Pickups...

I didn't make it back to the shop today.  My little one kept me up most of the night.  Saws and sleep deprivation rarely mix well. I'll have to wait until tomorrow to see how well my marine ply glued up.

Of course, an electric guitar requires not only a body, but also some electronics.  Today, a bit about my choice in pickups...  A pickup is, very simply, a magnet surrounded by a coil of wire that picks up string vibrations and converts them into electricity.  That electricity travels down the cables and eventually comes out of some sort of speaker which converts the electricity back into vibrations (aka sound).

There are two main types of pickups - single coil and humbucker.  Single coil pickups are just that - one coil of wire - essentially one pickup.  Single coil pickups were the first type of pickups and they are used to produce everything from Hawaiian steel to lap steel to jazz guitar sounds.

Single Coil Pickup

The main issue with single coil pickups is that the coil of wire also acts as an antenna and picks up all sorts of radio frequencies and hum.  They are quite noisy in that sense.  So, someone from the Gibson company came along and had the bright idea of taking two single coil pickups and putting them side-by-side at opposite polarity (remember that they consist of a magnet, so north with south, north with south).  This serves to cancel out the radio noise and hum.  The double pickups are called humbuckers because they "buck" the hum.  All they are is two single coil pickups in a 69 position.  Humbuckers are used in most modern rock and heavy metal because of the warmer, fatter sound.

Humbucker

I like the idea of no noise in my pickups.  I also like the idea of being a rock guitar god.  So, for my custom guitar, I'm going to use humbuckers.  However, since I am also trying to make a diverse guitar that can pretend to be a number of different types of guitars, I also want to be able to have that single coil pickup sound available.  Maybe someday I will join a country western band.  Fortunately, there is a way to have both.  If wired correctly to a switch, a humbucker can be made only to play one of its two coils.  In other words, by turning one of the two coils in a humbucker off, you are left with a single coil pickup.  Even better, Seymour Duncan, makes a specialized humbucker called a P-Rail which is a humbucker that consists of two famous types of single coil pickups.  One single coil pickup is the P90 which is a favourite among many guitarist.  Gibson used it for many years.  The other single coil is a rail style coil made famous by the Fender Stratocasters of the '50s.  Together, the two coils form a decent humbucker.  If wired correctly, using the P-Rails will give me a guitar with a very diverse sound.  I guess not only my body shape borrows from both Gibson and Fender.

Seymour Duncan P-Rail

So that's a bit about pickups.  But of course it doesn't end there.  I still need to decide on how many P-Rails I want to put on my guitar.  Yes, that's right, most guitars have more than one pickup.  A standard notation for humbuckers is H and for single coil pickups, S.  Thus, a guitar with three humbuckers would be labeled H-H-H.  That's a bit overkill for me.  Some Ibanez guitars have that configuration.  Stratocasters have an S-S-S configuration.  I'm going to go, instead, with two P-Rails - so H-H.  Remember too that if I wire the P-Rails correctly, I can fake a pretty decent S-S, S-H, or H-S by turning off the appropriate coils.  I can also mix and match between Rails and P90s.  In fact, it gets even more complicated.  Each P-Rail humbucker pickup has six combinations.  In addition to the single Rail and the single P90, the combination of the two single coils (that is, the humbucker) can be configured in four ways.  The humbuckers can be wired in series - one coil after the other, in parallel - both coils beside each other, in series and out of phase, and lastly, in parallel and out of phase.  If you picture sound waves pushing and pulling the air around you, "out of phase" just means that one coil is pushing air while the other coil is pulling air.  The effect is that most of the sound is cancelled out by the coils working against each other and the sound that remains is very nasal and ethereal.  The six combinations for each P-Rail then:

1. P90
2. Rail
3. Humbucker in series
4. Humbucker in parallel
5. Humbucker in series and out of phase
6. Humbucker in parallel and out of phase

Considering I have two P-Rails (a bridge pickup and a neck pickup), with 6 combinations each, that gives me 36 possible configurations (I won't stop there, but more on that some other post).  I hope you are starting to understand what I am meaning by a diverse guitar.

It just so happens that Nathan had a couple of like-new P-Rails kicking around in his hoarder's collection of guitar guts.  He gave Eunice an incredible price for them and they are part of what I got for Eunice's birthday last week.  Nathan also just so happened to have wired each one to a 6-way switch.  I'll show a picture or diagram of that some other time.