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Vintage threads from the first ten years

Re: Warning Scotch 235 black paper tape DON'T USE

5/19/2006 9:34 PM
Ken	Re: Warning Scotch 235 black paper tape DON'T USE Or the really great PAF's were... I worked in OEM electronics plants for much of my life, women are desired there because they are more patient and detail orientated, usually have smaller hands and don't usually mind doing the same things day after day. I had a boss once who would preferably hire Asian female 'part placers' for that reason. FYI, Fender hired women for winding pickups, wiring amps, wiring guitars, and other 'detail work'. Me, I believe that there is no difference between males and females paywise - if a female can do the same work as a male, she should be paid exactly the same too. Ken

5/19/2006 9:34 PM

Ken

Re: Warning Scotch 235 black paper tape DON'T USE

Or the really great PAF's were...

I worked in OEM electronics plants for much of my life, women are desired there because they are more patient and detail orientated, usually have smaller hands and don't usually mind doing the same things day
after day. I had a boss once who would preferably hire Asian female 'part placers' for that reason.

FYI, Fender hired women for winding pickups, wiring amps, wiring guitars, and other 'detail work'.

Me, I believe that there is no difference between males and females paywise - if a female can do the same work as a male, she should be paid exactly the same too.

Ken

5/20/2006 12:40 AM
Jon Gundry	Dave: I agree making a pickup is about tone design. And yes experience counts. I do not think making a great pickup is a cinch. Making a crappy pickup is hard work. But I think as far as a standardized pickup is a sort of toneful riddle it is not a very complicated riddle. I can't really speak to Fender style pickups. But I'm sure there is more room to vary the design than with standardized PAF parts. There are more variables to take into account like coil height, stagger, mix of magnets and I'm sure more. So the riddle is a little more complicated which is good. It offers more possibilities for interpretation. As far a new pickup design goes or innovations on the original design, I agree that is an entirely different situation. That is a big frame to paint in. But the frame for standardized pickup designs is just not real big. Tone is a very subjective thing. Your great may be my muddy etc... I am happy to trust my own ears. I learned in designing effects that ears are way more useful than a multimeter or a scope if you want to design for tone. In fact my ears are the only tone test I trust and I have a scope. I discovered that many of the "right" ways of doing things often sacrificed the tone. Many still insist that you can't hear the difference between different capacitor and resistor types. Why? because they cannot measure the difference to their satisfaction. But there is a difference if you listen. Others will have tonal preferences different than mine. This is where tone design comes in. I don't feel I have a full grasp of all of the variables yet but I can see that with a reasonable amount of time a very good understanding of them is attainable. It's not a cinch but it is not that big of a riddle. It takes hard work, trial and error, experimentation, failure and success but that is most of the fun. If you log what you did well the riddle can be shaped into the tone you want. I also think that designing for tone requires only ears. A multimeter is useful as a reference and trouble shooting tool. I actually don't think we are too far apart on this. I just think there is a temptation to over think the variables and miss the simplicity and elegance of the design. Innovations on the theme are great but are not the only way to get a great pickup.

5/20/2006 12:40 AM

Jon Gundry

Dave:
I agree making a pickup is about tone design. And yes experience counts. I do not think making a great pickup is a cinch. Making a crappy pickup is hard work. But I think as far as a standardized pickup is a sort of toneful riddle it is not a very complicated riddle. I can't really speak to Fender style pickups. But I'm sure there is more room to vary the design than with standardized PAF parts. There are more variables to take into account like coil height, stagger, mix of magnets and I'm sure more. So the riddle is a little more complicated which is good. It offers more possibilities for interpretation. As far a new pickup design goes or innovations on the original design, I agree that is an entirely different situation. That is a big frame to paint in. But the frame for standardized pickup designs is just not real big.

Tone is a very subjective thing. Your great may be my muddy etc... I am happy to trust my own ears. I learned in designing effects that ears are way more useful than a multimeter or a scope if you want to design for tone. In fact my ears are the only tone test I trust and I have a scope. I discovered that many of the "right" ways of doing things often sacrificed the tone. Many still insist that you can't hear the difference between different capacitor and resistor types. Why? because they cannot measure the difference to their satisfaction. But there is a difference if you listen. Others will have tonal preferences different than mine. This is where tone design comes in. I don't feel I have a full grasp of all of the variables yet but I can see that with a reasonable amount of time a very good understanding of them is attainable. It's not a cinch but it is not that big of a riddle. It takes hard work, trial and error, experimentation, failure and success but that is most of the fun. If you log what you did well the riddle can be shaped into the tone you want. I also think that designing for tone requires only ears. A multimeter is useful as a reference and trouble shooting tool.

I actually don't think we are too far apart on this. I just think there is a temptation to over think the variables and miss the simplicity and elegance of the design. Innovations on the theme are great but are not the only way to get a great pickup.

5/20/2006 2:12 AM
Dave Stephens	Slackski, humbuckers are easy to make. Any kid with some parts and wire can make an atrociously toneless thing like DM makes quite easily, well, if they have a hot glue gun to hold it together Humbuckers are forgiving because there's two coils sensing different areas of the string path, its hard to really make an awful humbucker, yes its work On the other hand single coils, its pretty easy to make something that sounds pretty good, but to make something thats like wine instead of budweiser in single coils requires alot of work and listening and live testing. I have a strat set based on a '59 set that I really like, all the jam guys like. Took it out to a Robbie Laws jam, who is a great strat guy. He plays a super reverb blackface, but the amp is weird, its too clean, he turns the bass all the way up, which I thought really odd, even for strats. He plays some old Fralins and they sound great through that amp. They are potted solid, lack in sparkly harmonics etc. He played my guitar and even though he liked it, I didnt, the amp made the harmonics sound too edgy, distorted in a weird way, I don't know why, some amp thing I'm sure. Or maybe because my guitar had 11s and he plays 13s, hard to tell. I recorded those sets and can't use it on the website, something wasn't right. Probably because he uses Fralins he gravitated to an amp that makes them sound good. So besides pickups there's the amp factor to deal with. Yeah, opinions on whats killer is really varied. I live in a bluesful world, Portland oriented, but there's lots of players out there who are in that world. The jump blues guys, the roots rock guys etc. I recently read a Harmony Central review of some kid reviewing I think it was a Seth Lover pickup or something similar, saying how he hated that "horrible hollow tone" and had someone pot it solid to get rid of that annoying tone. Man, that guy needs to buy some EMG's quick, none of that annoying tone for sure. Some of us shoot for that vocal, expressive tone that kills when you play straight into an amp, its fairly easy to get, hard to control. Anyway the only point I was trying to get across is that it takes experience to go well beyond buying some parts and throwing something together, to get to tone nirvana. No it doesnt have 3 coils think dilithium crystal impregnated alnico 14, thats been pulled through a black hole, then phase dimensioned through a portional, fractional tetrahedrix oriented magnetic vortex tunnel, but for only 3.2 seconds. Then dipped in vinegar.....it works....

5/20/2006 2:12 AM

Dave Stephens

Slackski, humbuckers are easy to make. Any kid with some parts and wire can make an atrociously toneless thing like DM makes quite easily, well, if they have a hot glue gun to hold it together :-)

Humbuckers are forgiving because there's two coils sensing different areas of the string path, its hard to really make an awful humbucker, yes its work :-)

On the other hand single coils, its pretty easy to make something that sounds pretty good, but to make something thats like wine instead of budweiser in single coils requires alot of work and listening and live testing. I have a strat set based on a '59 set that I really like, all the jam guys like. Took it out to a Robbie Laws jam, who is a great strat guy. He plays a super reverb blackface, but the amp is weird, its too clean, he turns the bass all the way up, which I thought really odd, even for strats. He plays some old Fralins and they sound great through that amp. They are potted solid, lack in sparkly harmonics etc. He played my guitar and even though he liked it, I didnt, the amp made the harmonics sound too edgy, distorted in a weird way, I don't know why, some amp thing I'm sure. Or maybe because my guitar had 11s and he plays 13s, hard to tell. I recorded those sets and can't use it on the website, something wasn't right. Probably because he uses Fralins he gravitated to an amp that makes them sound good. So besides pickups there's the amp factor to deal with.

Yeah, opinions on whats killer is really varied. I live in a bluesful world, Portland oriented, but there's lots of players out there who are in that world. The jump blues guys, the roots rock guys etc.

I recently read a Harmony Central review of some kid reviewing I think it was a Seth Lover pickup or something similar, saying how he hated that "horrible hollow tone" and had someone pot it solid to get rid of that annoying tone. Man, that guy needs to buy some EMG's quick, none of that annoying tone for sure. Some of us shoot for that vocal, expressive tone that kills when you play straight into an amp, its fairly easy to get, hard to control.

Anyway the only point I was trying to get across is that it takes experience to go well beyond buying some parts and throwing something together, to get to tone nirvana.

No it doesnt have 3 coils :-)

think dilithium crystal impregnated alnico 14, thats been pulled through a black hole, then phase dimensioned through a portional, fractional tetrahedrix oriented magnetic vortex tunnel, but for only 3.2 seconds. Then dipped in vinegar.....it works....

5/20/2006 4:08 AM
GTarman	Hey Dave, those old blackface super reverbs were quite bright with the bright switch on, made them sound almost fizzy when they were cranked. Maybe that was the reason for the edgy harmonics??

5/20/2006 4:13 PM
jason lollar	chris cain I have a chris cain story. Late 70's, I noticed that alot of the rock albums i listend to had odd names on the writing credits like sonny boy williamson. So i went to a used record store and dug around- found a sonny boy album among others. Long story short I threw my hendrix licks in the trash and started a little walter kind of band around 81 or 83 right before blues almost got popular (trad blues never really was as popular as you might think) and I was playing in this biker club- we were the only 20 somethings in the area playing blues although 6 or 10 years later 20'ish guys eventually flooded the market- and this guy is watching me play all night (obviously a guitar player) so I go over to see whats up and he says "I am your new competition- remember my name (really kind of hoaky I thought) its Chris Cain". well whatever I figure, wheres your band at? If you were so hot you would be gigging. At the time I had a memory I cant explain today so I did recall his name and finally saw it about 10 years later right about the time I quit playing clubs after a couple thousand nights of hot and cold. I have seen his photo- looks like the same guy I saw.

5/20/2006 4:13 PM

jason lollar

chris cain

I have a chris cain story.
Late 70's, I noticed that alot of the rock albums i listend to had odd names on the writing credits like sonny boy williamson.
So i went to a used record store and dug around- found a sonny boy album among others.
Long story short I threw my hendrix licks in the trash and started a little walter kind of band around 81 or 83 right before blues almost got popular (trad blues never really was as popular as you might think) and I was playing in this biker club- we were the only 20 somethings in the area playing blues although 6 or 10 years later 20'ish guys eventually flooded the market- and this guy is watching me play all night (obviously a guitar player) so I go over to see whats up and he says "I am your new competition- remember my name (really kind of hoaky I thought) its Chris Cain".

well whatever I figure, wheres your band at? If you were so hot you would be gigging.
At the time I had a memory I cant explain today so I did recall his name and finally saw it about 10 years later right about the time I quit playing clubs after a couple thousand nights of hot and cold.
I have seen his photo- looks like the same guy I saw.

5/20/2006 6:58 PM
Dave Stephens	I'm wondering if this super is a reissue, I'm going there tomorrow and will ask him, maybe ask him if he wants me to check the bias on the amp too. Yep that must of been Chris Cain, never heard a name like that before. Albert King loved the guy and used to come and watch him play when Albert was touring through the area. You hear alot of Albert in Chris's vocals and playing, but he has alot of jazzy blues stuff in his playing. He plays a Music Man 112 Hybrid amp, plays neck pickup only, 80s reissue 335 but Joe Pass or someone similar gave him a set of real PAFs, cranks the treble all the way, bass all the way off. I still have a live recording of him I put up for people to listen to, he writes most of his own stuff, take a listen: http://ur.pair.com/shrapnel/cain/ He's playing here on the 26 gotta go see him. Sometimes he's incredibly awesome sometimes he's burned out and not too inspiring, but sitll whips most of us into the ground even on his worst days.....

5/20/2006 6:58 PM

Dave Stephens

I'm wondering if this super is a reissue, I'm going there tomorrow and will ask him, maybe ask him if he wants me to check the bias on the amp too.

Yep that must of been Chris Cain, never heard a name like that before. Albert King loved the guy and used to come and watch him play when Albert was touring through the area. You hear alot of Albert in Chris's vocals and playing, but he has alot of jazzy blues stuff in his playing. He plays a Music Man 112 Hybrid amp, plays neck pickup only, 80s reissue 335 but Joe Pass or someone similar gave him a set of real PAFs, cranks the treble all the way, bass all the way off. I still have a live recording of him I put up for people to listen to, he writes most of his own stuff, take a listen:
http://ur.pair.com/shrapnel/cain/

He's playing here on the 26 gotta go see him. Sometimes he's incredibly awesome sometimes he's burned out and not too inspiring, but sitll whips most of us into the ground even on his worst days.....

5/22/2006 2:06 PM

David Schwab

Re: Warning Scotch 235 black paper tape DON'T USE

quote:
"Me, I believe that there is no difference between males and females paywise - if a female can do the same work as a male, she should be paid exactly the same too."

Yes, a woman should make the same amount of money as a man, but historically that has not been the case in the USA. Women still often make less then men doing the same job.

Remember the ERA? (Equal Rights Amendment).

Back in the 50's... forget about it!

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