By Mark Grove
03/28/03
This is an important repost for players who want their pickups to be just right for the guitar and amp they use. This interview I did in 2003 was with Bill Turner, one of music's Pickup gurus who has made pickup technology his life, and players like you have benefited like crazy because of it. So with that I decided to put it back up because a refresher on how pickups work and what ones to use for your music are important, at least it's important to me. Well, it better be important to you if you want great tone. Hell, I didn't realize I did that interview 10 years ago.
Time flies doesn't it. Which means you players better get to work and learn from this little interview with Bill Turner.
Fender Guitars and Pickups are known for their distinctive sound that delights players and fans all over the world. This has lead to generations of players trying to perfect Leo Fender's great inventions. Bill Turner: The Pick up expert and Co-founder of EMG pickups and LSR (Linear String Research) came on board with the Fender R&D team in 95' and wanted to bring back that vintage sound that clearly stated Fender's unique pickup tone and quality.
http://www.fender.com
Bill being the old hand at pickup development, took old vintage Fender pickups and experimented not just to recreate that old fender Sound and technology. But how to combine Old Tech with the new and test the hell out of it to come up with Vintage pick-ups that had that distinctive Fender tone that only Leo and real musicians would love.
MG: When you joined The Fender R&D team in 95 was it important that the vintage pickups that Fender was making had more of a percentage of vintage parts or new technology?
Bill: It was extremely important that the vintage pickups be correct. The current vintage reissue pickups are the truest recreations of the originals. The pickup construction is consistent with the techniques used by Fender from the early fifties to the present day. The vintage pickups are still made with pressed paper fiber and Alnico magnets which form the winding bobbin. The magnet wire is wound directly onto to the magnets in the traditional manner. The technical part was the research into the materials used to make these pickups when they were originally produced.
The structure and process of the Alnico 5 magnet was slightly different in the past than it is today, which is a large component of the tonality of the pickup. The other half of the sound component is the magnet wire. The magnet wire used for the pickups is still produced by one of our original suppliers. Without getting to technical about it, for better or worse in the case of pickups, the grades and processes for magnet wire have changed over the last fifty years, leading us back in time to discover the technique and material the wire maker used to produce the wire.
http://www.fender.com
Fine magnet wire produced in the fifties and sixties had greater hardness than the softer annealed wire produced today, so the original technique was used to produce the magnet wire for the vintage pickups.
MG: Do you believe the single coil pickup is really what drives that signature Fender guitar sound and why?
Bill: Without doubt, it is the single most identifiable electric guitar sound, the sound is unique to Fender instruments. The single coil pickup produces the most natural tonality and presence of any type of guitar pickup. What sets the single coil apart from the humbucking style pickup is its ability to produce the fundamental note with the naturally occurring related harmonics, while the humbucker cannot reproduce the fundamental, only a harmonic of the original note, which is why it lacks the clarity of the single coil.
MG: Are the type of magnets used in the pickup making process important? Magnet material is chosen based on a group of properties. Alnico(Aluminum, Nickel, Cobalt) iron making up about 50% of the magnets balance. The magnet not only must provide a magnetic field to magnetize the string, it also must provide the iron critical to inducing (inductance) voltage in the coil. The iron in Alnico spreads and widens the magnetic field through the pickup coil, charging the coil with magnetic flux. Ceramic magnets, while twice the magnetic strength of Alnico, contain no iron and cannot achieve the same affects as Alnico without iron or iron pole pieces being added to the pickup design. Each of these materials has its own very different properties, both very useful in pickup design, it`s a matter of understanding the strengths and weaknesses of each.
MG: When you started with Fender you began with 1957/1962 StratoCaster Pickups. Was it a challenge to produce a solid vintage 57/62 pickup even though your'e an old hand at it?
Bill: It was a learning experience. As I described in your question regarding vintage parts for pickups, the 57/62`s were the model for that research. A set of original 63' Strat pickups were sacrificed for that project,for the greater good of musicians everywhere. With regard to the reference "old hand", although I was responsible for many of EMG pickup designs, EMG wasn`t tied down to producing a truly authentic passive Strat sound. We created a truly good Strat tone, but achieving the subtle tonal nuances of a passive 60`s Fender single coil pickup proved very difficult. Passive pickup design is the most challenging because of its inherent limits. There are only wire and magnets as the tools of creation.
MG: What are one of the ways to test out the tone of a pickup to be and figure out it's capabilities and what it can handle?
http://www.fender.com
Bill: The best way to evaluate the tone quality of a pickup is in a controlled situation. In other words, you would want to use the same guitar and the same amp for all your listening tests. Swapping different pickups in and out of the same guitar for a consistent sound reference point. We use only one test guitar. The guitar has been modified so we can slide pickguard assemblies in and out of it quickly. The pickguards have different types pickups installed on them, so we can swap and slide pickguards in a matter of seconds and listen to many types of pickups. I realize that this is not practical for most musicians, but a music dealer might consider a test set up like this for his store.
MG: Do fender guitars and amps ever have to tweak their electronics and parts to conform with the way Fender Pickups are made?
Bill: Fender amps and guitars have always been traditionally designed around each other. My thought on this is that popular trends, new products, and player demand create changes to the equipment, and Fender has responded with very innovative guitar and amp products that cover a wide range of musical tastes.
MG: Which type of Fender Pick-ups needed the most changes when you came on Board the Fender R&D Team?
Bill: The American Standard Strat, Tele, Jazz Bass, and P Bass all were upgraded with new pickup designs. MIM guitars were upgraded with new pickups soon after, but the first major project undertaken was developing a new program for Fender Humbucking pickup designs.
MG: Has your past experience in manufacturing pick-ups with (EMG)given you the ability to see where pick-up making has to go and actually improve on Leo Fender's masterpieces?
Bill: It gives me a unique perspective having come from an audio and electronics engineering back round. The answer is in developing new materials for pickup design for the future.
Mark Grove-Canadian Guitar Player-March 2003
http://www.fender.com
For more info on Fender Vintage Pickups just click the Fender link above,or for even more info on Bill Turner's EMG pickups go to: http://www.emginc.com
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