com as spammers.  To protect the rest of the users and this site, no more will be accepted from that domain.  The remaining mailcatch.com users will be checked periodically to see if they have spammed, and removed if necessary.  If you feel this is unjust, please try again from another domain.

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When you have something to say – please let me hear it

Posted on July 10, 2016 by admin

So I’m an old guy.  I remember music from the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s.  What do I miss?

Clarity.

If I go to live music today, it’s often so loud, it’s painful.  Not only that, it’s so loud I can’t hear it.  I can’t tell one instrument from another, and usually can’t hear the bass or keyboard at all.  One or more of the band members might as well not be there.  Sometimes even the lead singer.

Loud noises make ears clench and shut down.  I know a very talented guy who plays great guitar and bass.  Sings good, too.  But when I heard him and his band live, it was so loud it literally wasn’t musically audible.

What’s up with that?

Take the Rolling Stones, the original bad boys.  Listen to the guitar lead-in to Satisfaction.  (OK, so maybe I don’t remember the title or all the words, but I remember not getting any.  It spoke to me.)  Every note is distinct.  Every word in the song is distinct.  Every instrument is distinct (at least in my memory).  There’s no doubt about what it says and how it says it.  Even Bob Dylan, who sometimes get imitators these days who mumble incomprehensibly, and may have had a better guitar than a voice, had no trouble getting “lay, lady lay” across.

But when I hear stuff today that’s loud and over-distorted – it just all runs together – and falls apart.  Even if it’s as important as Abe Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address, or Winston Churchill during the Battle of Britain, it’s like trying to hear one voice in a screaming football game.  Or trying to hear that killer guitar riff in an avalanche of screaming Skil saws.

I recently listened to tracks laid down by someone I knew had to be good, whom I like and want to be good.  But I couldn’t hear it for all the distortion and instruments smeared together.  So with all due respect to musicians who are many times more talented than my thumb-plunking on a guitar –

When you have something to say – please let me hear it.

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New Page: On Changing the Personality of a Guitar – Part 2

Posted on July 10, 2016 by admin

Click Here.

Shows that for K number of matched single-coil pickups, the total number of possible in-phase pairs is K*(K-1)/2, and the total number of possible contra-phase pairs is K*(K-1)/2.  The ultimate number of unique humbucking pairs for K is UK = K*(K-1) and the total number unique humbucking tones or timbres (due to series and parallel connections) is 2* UK = 2* K*(K-1).  So for K = 2,3,4,5,…, UK = 2, 6, 12, 20, …, and the number of possible unique timbres is 2* UK = 4, 12, 24, 40, …

For K matched single-coil pickups, there are 2 to the (K-1) power (2^(K-1)) different unique sets of N and S pole arrangements, of which it is likely that K sets will produce 2* UK unique humbucking timbres.

So for K = 4, there are 8 different unique pole arrangements.  These arrangements can go from all N (or all S) with 12 different contra-phase outputs, to 1 N and 3 S (or 1S and 3N) with 6 in-phase and 6 contra-phase outputs, to 2N and 2S with 8 in-phase and 4 contra-phase outputs.

If a guitar with 4 pickups in fixed positions, which can each be switched out for a pickup of the opposite pole, and the switching system can compensate to produce the K*(K-1) = 12 unique timbres (for each of the 8 pole sets) in increasing progression from warm to bright, then a 4-pickup guitar can have up to 8 different personalities.

If the pickups can be shifted in physical position, to shade the timbres, then a whole new universe of customization opens up.

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New page: How Many Useful Outputs From Five Coils?

Posted on July 7, 2016 by admin

How Many Useful Pickup Combinations Can You Get From 5 Coils?

© 2016 Don Baker dba android originals LC

How many possible connections, musically meaningful or not, can you get from 5 electromagnetic coil pickups?  More specifically from two humbuckers, one each at the bridge and neck, with a single coil in the middle.  If you are going to sell something based upon the many choices you offer, what choices in what order did you pick to offer, and what musical sense to they make?  For a simple example, a clear progression from warm to bright, like a tone pot.

The article shows the different number of electrically different choices of circuit for 5 pickups taken 1, 2, 3, and 4 at a time.  5 at a time is left as an exercise for the reader.

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Guitars With Too Many Choices to Succeed

Posted on July 6, 2016 by admin

(c) 2016 Don Baker dba android originals LC

Let me put this in Bold:  With humbucking pairs, you can set a guitar up to shift from warm to bright without ever knowing which pairs are used.

Other  guitars have come onto the market with a huge number of switch choices, and no road map from bright to dark, no warning signs for hum ahead.  For example, the Fender Marauder ™, with 81 switch choices, of which about 7 were unique and humbucking. 60 choices of the 81 had hum.  And the Music-Man Game Changer (also here).  The switching diagram for the Game Changer ™, if I read it correctly, claims 35 different combinations with only two humbuckers, a single-coil pickup and an optional piezo pickup.  Both the Marauder and the Game Changer required the guitarist to figure out and remember where the best outputs lay among the many choices.  According to some reports, not many sold.

With humbucking pairs, the Marauder with four equally-spaced pickups could have had 12 different humbucking outputs, including in-phase and contra-phase, serial and parallel.  With humbucking pairs, the Game Changer could have had 16 different humbucking outputs.  Like the Paul Reed Smith 513(tm), it might have had 20 if the pickups were more evenly spaced, but the close coils in the two humbuckers cut down on choices with distinct tones.

So the difference between a Marauder or a Game Changer and a guitar properly set up with humbucking pairs is like comparing a diesel truck with 3 or 4 shift levers and 35 to 81 gears, not all of which work well, or in a progressive order, to a car with an automatic transmission and a shift lever going through 12 to 20 progressive gears.

Sorry, guys; that’s just the way the math works out.  You can verify it for yourselves from the Humbucking Pair Tutorials.  Granted, the theory still needs to be tested to identify the right progression of HB pairs from warm to bright, and the optimal matched single-coil pickup poles, order and spacing for any particular application.  But that’s relatively straightforward and doable.

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For news on changes to this site, follow @TSGAxe on twitter

Posted on July 6, 2016 by admin
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Tutorials Tab Reorganized

Posted on July 5, 2016 by admin

The Tutorials tab has been reorganized to group all pages on Humbucking Pairs together.

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History Tab Added

Posted on July 5, 2016 by admin

For any who might wonder where this all came from, and how long it took, TSG now has a History tab.  The first article, Shooting the Bullet, describes a time in about April to May 2005, when a new Fender Squier Bullet Special(TM) guitar became the platform for using Adobe PhotoShop(TM) to simulate android-originals.com artwork on guitars.  Like this:

my1505j3

and this:

my1405d1

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New Page: On Changing the Personality of a Guitar – Part 1

Posted on July 4, 2016 by admin

A new page discussing how the tonal quality and range of a guitar can be changed by plug-in pickups and a plug-in board connecting the pickups to a tone switch.

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