Educate me on calibrated sets

IMENATOR

IMENATOR

Well-known member
I understand for most hubmuckers you can just buy a pair of the exact same pickup, put them in the same guitar and just by adjusting the hight they will eventually match in output. So why does Seymour Duncan offers some of their humbuckers as neck model or bridge model? I understand brige has more output (or neck has less, it is all relative) but what is the intended benefit by offering a calibrated set?

I have some ideas of my own but I would like to hear from you or maybe from some SD employees posting in this forum.

Edit: In about 14 years using SDs I only had 2 sets: Duncan Distortion and Full Shred but I always understood neck and bridge of these are actually different sounding pickups, differente characters, that to me is a set but not necessarily two of the same calibrated. I may be wrong.
 
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I personally think the best Duncan "calibrated" sets are their vintage output sets. I think a slightly underwound neck pickup with a slightly overwound bridge pickup works great.

I think the intention is by overwinding a bridge pickup you "fatten up" that pickup, thus countering the shrillness that comes from the bridge position. By contrast, by underwinding the neck pickup, you accomplish a brighter more open sound to counter the bloat of the neck position.

As you mentined, their bridge pickups are wound hotter to make it easier to achieve balance by setting the heighs so that you don't have to have the bridge pickup extremely close to the strings and the neck pickup unreasonably low as you sometimes have to when using the exact same pickup in both positions.

But other than that, I feel many of their "calibrated" sets are pretty arbitrary. Like the JB/Jazz, which IMO is taking the thought that I mentioned to the extreme to the point where (to me) it's just too much. JMO.
 
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It's as you might expect, Duncan worked out how to get similar tone while balancing the levels of the two position pickups. There are a couple cases where bridge and neck intentionally sound different, but for the most part, calibrated sets were to match levels between bridge and neck while keeping a similar tone profile.
 
FWIW, I don't think the Distortion Mayhem set is "calibrated" either. At least not by design. They mention on an old blog entry that it was people who matched the Seymourizer SH-7 with the Distortion SH-6, so they decided to make a set out of them. They didn't really design the SH-7 (now SH-6N) to match the SH-6 (now SH-6B).
 
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Rex_Rocker said:
FWIW, I don't think the Distortion Mayhem set is "calibrated" either. At least not by design. They mention on an old blog entry that it was people who matched the Seymourizer SH-7 with the Distortion SH-6, so they decided to make a set out of them. They didn't really design the SH-7 (now SH-6N) to match the SH-6 (now SH-6B).
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I don't think the Mayhem set was ever marketed as calibrated? Usually it's mostly the Strat sets that are marked as calibrated and mostly the vintage PAF type humbucker sets.
 
An interesting side note to this thread, is that most Duncan Tele sets have a "hotter" wound neck pup. I'm sure there's a reason for that.
 
ArtieToo said:
An interesting side note to this thread, is that most Duncan Tele sets have a "hotter" wound neck pup. I'm sure there's a reason for that.
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I think it's because that's what they were like at some point from Fender, but I don't think they're actually "hotter", but rather, just wound with thinner wire.
 
Yup. And I should have said, higher DCR. Which, of course, is not exactly the same thing.
 
Rex_Rocker said:
FWIW, I don't think the Distortion Mayhem set is "calibrated" either. At least not by design. They mention on an old blog entry that it was people who matched the Seymourizer SH-7 with the Distortion SH-6, so they decided to make a set out of them. They didn't really design the SH-7 (now SH-6N) to match the SH-6 (now SH-6B).
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Exactly, the DDs are a set of two different voiced pickups that play well together (like JB/Jazz for most people) but I dont think of that as calibrated set. An example of exactly the same humbucker into a calibrated set to me would be the Alnico ii Pro or 59 set and other PAF sets.
 
IMENATOR said:
Exactly, the DDs are a set of two different voiced pickups that play well together (like JB/Jazz for most people) but I don't think of that as calibrated set.
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One of my favorite "balanced" sets. If they didn't plan it, they sure got lucky on the engineering.
 
IMENATOR said:
Exactly, the DDs are a set of two different voiced pickups that play well together (like JB/Jazz for most people) but I dont think of that as calibrated set. An example of exactly the same humbucker into a calibrated set to me would be the Alnico ii Pro or 59 set and other PAF sets.
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That being said, though, I do think the Full Shred set that you mentioned, they did plan it out as a "calibrated set" even if the pickups are pretty different between each other.

I haven't tried the Full Shred set, but it seems like what they did for the FS's, the Invader, the Nazgul and Pegasus with the Sentient, and maybe some others that I'm forgetting, is they took the Jazz and tweaked it to varying degrees to make it a "calibrated" set with high output firebreathers in the bridge position.

They also have the Black Winter set with a 13K neck pickup which they did originally plan out as a set. That being said, I'm pretty sure both of those pickups are tweaked versions of the Distortion Mayhem set, which didn't start out as a planned set, LOL.
 
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Are we using 'calibrated' to also mean 'balanced' or are they 2 different things?
 
IMENATOR said:
I understand brige has more output (or neck has less, it is all relative) but what is the intended benefit by offering a calibrated set?
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As explained by Rex_Rocker, it's not only a question of output.

When one adds wire around coils, the output rises because the inductance increases with the DCR.

But more inductance also shifts down the resonant frequency and it leads a PU to trim the high range sooner.

So, slightly overwinding a bridge pickup makes it louder but also less shrill.

And slightly underwinding a neck one makes it less loud but also brighter / tighter.

A good way to understand the interest of this recipe is to try guitars with pickups not designed for their respective positions: when I remember a LP with a PG in bridge position and an APH bridge pickup in the neck slot, I recall its sound as really unbalanced... One had to change the amp settings each time the pickups switch was flicked. :-P
 
ArtieToo said:
An interesting side note to this thread, is that most Duncan Tele sets have a "hotter" wound neck pup. I'm sure there's a reason for that.
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AFAIK, the reason is the same than for original Fender Tele PUs: the neck pickup of a Tele is physically slim so it's easier to wind it with AWG43 than with AWG 42 (unless one makes the coil taller like in Fender "Twisted" Tele neck PU's).
But DCR due to thinner wire is not the same than with more turns: a Tele neck with 9400 turns of AWG42 should measure a bit above 6.9k while it would rise above 8.6k with the same number of turns of AWG43... for the same inductance and therefore, almost the same sound ("almost" because AWG43 makes the bass a bit tighter AFAIK / IME: might be a second reason for Tele neck PU's with an apparently "hotter" DCR).

Anyway, inductance wise, neck Tele PU's generally remain under the value of their bridge neighbour - unless the neck PU is an humbucker of course.
 
Yeah the Tele neck thing is the same reason why Wolfgang neck pickups are "hotter" than the bridge. They are wound with thinner wire so the DCR looks higher
 
freefrog said:
When one adds wire around coils, the output rises because the inductance increases with the DCR.

But more inductance also shifts down the resonant frequency and it leads a PU to trim the high range sooner.

So, slightly overwinding a bridge pickup makes it louder but also less shrill.

And slightly underwinding a neck one makes it less loud but also brighter / tighter.
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Duncan has methods of changing the geometry of the coil to counteract those effects. For example, a former employee once mentioned that if you pack the coil near the top of the bobbin it gets brighter. Which in my mind is the difference between "calibrated" in terms of sound and "balanced" in terms of output.
 
beaubrummels said:
Duncan has methods of changing the geometry of the coil to counteract those effects. For example, a former employee once mentioned that if you pack the coil near the top of the bobbin it gets brighter. Which in my mind is the difference between "calibrated" in terms of sound and "balanced" in terms of output.
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Yep. These methods are of those that most pickups winders apply and that none of 'em ever reveals online. ;-)

There's certainly a lot to do with coil geometry, winding tension, TPL, etc. :-)

That said, all other factors being equal (coil geometry included), more turns of the same wire on same bobbins = more inductance = lower pitched resonance = warmer louder sound VS the opposite with less turns, and it suffices to explain the difference of DCR noticeable between neck and bridge pickups in "calibrated" sets currently on the market, whatever is the brand involved. IME. IMO. YMMV.
 
Usually most people want more power and bass from my bridge position (naturally a bright and less ballsy spot to pick up from the strings) and more clarity from my neck position (naturally boomy and louder from the strings) . . . hence the desire for 'matched' sets.

I've played with unmatched sets, and you can usually make 'em work by playing with pickup height. Matched sets just seem to be easier to get working together.
 
Calibrated is output matching for neck vs bridge differences in loudness.

Co-ordinated? Matching? Whatever - is creating two pickups that compliment each other tonally. That could mean are the same, are opposite, or something else. Which is why I also ask "What do you mean. by "Pairs with".

For low output pickups, calibration is generally not an issue - and never really was. As output got higher, it becomes a thing.
 
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