Experimental build

[Tom Mc1]

I am working on a new guitar. The body style is LP Special double cut. What I am waiting for is the nitro finish to cure. 3 weeks to final polish.

The body is saple and a figured maple top.

I have a SD P-Rail pickups for the neck and bridge and am l going to put a LR Baggs.T-Bridge. The Hummbucker rings will be the SD Tripple Shot.

Any thoughts on the pickups? I think the the T-bridge will give a unique sound when used thru an A/B switch.

The thing about creating your own guitar is that you can make it what you want.

[WRGKMC]

Theres a ton of great pickups out there today. What might be best for any one instrument depends on its acoustic tone, amps and effects and music style you like playing. Those should sound good. If not you can always sell them and try something else. Its hard to know exactly. Unless you've played other instruments with those same pickups, there's always a certain amount of risk in not getting it just right.

 

There's no simple way of testing either. I have done experiments where I've tested the sound of the wood using contact mics, recording the sound then passing it through a frequency analyzer then viewing the results. You can pretty much see the frequency peaks and the woods dominant resonant frequencies. Thing is when you choose a pickup you'd have to know if you want to enhance those frequencies or strengthen the weaker ones. Pickups at best have a reception range from around 100hz to 6 or 7Khz depending on how hot they're wound. They may also have a narrow peak in the center like a mountain (many hot wound pups have this) or a wider plateau (like many vintage winds) How well they will sound with your gear is the question. You can increase lows, mids, and highs with an amps EQ, If those pickups produce those frequencies to begin with. If they aren't there, all you boost is noise.

 

Magnet strength is the other item. You can have hot wound, hot magnets, hot wound weak magnets, Vintage wind with strong or weak magnets and all produce different responses. Even the wire thickness makes a difference.

 

The only way you can test a pickups response is similar to how you'd test a mic except you don't have a diaphragm to generate a current. You'd use another inductor in close proximity to the pickup that that generates a wide flat response a magnetic field. Then you run something like pink noise into that coil and see how well the pickup receives it. You'd compare the signal going to the transmitter coil to the signal coming out of the receiver and you'd be able to see the peaks and looses.

 

They would give you some data to work with but you'd still have to match that instrument. Engineers may get involved that deep, but whose to say their ears are better than anyone elses, and would a flatter response be the best for a particular guitar. Thing is a guitar is a midrange instrument and since our ears are most sensitive at hearing speech between 1~2K hz, the midrange frequencies varied up or down in frequency by even small amounts seem to be large to a normal listener.

 

So given that, all I can say is try it and see what happens. Try the instrument solo and with a band and see hos it holds up and cuts through with the other instruments going. If it gets buried by a bass guitar, try something with more mids and highs. If it sounds thin, try something with more bottom end. Try different amps, speakers etc too. If it works well through many amps, then you have a winner. If try different pickups or different woods on your next build.

[Tom Mc1]

These pickups are a little different in that they have pole pieces in the upper section and rails in the lower part of the humbucker. The rails are supposed to sound like P-90s. The upper half is a standard single coil when selected. Played together, they should have a humbucking sound. Using the tripple shot ring will allow me to choose which coil of each pickup I want to use. According to SD, I can go humbucking, P-90, or single coil (Fender) at the flick of a switch. Doing the math, I should get about 16 different sounds using this setup and a 3-way switch.

The LR Baggs TOM bridge should give me and accoustic option. It has piezo crystals in each saddle and are wired into a stereo jack. Using an A/B switch, this should give me the option of an electric sound, accoustic sound or both at the same time.

In building your own guitar, you can customize it anyway you want. The key to this one is to experiment with the versitaly of the pickup style and to explore the accoustic option with out sacrificing one of my other guitars.