The Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary
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  1. #1

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    Recently noticed that Kent Armstrong 12 point PAF humbucker pickups state that due to the multiple adjustable poles the pickup can be adjusted for nickel, bronze, and copper strings. I assume this includes steel since almost all high E and B strings are made of steel. And what about chrome strings? Anyone have experience with adjusting pickups for these varieties of strings that are used on archtops?
    Djangobooks also gives the option of choosing coil tapped versions when ordering these pickups. I thought this was a single coil option only. Thoughts about coil-tapped humbuckers?

    D

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  3. #2

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    Maybe I misread your post but humbuckers are never single coil. Chrome strings don’t work, it’s probably a marketing term. Chromium - Wikipedia). I suspect nickel and steel strings are both mixtures of ferro and nickel and have similar magnetic properties. But good question, seriously.


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  4. #3

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    chromes are just d'addario brand name version of stainless steel...so being all high e & b are steel cores...the remaining heavier wound 4 strings of chromes are steel winds on steel core...so it's all highly magnetic/ high gauss all steel

    screw polepieces are not magnets..the magnets are below the bobbin and the screws just interface between strings and magnet...why getting pick up height right is ultimately more important than screw polepiece height

    what that means is having 6 or 12 screws to fool with matters little, esp. compared to what kind of strings you use

    cheers

  5. #4

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    So, yes, as noted above these pickups can be adjusted for use with steel wrapped strings, nickel wrapped strings and bronze wrapped strings. By raising or lowering the polepieces under those strings, they can be balanced against the plain steel treble strings. That would include all electric guitar brands and all steel string acoustic guitar brands. For acoustic strings with bronze wrap, which are poorly magnetic, the polepieces under the bass strings would be raised up; with a more magnetic string such as the D'Addario Chromes, the polepieces would probably end up being screwed down into the pick up.

    Maybe it helps to take a moment to explain what is happening with a pickup. The pickup is a coil sitting around or on top of a magnet. The magnet itself does not directly contribute to the sound of the pickup. All it does is magnetize the metal strings which thus become magnets themselves and, when vibrating over the coil, induce a current with a set of frequencies.

    One magnet (or six if the polepieces are the magnets) paired with a coil of wire is a basic single coil pickup. The coil has start and finish ends to the wire. Those are attached to terminals which are sometimes called taps. A single coil pick up can have more than just one pair of taps; one tap is always the start of the coil and one tap is always the end of the coil, but one or more taps can be placed in between to effectively reduce the number of winds of wire in the coil. Kent Armstrong does this with his floating single coil, which has taps for 7K or 10K Ohms. The output and sound will be different, the 7K approximating the old DeArmond Rhythm Chief sound and the 10K taps resulting in a P90 type sound. So that's a coil tapped pickup.

    A humbucker is two single coil pickups either side by side or one above the other. Switching a humbucker to a single coil requires splitting the coils from each other electrically and shunting the signal of one coil to ground, usually through a mini switch in the circuit. This is splitting, not tapping, but the terms are frequently used incorrectly and there is a lot of confusion. The humbucker must have a four wire conductor plus a ground wire to make that work: one wire from each of the ends of the two coils. At the switch the coil signals are added together or one is sent to ground.

    My personal experience with coil splitting is that it sucks. I find that the sound of the split humbucker is harsh, weak and quite objectionable. It does not sound like a nice single coil pickup. I think that the problem here is that once the humbucker is split, the single coil signal is still going through 500K volume and tone pots and the .022 capacitor. A regular single coil put through that combination is likely also to sound harsh and weak.

    Jerry Garcia got around this problem by using stacked pots where the humbucker signal went through 500K pots and the split signal went through 250K pots. The wiring in his later guitars was inordinately complicated and you can find diagrams online as well as pictures to see the electronic spaghetti in there. In addition to this, he also had a switchable onboard unity gain preamp buffer driving his effects loop (which was electrically between the pickups and the volume control, so that his effects pedals saw full voltage signal at all times no matter what the volume setting). But he did have the best split coil sounds I've ever heard.

    Well, there you go: another episode of Drivelalia Factosum by Cunamara.

  6. #5

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    Hmm yes on the subject more or less I have Kent Armstrong noiseless P90s. But I’m looking for s as more blues/jazz tone. DiMarzio have humbuckers that fit my p90 size slots. Any good?


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  7. #6

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    Quote Originally Posted by Cunamara
    ...Well, there you go: another episode of Drivelalia Factosum by Cunamara.
    Small edit, I believe: "Kent Armstrong does this with his floating single coil, which has taps for 7K or 10K Ohms. The output and sound will be different, the 10K resulting in the old DeArmond Rhythm Chief sound and the 7K tap approximating a P-90 type sound."

    Quote Originally Posted by Eck
    Hmm yes on the subject more or less I have Kent Armstrong noiseless P90s. But I’m looking for s as more blues/jazz tone. DiMarzio have humbuckers that fit my p90 size slots. Any good?
    Many pickup makers have humbuckers that fit P-90 size slots. I think Dimarzio was the first to do it, after Gibson did it with the mini-humbuckers in the Les Paul Deluxe, of course.

  8. #7

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    Ah. I never studied the mini humbuckers. More to look for


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  9. #8

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    Some people use coil split and coil tap interchangeably, but they are not the same things.

  10. #9

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    Quote Originally Posted by sgosnell
    Some people use coil split and coil tap interchangeably, but they are not the same things.
    exactly!! a coil split requires a humbucker..2 coils...and you split the humbucker into a single coil...(usually)with volume drop... + hum

    a coil tap can be had on a single coil...just extra winds added...the great red rhodes velvet hammer pickups were one of, if not the first to do that!!..

    there are now humbuckers that will split coil from humbucker to single coil but without the loss of volume...they add extra boost coil to the single coil thats being split...so it maintains even volume going from humbucker to single coil...prs has them on some guitars...as well as some other pup makers...ingenious idea

    cheers

  11. #10

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    Wish I could tap my Kent Armstrong noiseless P-90 neck pickup. The Lollar sounds sweet but in my house it would hum too much.


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