DIY Air Mod?

['59]

DiMarzio has a well known patent on "air technology" in a pickup, which is simply putting a non metallic spacer inbetween the magnet and the base plate. This has a big enough effect that the Tone Zone, without the mod, and the Air Zone are sold as two different pickups. The Air Norton and Norton are the same way.

I was wondering if any of you guys have tried this mod on any non-DMZ pickups and wanted to know what the results were and how you did it so it worked out nice and easy. How specifically does it alter the tone and the feel of a pickup? Does it work best in the neck or bridge, or both?

 

[Demanic]

Re: DIY Air Mod?

I'd be curious to know why putting a non magnetic spacer between the magnet and baseplate affects the sound of the pickup. Doesn't Dimarzio use non magnetic brass baseplates?

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[ItsaBass]

Re: DIY Air Mod?

Where did you get that information? That is not what DiMarzio Air Technology is. They clearly say otherwise on their own Website. Its the magnet not having physical contact with the pole pieces, not with the baseplate (which would do nothing).

It has been proven to my satisfaction by a very knowledgable poster on the TDPRI forum that baseplate material, and metal baseplates vs. no metal basepletes on Fender style pickups, do nothing that anyone can hear (i.e. anything over 1 dB of change on any range of frequencies).

You can very easily convert most standard humbuckers to half Airbuckers. You just go in and take out the keeper bar. It results in air on that side, but not on the slug side. To do a full Airbucker (air on both sides of the magnet), you need a magnet that is not as wide as the original.

 

[Adieu]

Re: DIY Air Mod?

Or a piece of electric tape on the magnet... or so I heard somewhere, ages ago

 

[freefrog]

Re: DIY Air Mod?

I'd be curious to know why putting a non magnetic spacer between the magnet and baseplate affects the sound of the pickup. Doesn't Dimarzio use non magnetic brass baseplates?

‘’Non magnetic’’ is not a designation that I’d use personally. Food for thought (matching similar experiments done here): https://alexkenis.wordpress.com/201...e-material-effect-on-self-resonant-frequency/

DiMarzio has a well known patent on "air technology" in a pickup, which is simply putting a non metallic spacer inbetween the magnet and the base plate. This has a big enough effect that the Tone Zone, without the mod, and the Air Zone are sold as two different pickups. The Air Norton and Norton are the same way.

I was wondering if any of you guys have tried this mod on any non-DMZ pickups and wanted to know what the results were and how you did it so it worked out nice and easy. How specifically does it alter the tone and the feel of a pickup? Does it work best in the neck or bridge, or both?

Pulling the keeper bar out of a humbucker diminishes its inductance.

All other parms being equal, lowering the inductance of a pickup makes it brighter and less powerful.

Following another patent, DiMarzio inserts additional slugs in between the usual ones in order to compensate such losses of inductance... It's a possible solution for someone who would have "aired" a bucker and who would like to recreate a bit of missing beef (if any).


FWIW.

 

[ItsaBass]

Re: DIY Air Mod?

To do a full Airbucker (air on both sides of the magnet), you need a magnet that is not as wide as the original.

I should make this more correct by stating that this is what you must get if you want the same gap on the slug side that you get on the screw side when you simply remove the keeper bar from a "normal" humbucker.

What DiMarzio does, I believe, is to use the same width magnet as normal, but to nudge it toward the screw poles, and away from the slug poles, a bit. It takes the large gap on the screw side, and the zero gap on the slug side (which you are left with after removing the keeper bar), and it puts half as much gap width on either side of the magnet, instead of all of it on one side.

FWIW, I half-aired a Gibson 500T, and did it with an A3 mag (the weakest commonly available pickup magnet), and it didn't make a huge difference. At that point, I was theoretically weakening the screw coil, and the entire pickup, quite a lot. But it was still honky and lacking treble, just like stock; it just hit the amp less hard, so compression at the amp was not as much of a tonal factor. There is a lot of pickup e.q. in the winds of the coils, which are not easily adjustable. Magnet swaps affect the pickup's output more than they do its inherent e.q., IME. So, while DiMarzio pickups that use Airbucker technology might sound great, I'm really not sold on the idea that the Air Technology makes them sound greater than any other path taken to arrive at the same electronic specs from a pickup (inductance, capacitance, resistance, magnetic field parameters, etc.).

 

[freefrog]

Re: DIY Air Mod?

FWIW, I half-aired a Gibson 500T, and did it with an A3 mag (the weakest commonly available pickup magnet), and it didn't make a huge difference. At that point, I was theoretically weakening the screw coil, and the entire pickup, quite a lot. But it was still honky and lacking treble, just like stock; it just hit the amp less hard, so compression at the amp was not as much of a tonal factor. There is a lot of pickup e.q. in the winds of the coils, which are not easily adjustable. Magnet swaps affect the pickup's output more than they do its inherent e.q., IME. So, while DiMarzio pickups that use Airbucker technology might sound great, I'm really not sold on the idea that the Air Technology makes them sound greater than any other path taken to arrive at the same electronic specs from a pickup (inductance, capacitance, resistance, magnetic field parameters, etc.).

FWIW, the metallic content of AlNi3 (unlike ceramic bars) might have compensated the substraction of metallic mass due to the absent keeper bar, leading the inductance to stay constant (it's an hypothesis but I should be able to check it when time permits, since I've here a 500T on the shelf + various mags).

But it's true that with coils exhibiting as much "stray capacitance" as those of a 500T (at least in the one that I've here), manipulating the magnetic circuit shouldn't change the EQing curve...

 

[Masta' C]

Re: DIY Air Mod?

DiMarzio inserts additional slugs in between the usual ones in order to compensate this loss of inductance...

While this statement is true, you're confusing their "virtual vintage" technology with their "air" technology...those slugs are not a standard feature of most "air" pickups

 

[Masta' C]

Re: DIY Air Mod?

Here's the inside of a stock Air Norton posted a while back from one of our forum members. DiMarzio uses tapered slugs and plastic spacers:

 

[freefrog]

Re: DIY Air Mod?

While this statement is true, you're confusing their "virtual vintage" technology with their "air" technology...those slugs are not a standard feature of most "air" pickups

Ah well, in my mind, the sentences of my post 5 were separate from each others...

I'll edit it to make it clearer, so. In the meantime, let's share the related patent, which gives us a possible way to compensate the loss of inductance due to pulled off keepers:
https://patents.google.com/patent/US5908998

 

[Demanic]

Re: DIY Air Mod?

Interesting.

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['59]

Re: DIY Air Mod?

Okay. So just to be sure, the half air mod is when you remove the keeper bar and install a nonferrous object to stop the magnet from sliding around, and the full air mod is when you remove the keeper bar and install nonferrous materials on both side so that neither side is touching the polepieces or slugs?

I've heard the air mod removes bass and restores highs at the cost of output. Is the half air mod inbetween the results you'd get from doing the air mod or keeping the pickup stock?

 

[ItsaBass]

Re: DIY Air Mod?

Okay. So just to be sure, the half air mod is when you remove the keeper bar and install a nonferrous object to stop the magnet from sliding around, and the full air mod is when you remove the keeper bar and install nonferrous materials on both side so that neither side is touching the polepieces or slugs?

I've heard the air mod removes bass and restores highs at the cost of output. Is the half air mod inbetween the results you'd get from doing the air mod or keeping the pickup stock?

That is what I informally call the half air mod, though I do no think there is an official definition anywhere. Although when I did it, I didn't install a non-ferrous spacer. I just left the gap. The magnet isn't going to slide around. I think DiMarzio uses spacers for the sake of consistency in the gap and magnet alignment.

As for how it would compare to a full air mod, I do not know.

 

[jeremy]

Re: DIY Air Mod?

thats basically correct

 

[Benjy_26]

Re: DIY Air Mod?

Do you still have the ability to adjust the poles without a keeper bar?

 

[ItsaBass]

Re: DIY Air Mod?

Do you still have the ability to adjust the poles without a keeper bar?

Yes. Most keeper bars are not threaded (though some are). The adjustable poles self tap in the plastic bobbins.

Threaded keepers are actually kind of problematic, because you must thread though the bobbin first...and how do you make sure the threads on the screws match up with the threads on the keeper once the screws get through the bobbin to the keeper bar? The only way is to tap the bobbin threads from the bottom, going though the keeper bar first. Then you have to pull all the screws and install them from the top. This usually has to be done with the screws themselves, as 5-32 (or something like that) taps can't be found at your run of the mill hardware store. They usually must be mail ordered.

 

[freefrog]

Re: DIY Air Mod?

Do you still have the ability to adjust the poles without a keeper bar?

If I can contribute to the collective answer: the screw poles of many humbuckers are/were threaded in their baseplates, anyway... That's how Gibson did it and something still listed among "points of excellence" in a relatively recent flyer (http://archive.gibson.com/files/_gear/datasheets/Pickup_Guide.pdf: point 10).

Pre-historic Duncan's (those with an oval "Seymourized" sticker) were like that too, and so are various other P.A.F. replicas that I've here.

Screw poles threaded only in bobbins of Gibson style HB's came later as a way to ease the building process... and have the collateral interest to help preventing high pitched squealing (when a screw pole is threaded in soft plastic, it helps to dampen "bad" microphony).

But when a mistreated plastic bobbin has enlarged holes, the screw poles are loose and it becomes less satisfying. In such a case, wax or plumber teflon tape are there to help us


To come back to the effects of air mod, I post below the actual induced resonant peak of a same pickup with A5 mag + keeper bar, then "aired" by the absence of this keeper bar (in blue) then with a ceramic magnet (in green), which is the way to obtain the lowest inductance. It could be useful to recall that the highest fundamental note produced by a (normally tuned) guitar is somewhere between 1174hz and 1318hz (if you have 24 frets rather than 21): it helps to see how the "air mod" lowers the power of fundamentals and promotes relatively the harmonics, along a resonant peak whose Q factor becomes higher...

.. but it would be excessive to conclude that airing an AlNiCo loaded PU is the same than fitting it with ceramic: any resonant peak is only showing the transfer function of a pickup in "static" conditions and never reveals its whole tonal profile.

FWIW.