What makes the Humbucker so magical?

[aiza55]

Re: What makes the Humbucker so magical?

They provide a different tone from single coil pickups. Put your pickup selector on "bridge" and turn up your amp with your favorite distortion. You'll get the idea.

[marcello252]

Re: What makes the Humbucker so magical?

I love these 'angels sex' discussion

[tc]

Re: What makes the Humbucker so magical?

In my mind the REAL hero here is the amplifiers.

Thank you. It wasn't necessarily the humbucker (which btw, is magical because it "bucks hum"), it's the fact that our perception of acceptable noise and odd order harmonics evolved ever...ehm...noisier. Overdrive was never an intended use of a guitar amplifier, but once people started liking it they started to find ways to make it happen easily (master volume amplifiers, hotter output pickups, stompboxes). When people grab a JTM45 they expect this huge raucous AC/DC tone, but that only happens when you crank that bad boy to "I'm going deaf" levels and slam your right hand into the strings like Malcolm.

There's a great article on amps about 7 years ago about the evolution of Fender (and Boogie, which kinda follows the California heritage) and Marshall and how the gain stages of their amplifiers evolved over time. I'll try to look it up.

[freefrog]

Re: What makes the Humbucker so magical?

I have always wondered if one of the coils in his humbucker was a dummy but figured it wasn't because I don't think eddie's tone was achieved with a strat-size single coil.

Can anyone confirm that he used a les paul jr on the first album?

Recently, I've repaired an old Gibson bridge pickup with a shortcut: it didn't sound like a single coil.

The dead coil was acting like a capacitor in series with the intact one. The tone was rather "Rickenbacker" [I mean: the ricky's including a cap in series with their PU's, since it's a trick applied by this brand: http://i1019.photobucket.com/albums/...gstandard.jpg]. Weird but certainly useable.



About the neck PU in parallel... I've already been surprised to hear a rather convincing VH1 tone produced with a Strat : bridge + neck single coils + a cap wired as a mid enhancer "a la Bill Lawrence" + an OD in a Blacsktar HT-Dual (!!!!!!!). Apparently absurd but it worked once the dedicated volume pot of the neck PU slightly lowered.



On P90's: there's much to say IMHO about the relation between vintage P90's and vintage P.A.F.'s. If the Frankenstrat has hosted an altered P.A.F. among other PU's, I can see how EVH could obtain not too different tones with an old LP Jr.

[of course, these questions of pickups become much less important if EVH used an EQ as a mid boost: http://wwwc.dcns.ne.jp/~epi/english.html]

[AudioWonderland]

Re: What makes the Humbucker so magical?

Don't know if it's accurate, but I read an article not too long ago where a tech working on Eddie's guitar back in the day said when they tested his guitar at the time, one of the coils on the famous single humbucker was dead, so it was essentially operating as a single coil. And apparently the neck single that started as a 'decoy' was wired in temporarily to fatten things up. Need some corroboration on that.

FWIW - Significant portions of the first VH album were done on a Les Paul Junior with a single coil P90.

Here's an odd conspiracy link for y'all too. Discuss...
http://www.woodytone.com/2011/03/31/...pickup-combos/

Its not that simple. Technically, the coil read zero resistance. But since it was wired as a humbucker, it was passing current or the pickup would not function and therefore it was not running as a simple single coil.

As for the neck pickup being used, thats the first I have ever heard that in 30 years of playing