Anybody experiment with individual coil height?

[Bowtomecha]

I’m curious if anybody has ever experimented with different coil heights on their humbuckers. Not the pole pieces themselves but the actual coils being different heights off the baseplate. Using a spacer/shim with a different thickness that offsets a screw pole coil in height but keeps the magnet in contact with the slugs/spacer. I’m thinking that it would be an interesting tweak that would be a bit different than raising only polepieces. Like a spacer for the baseplate screws.

 

[freefrog]

One can have an idea of what it would do by angling an humbucker under the strings, for the record. It's an easy and interesting test.

 

[jeremy]

i have not tried that, if you do it, let us know what ya think

 

[Rex_Rocker]

I wonder if you start running into phase issues like that? Like, when mic'ing a guitar cab with two mics, you have to either align the capsules or spread them apart in a certain ratio, or else, they sound phasey and horrible.

Or maybe the distances are so minimal here that it doesn't matter?

 

[larryguitar]

I wonder if you start running into phase issues like that? Like, when mic'ing a guitar cab with two mics, you have to either align the capsules or spread them apart in a certain ratio, or else, they sound phasey and horrible.

Or maybe the distances are so minimal here that it doesn't matter?

The coil height (which is what is suggested being altered here) wouldn't affect phase; so long as pickups used together are 'in phase' with one another that's not an issue.

Mechanically, I'm trying to figure out how I could try this; the issue would be that even if the screws or slugs are still in contact with the magnet, the entire coil would be farther from it, and that'd have an effect on tone without a doubt.

Larry

 

[Chistopher]

Interesting you should bring that up. I recently finished making a hybrid of two random squier pickups where one bobbin is about 1 mm taller than the other.

 

[Rex_Rocker]

The coil height (which is what is suggested being altered here) wouldn't affect phase; so long as pickups used together are 'in phase' with one another that's not an issue.

Mechanically, I'm trying to figure out how I could try this; the issue would be that even if the screws or slugs are still in contact with the magnet, the entire coil would be farther from it, and that'd have an effect on tone without a doubt.

Larry

No, I don't mean as in the phase 180 degrees flipped as in the Peter Green sound. You don't have to have the phase flipped to run into those kind of issues, though, just to a lesser extent.

But I don't really know if guitar pickups work like microphones in front of a speaker. I assume they do, but the differences are so tiny it might not even mater?

 

[freefrog]

But I don't really know if guitar pickups work like microphones in front of a speaker. I assume they do, but the differences are so tiny it might not even mater?

Two mics in front of a cab are just not wired in series like the coils of a humbucker. And the difference seems effectively too small IMHO to have an effect in this case.

Two single coils in parallel and at different locations under the strings would appear to me as more comparable to separate mics hearing a cab (might be the reason why people describe sometimes the 2d and 4th positions of a Strat as "out of phase", albeit they don't do the same thing than on center / off center mics in front of a loudspeaker).

Again, the difference of vertical level can be emulated IME by tilting strongly a classic humbucker.

EDIT - A now retired luthier winder for whom I've worked had a prototype of humbucker whose coils could be moved closer to the neck and/or bridge... And Schaller had SC / HB models with sliding magnetic poles doing vaguely something similar, if memory serves me.
It's an occasion for me to share again about the useful Tilman applet: https://till.com/articles/PickupResponseDemo/index.html

 

[Chistopher]

I think the difference between having one coil at a different height above the magnet would be that the higher coil brings the magent field closer to the string, however it would be a weaker magnetic field because the poles are further from the magnet. My experiment wouldn't account for this.