How to wire one-per-string magnetic pick-ups

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Dean Markley Sweet Spot Pickup - Under-the-saddle bridge guitar pickup

It's a great add on piezo, good sound into the right load (not so good on my valve head)
These days, most "acoustic" guitars come with an onboard piezo preamp and an undersaddle transducer like that one. Most of the time, the onboard preamp has a high enough Zin, and maybe some onboard EQ as well, so that most of the time there is too much, rather than too little, bass. Craig Anderton's article shows some example spectra, with piezo-pickup guitars producing more bass than the same guitar with a microphone in front of it.

There's always an exception, though. I used to have a dirt-cheap $100 Kona acoustic guitar bought from Walmart (plywood top, undersaddle piezo, onboard preamp) which sounded very thin and bright - the onboard preamp evidently didn't have a high enough input impedance for the small-area piezo, with its small source capacitance.

But that problem was easily fixed by running the guitar through a $30 Danelectro Fish-and-Chips graphic EQ pedal. It took a lot of bass boost, and a good bit of treble cut, but once EQ'd properly, that guitar sounded quite good, plugged in.
...reasoning behind Hot Rails...
I thought that was more to cope with extreme string-bending than normal vibrational amplitude of the guitar strings.

I have a Yamaha bass guitar with huge (diameter) pole pieces on the pickups. I'm not sure if the designer was anticipating huge-amplitude string vibration, or a bass player who actually used string-bending. (I've heard a couple of strong-fingered bassists who actually do, usually micro-bends to add expression. Still impressive. :eek: )
I was going to try winding a pickup and never got around to it
I wound two single-coil pickups in the 1980s, a decade before the Internet became available to me (and there were only science research papers on the 'Net at first, anyway.) There were no books or magazines on guitar pickup winding at any of three city libraries, so I didn't have a clue what I was doing. The pickups worked, but were very low output, and very low impedance. They sounded a lot like today's "acoustic" soundhole pickups - clean and bright.


-Gnobuddy
 
An old jam buddy of mine had a gorgeous (I think) Musicman bass with large diameter double pole PUPs.

Now I dont know about string bending, certainly possible on this bass, but the 3 finger hammer on pull off 80s hair rock guitar solos were stupidly easy to replicate on that bass.

It really was a bass guitar that in my hands would have become a GuitBass, something to play those President of the USA, and Royal Blood tunes on!

I dont know, maybe the PUPs were better for slap bass/twanging and the hammer on/pull off type of playing, rather than a pick or walking fingers?
 
Didn't you ever lower the action on a guitar as far as possible, and jack the pickups as high as possible to increase the output?

….and shimmed the neck with sanded down popsicle sticks.....

When your first guitar came out of the Lafayette Radio catalog somewhere around 1960, you need to try anything to make it more playable and capable of driving my DIY germanium fuzz box further toward the edge of meltdown.

I was digging through boxes that were packed during a rushed move out of Florida over 5 years ago when I found the oldest yet relic from my childhood....the DIY germanium fuzz.

This had to be made when I was in middle school, 11 to 13 years old. Its transistors were selected from my junk box for best tone with my crappy guitar. This one went into the junk box when I got a Hagstrom in high school. It did not have a foot switch since DPDT footswitches were not common in 1960's junk. The second one had a relay operated by a SPST footswitch.
 

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….and shimmed the neck...
I did that just recently with a Korean-made Epiphone Les Paul that was given to a friend of mine.

The guitar had spent a long time in its case, and sounded permanently out of tune - as though the intonation was terribly off. The weird thing was that I tuned the guitar, set the intonation at all six adjustable bridge saddles, and it still sounded out of tune - for every chord, in every position, even for chords with lots of open strings (Em, say). :h_ache:

The neck angle seemed to be wrong (slightly negative), so I shimmed the screw-on neck with a thin piece of plastic (a too-thin guitar pick!) Hey presto, the harsh sound disappeared, and the guitar now sounded as though it was properly tuned and intonated. Very weird, but I was happy with the result.
...DIY germanium fuzz...
...when I was in middle school, 11 to 13 years old.
I was a few years older when my older brother brought home an electric guitar belonging to a friend of his, which needed some sort of repair.

In exchange for repairing it, my brother got to keep it in our house for a few weeks - and when he wasn't playing it, I was trying to teach myself how to play it.

At the time, for some reason, I was obsessed with the fuzz-box guitar solo in The Carpenter's song "Goodbye To Love", and I remember making multiple attempts to come up with a circuit that would recreate that sound. Silly, because I certainly didn't have the musical chops to play that solo anyway.

I eventually came close to the sound, though, with a two-stage transistor amplifier, with the output feeding a pair of anti-parallel germanium diodes (they might have been silicon, I don't really remember) through a rather small capacitor (so treble was fuzzed much more than bass), and some of the guitar's clean sound mixed in with the fuzzed treble.

Listening to that song again, I still like the solo, but I can't imagine why I liked that spiky, fuzzy guitar tone. I certainly don't like it very much now!

The solo is at about 1:24 in this video: YouTube

-Gnobuddy
 
I dont know, maybe the PUPs were better for slap bass/twanging and the hammer on/pull off type of playing, rather than a pick or walking fingers?
You may very well be right. :)

I'm not far beyond novice level with a bass guitar - the only reason I can play bass at all is because I know enough music theory, and enough of a normal guitar's fretboard, to find chord roots and fifths and octaves and whatnot.

I did take (and pass) an 18-week community college intro to bass guitar course, but that was many years ago, and I didn't keep up the chops I acquired from 18 weeks of diligent practice back then.


-Gnobuddy
 
The guitar had spent a long time in its case, and sounded permanently out of tune - as though the intonation was terribly off. The weird thing was that I tuned the guitar, set the intonation at all six adjustable bridge saddles, and it still sounded out of tune - for every chord, in every position, even for chords with lots of open strings (Em, say).

Last time I saw a new guitar like that, replacing the strings with new ones and re-intonating the bridge fixed it.
 
Last time I saw a new guitar like that, replacing the strings with new ones and re-intonating the bridge fixed it.
Agreed. That is certainly what Wol (from Winnie The Pooh) would have called the Crustimony Proceedcake in those circumstances. :)

I've encountered many guitars with bad intonation in the past, and in almost every case except this one, the fix was as you described. New strings, adjust truss rod if necessary, adjust the bridge saddles.

In one or two rare cases, I also had to shave the headstock end of the fret-board by the thickness of a piece of card-stock, or remove the nut and clean off a buildup of glue under it, so that the nut could move a hair closer towards the first fret.

This guitar, though, stymied me for a while. I did the usual things first - cleaned up the nut slots, adjusted the truss rod, adjusted the bridge saddles to intonate all the strings at the 12th fret. The strings were brand-new, just replaced by my friend when she'd been given the guitar a few days earlier. And still, it sounded harsh and out of tune, on every fret, for every chord shape, even one-finger chords (Em7, 2nd fret, 5th string.) Even the open strings sounded out of tune when strummed together. :confused:

I'm baffled as to why fixing the neck angle problem also fixed the intonation. But there's no doubt that it did - the improvement in the guitar's sound was dramatic.


-Gnobuddy
 
A really bad neck angle can make the string path shorter than ideal as you use the entire neck length as opposed to smaller pieces of it. It's that arc tangent thing from geometry class that I never quite grasped.

I have a vintage Fender Coronado with the same problem.

Note that the free phone app "Pitch Lab Pro" makes guitar tuning and intonation adjustment a lot easier. Just set the phone on the body of the guitar in a fairly quiet room and it will measure the pitch. It works on electric guitars without an amp. It vanished from the Google Play store years ago but it still on the Amazon app store for Android and the Apple store for IOS.

brought home an electric guitar belonging to a friend of his, which needed some sort of repair.

I played in a (surf music) garage band with some neighbors in middle school. At first I was using an old Magnavox HiFi console for an amp which required a car to move. I finally got one of my DIY Champs into a box such that I could lug it to a friends house two blocks away. He had a Fender amp, a Hagstrom 1 guitar, and a Vox Tone Bender germanium fuzz box, all provided by his parents, who encouraged these loud sessions since they were the only way to get him to practice.

He managed to break the 9 volt battery snap in the Vox, so I volunteered to fix it....of course I traced it's circuit and created this device with transistor sockets to test my junk box full of transistors for proper "tone."

As middle school was ending the 4 of us in the band would find ourselves assigned to three different high schools, so the band dissolved in the mid 60's. Lane would never play the guitar again and sold all of his stuff. That's how I got the Hagstrom. It stayed with me until it's weird half plastic (AKA mother of toilet seat) body disintegrated from Florida's UV radiation some time in the early 70's. I still have the neck and pickups.

In the CB radio boom of 1976 I traded a DIY CB booster amp for a Univox guitar and amp. I sold the transistor amp after playing it once, but still have the guitar. I played the frets off of it over about 25 years. At the time I brought it to a guitar shop who told me that it was junk and not worth fixing, so I bought a Squier Strat, but kept the Univox It is a Mosrite with a Univox name, similar to that used by the Ventures on all the early surf music.

Univox was only a marketing company. Univox synthesizers came from Japan. The first ones were called MiniKorgs, which was the origin of that brand name. I had two of them and was stupid enough to sell them along with my ARP Odyssey, Little Brother, and string ensemble in the digital 80's when I got a Korg DW-8000.

The guitar I have is a Mosrite with a Univox name, similar to that used by the Ventures on all the early surf music.
 
A really bad neck angle can make the string path shorter than ideal as you use the entire neck length as opposed to smaller pieces of it.
That makes sense!

The bridge had been lowered (by some previous person) to try to compensate for the wrong neck angle. That made the string height (action) tolerable, but that out-of-tune sound was horrendous to anyone without tin ears.
...Lane would never play the guitar again...
It saddens me when I hear stories like this, of people who once played a musical instrument, then gave it up for good. Most of the time, the stories involve controlling parents forcing a kid to study an instrument he/she really didn't care for, and the kid stops playing the instant he/she is old enough to defy the parents.

I barely touched a guitar for a good ten or fifteen years myself, when a lot of things slowly went wrong in my life, one after the other. But luckily for me, the urge came back eventually, and music's given me a lot of happiness since.


-Gnobuddy
 
Most of the time, the stories involve controlling parents forcing a kid to study an instrument he/she really didn't care for

That was his case. His parents wandered into a music store and got him the guitar and amp and guitar lessons. He wasn't really into it, but he wasn't a bad player and had a big empty garage.

My parents got a plastic toy guitar with a plastic amp for all three of the kids. I thought it was made by Mattel but I can't find any reference of it online. It had nylon strings and a piezo pickup. Once I learned how to get something resembling music out of it, I got a cheap solid body guitar from a mail order catalog, but no amp. The following Christmas my younger brothers also got musical instruments, and lessons. I was the only one that stuck with it, and I was rewarded with guitar lessons well into high school.

I barely touched a guitar for a good ten or fifteen years myself

There were a few periods when I didn't touch a guitar, and a few years between the death of the Hagstrom and the trade for the Univox when I didn't even own one.

The longest quiet period was when my daughter was young. Then we hit her with music lessons in high school which stuck. There were many long days of annoying the neighbors with musical weapons.

She played drums and keys, and was learning the guitar when she ran off with a guy, got married, and pawned the Strat I gave her. She is now living here on my dime, has 4 kids and no interest in music......but I still have her drum set and JV1000. Maybe one of the grandkids will have some music interest, but none so far.
 
Anderton's Music has an interview with Yvette Young, whose parents pushed her into classical music, violin, classical piano competitions, and performing in an orchestra, starting when she was very young. She hated all this so much she actually became ill.

Fortunately, she recovered after she stopped competing, and she eventually started to play her own kind of music on guitar: YouTube


-Gnobuddy
 
weltersys, thanks for asking. I promised photos but I haven't posted any yet. Ill try to do it asap.
I connected the magnetic pickups in parallel and it works great, in combination with the piezo. I just moved the magnetic further away from the bridge because the sound was too bright overall. (cosmetically disappointing because now the cable can be seen going into a hole in the wood where the pickup used to sit)
Now the piezo provides the brightness and the nuances from the fingers and the magnetic a solid body to the notes.
My main instrument is the sax. I've just recently taken up guitar and bass, so I'm a total newbie. I have been lowering the action progresivelly to where I feel comfortable, so some notes on the mid to high end of the fretboard are buzzy. But I'm learning a lot and am totally happy with my creation.
Photo coming soon.
 
...just recently taken up guitar and bass...
Watch out for unexpected differences between those two, often overlooked by those of us who start on guitar.

For instance: good fretting-hand technique on guitar is to use the fingertips to press the strings down, with the tip of the finger standing nearly upright on the fretboard. This lets you play clean chords and ringing open strings, without accidental muting.

But most good bass players I've seen use the pads of their fingers to hold down strings, not the tip...and they lay their fingers almost flat across the fretboard, rather than perpendicular to it. Their fingers are usually touching all the higher strings simultaneously, to keep them quiet. This time it's all about deliberately muting every string except the one you're playing. Bass players rarely play chords or double-stops, so most of the time it's one single note at a time - and you definitely don't want other open strings ringing out!

What's particularly odd is that I've never seen this mentioned in any of several "How to play bass guitar" books I've read. The books show the same left-hand finger position as for guitar. But that's not what I see in video clips of really good bass players.

Maybe the need for so much left-hand muting has something to do with the exploding power levels of bass rigs, with many bass players now believing they need a 1000 watt bass rig to play a coffee-shop gig. :)


-Gnobuddy
 
VERY Nice looking instrument.
I agree, nicely done!

I remember watching a Pink Floyd video in which Guy Pratt was playing an upright electric bass that looks very similar, but I can't seem to locate an image online to confirm that memory.

The two attached images are of early (1930s) production electric upright basses by Ro-Pat-In (later changed to Rickenbacker) and by Vega. The Rickenbacker has a double-horseshoe pickup that appears to be a very similar design to the groundbreaking one George Beauchamp designed for their 1931 "Frying pan" electric slide guitar.


-Gnobuddy
 

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Thanks for the compliments. the null is inside the wooden pickup case. It has no magnet that I can tell and will pick up no sound at all.
The body is maple, like the neck. I figured the overall shape and thickness from some photos of Eberhard Weber's bass. It holds the intonation well enough for me.
By the way, the action is pretty low and comfortable right now and only the octave point on the fingerboard is buzzy. I am afraid to start sanding it in case I mess up.
 
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