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Topic: pickups and string separation |
John Groover McDuffie
From:
LA California, USA
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Posted 29 Nov 2019 8:17 am |
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I see a lot of pickups described as having great string separation, and I wonder what aspect of a pickup that refers to from an objective point of view, "tone" being a rather subjective quality.
Since the signal from all the strings combines to form one complex wave form, and that is the output, it seems to me that the only factors that could give this impression might be low distortion and a wide frequency response. Most pedal steel guitar pickups seem to have a coil that has a high dc resistance, and in my experience with guitar pickups the higher the dcr of the pickup, the narrower the frequency bandwith is. Example - if you compare a Seymour Duncan JB, with dcr of approximately 16k ohms to a '59 humbucker with a dcr of approximately 8.5k the JB sound decidedly more midrangy.
I'm curious as to what others have to say about this, especially from a laws of physics perspetive. Thanks |
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Ian Rae
From:
Redditch, England
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Posted 29 Nov 2019 10:14 am
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Here are the answers I got a couple of months ago
https://bb.steelguitarforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=349599&highlight=string+separation
What b0b describes is what I would call voicing, and is to do with playing technique, not pickup choice. I suspect that it is indeed harmonic distortion which is perceived as a lack of "separation", although what we actually hear is one complex sound.
Distortion will be reduced if the amp doesn't have to cope with a lot of LF difference tones, so some bandwidth limitation is probably a good idea.
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Make sleeping dogs tell the truth!
Homebuilt keyless U12 7x5, Excel keyless U12 8x8, Williams keyless U12 7x8, Telonics rack and 15" cabs |
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John Groover McDuffie
From:
LA California, USA
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Posted 29 Nov 2019 11:04 am
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| Quote: |
| Distortion will be reduced if the amp doesn't have to cope with a lot of LF difference tones, so some bandwidth limitation is probably a good idea. |
Good point. In most cases difference frequencies are pretty low in the pitch spectrum, so that range can probably be rolled off without adversely effecting the lower range of the instrument. Those low frequencies do take up a lot of headroom.
IMO this roll off of extremely low freqs is probably a design consideration in overdrives because of their tendency to reduce dynamic range. You can really hear difference tones when playing with overdrive and bending one string of a double stop, especially bending a lower string into unison with the next higher string. It took me a while to realize what I was hearing when doing that. |
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