Narcoleptigon

Muchrespect to the venerable Craig Anderton. I've learned a lot from himover the decades. Thereare some commonly accepted misconceptions about how guitar pickupsfunction. It's hard to tell all that's going on when you adjustpickup height. Certainly, the attack becomes more pronounced as thecoil is closer. The per note fundamental harmonic will also bestronger, mostly with thinner aperture, small/dense coils. Increasing distance from the coil will audibly decrease sensitivityat some point. If you raise the pole screws on a pickup and lowerthe coil, you are actually decreasing the per note fundamentalstrength. You might actually prefer less fundamental at certainpickup positions and/or strings. Themagnetic field also alters attack character. There is only so muchuseful magnetic power before string pull becomes an issue A fieldmore evenly distributed over the coil should generally produce afatter/richer attack character, as well as less string pull. If thefield intersects through the coil, if can cause cancellations andsignal asymmetry. Ofcourse, sustain will be affected by string pull. The sustaindifference in the Fig. 3 graphs may just be a result of the sustainportion of the waves not being completely normalized – maybe not. Real time, non-brickwall/look ahead compressors always have the potential of drivingwhatever follows them too hard. After the release fully raises thesignal level, a portion of the first attack transient goes through atan increased level. There's no way around that. If I use areal-time compressor, I only use maybe 6dB gain. It depends whatfollows it. A transformer saturation sim like VOS Tessla PRO mkIIrun before an amp sim can be set to eat those initial boostedtransients, or driven more to add low harmonic “meat†with theoutput boosted for more amp sustain, if desired.