Gibson pups character to compare with Duncan or DiMarzio - any such resource?

[Larioso]

Hi
To compare Gibson properly one would wish for frequency response - bass, mid, treble - for those - all models, kind of.

Really searched for this with no luck.
Output of some or roughly presented here and there, but not the real frequency response.

Is there any for Gibson?

Yesterday I swapped Burstbucker Pro successfully to DiMarzio DP103 36th anniversary and Superdistortion DP100 on an LP Std. So that went well, even specified level was no problem - they match real nicely. So that was luck, just getting rid of brittle Burstbucker Pro.

Why aren't even DiMarzio and Duncan specifying these to select proper improvement in their series?

 

[beaubrummels]

Gibson pups character to compare with Duncan or DiMarzio - any such resource?

The problem is that BMT chart, if detailed enough to be accurate enough to make a decision, would look slightly different for each guitar manufacturer and guitar model the pickup is installed in, and even serial number of the different guitar model in many cases.

I’ve moved Duncans across SGs and LPs and even had variants of the same pickup, like gold covered vs exposed bobbins of the same pickup model, and the pickups sound slightly different with and without a cover and depending on which guitar they are in.

But general descriptions of how each pickup model sounds in various guitars with various amps can be found by searching. Certainly this forum has a crap ton of descriptions of what pickups sound like (Gibson, DiMarzio, Duncan, etc.) in various guitars; with sound samples in some cases.

A BBPro was brittle to you in your guitar, but they sound pretty good and well rounded in other guitars I have. So no one can declare that a pickup model has an absolute sound to it, like brittle, 100% of the time.

 

[Mincer]

Re: Gibson pups character to compare with Duncan or DiMarzio - any such resource?

I've never seen Gibson release that, but it might not be relevant info because of the testing procedure isn't using your guitar with you playing. Then, even if you had that, you'd need to have other pickups tested with the exact same method to compare. I am not even sure the BMT charts are that good, as I might want a few more bars in there to get a sense of what I would expect.

 

[Larioso]

Re: Gibson pups character to compare with Duncan or DiMarzio - any such resource?

Thanks guys for input.
Just running white noise to a speaker - coil close enough to a pickup, not even mounted - can tell a story about character. Make an estimate with three bars at some average, done. As the guitar is not part of generating the sound, rather neutral.
I realize that it's not a full story in a guitar, but a comparison that both DiMarzio and Duncan do - so could Gibson or some 3rd party resource.

It's down to personal taste too - I'm not so fond of Strata sound as one. But Tele's I have a couple.

 

[Rex_Rocker]

Re: Gibson pups character to compare with Duncan or DiMarzio - any such resource?

I dig BB Pros with lots of gain. They have a killer kind of attack. Like raunchier '59's.

 

[jeremy]

Re: Gibson pups character to compare with Duncan or DiMarzio - any such resource?

i doubt a pickup company would ever do this but a 3rd party could. the trick is, what is their motivation? youd have to find some crazy guitar nerd with a lot of time, the right equipment, and either disposable income to buy all the pups or a large guitarist friend group in order to borrow the pups.

 

[beaubrummels]

Re: Gibson pups character to compare with Duncan or DiMarzio - any such resource?

Thanks guys for input.
Just running white noise to a speaker - coil close enough to a pickup, not even mounted - can tell a story about character. Make an estimate with three bars at some average, done. As the guitar is not part of generating the sound, rather neutral.
I realize that it's not a full story in a guitar, but a comparison that both DiMarzio and Duncan do - so could Gibson or some 3rd party resource.

It's down to personal taste too - I'm not so fond of Strata sound as one. But Tele's I have a couple.

This would not work in a reliable way. A pickup is not a microphone picking up audio frequencies, but rather works on magnetic interference of the vibration of metal strings. The strength of a speaker magnet is not the same as plain metal strings vibrating. White noise is random frequencies, most well outside the range of what guitars produce. You wouldn’t be able to control a speaker coil for the right magnetic movement to simulate string vibration when played under nominal installed conditions (strummed by hand anchored into a wood guitar with chrome/nickel/brass hardware).

The premise that the guitar is not influential on the resulting sound and frequency response is false, IME. The same pickup that can sound sweet in one guitar can sound abrasive in another guitar simply made of different wood and hardware: note your brittle experience with the BB Pro vs the fuller rounded sound in mine. Having a frequency response chart based on isolated stimulation using a speaker coil wouldn’t have revealed or even hinted at those issues.

But you can always try it and report back. Get all the pickups, stimulate them as proposed, and install them in two different control guitars to check the deltas between the chart and what your ears hear when installed. Pick a speaker coil that isn’t strong enough to demagnetize the pickups during the experiment.

Also note, the performance characteristics of the speaker coil you use to stimulate the pickup will bias your results in an undetectable way unless you use multiple speaker drivers and control for those differences.

Finally, if you are able to get a frequency plot, I wouldn’t convert that back into BMT. IME most of what makes pickups unique and identifiable happens in between the three BMT bars. Like the chime of PAFs, the honk of Seth’s, the ear piercing treble of JBs, don’t seem to show up on BMT bars.

 

[AlexR]

Re: Gibson pups character to compare with Duncan or DiMarzio - any such resource?

^ +1 to the above. Even small pickup makers who want to expand the info they provide have lamented the lack of applicability of the speaker type more comprehensive frequency range.
Supposedly resonant peak and Q can give some info on the pickup's response across the spectrum (and that is provided by Duncan)......but its not quite the same.

 

[guitaroholic]

Re: Gibson pups character to compare with Duncan or DiMarzio - any such resource?

A BBPro was brittle to you in your guitar, but they sound pretty good and well rounded in other guitars I have. So no one can declare that a pickup model has an absolute sound to it, like brittle, 100% of the time.

yea, I put covers on BB Pros and love 'em. I think they were BB Pro predecessors... BB V or something...

 

[ItsaBass]

Re: Gibson pups character to compare with Duncan or DiMarzio - any such resource?

Most pickup makers publish their own judgments of their pickups' e.q. and output. The problem is that there are no standards across the industry for arriving at these judgments. There often aren't even any consistent standards within a single company. No offense intended, but IMO Duncan has some of the most nonsensical/inconsistent e.q and output figures in the industry IME, and DiMarzio some of the most useful and consistent.

 

[Toejam]

Re: Gibson pups character to compare with Duncan or DiMarzio - any such resource?

yea, I out covers on BB Pros and love 'em. I think they were BB Pro predecessors... BB V or something...

The BB5 is the same as the BB Pro. They went by both of those names at some point. They were decent in my '04 Studio, but I removed them in favor of EMGs. I've still got the BB5/Pro neck laying around somewhere.

 

[Larioso]

Re: Gibson pups character to compare with Duncan or DiMarzio - any such resource?

i doubt a pickup company would ever do this but a 3rd party could. the trick is, what is their motivation? youd have to find some crazy guitar nerd with a lot of time, the right equipment, and either disposable income to buy all the pups or a large guitarist friend group in order to borrow the pups.

Not as i see it - you only need to do Gibsons - is it a dozen or so. Haven't looked at other smaller boutique like Fralin, Lundgren and others.
Maybe two of DiMarzio and Duncan too, as reference and see how the method compares, or so.

One guy need not do it all either - if the method is rated and post results.
There are various sites comparing sample rate conversions between different programs, and they provide a kit that everybody do in their daw - and ship result back to them. This could be the same - a generated frequency sweep maybe, or a white noise or both. A guitar amp is usually up to 6k or so anyway, any little speaker in phones do that.

It's a guide FGS, nothing to replace everything else - like ears playing them in a guitar.

There are little boxes made that are to create feedback through guitar pickups - I saw one on Pensado's place interviewed.

 

[Mincer]

Re: Gibson pups character to compare with Duncan or DiMarzio - any such resource?

I think as soon as money changes hands when you are testing several brands, you can be skeptical about the results. It is like a guitar magazine doing reviews, and seeing the ad for the very product they are reviewing within the pages of the review. I would even doubt the reviewer actually had the product. By the same token, unless it was some guy with a lot of money to buy pickups and time to switch them all out.
This is why forums are good, and communication between many different players...we can get a 'sense' of what something *might* sound like. In the end, that's all we have (the 21 Day Exchange helps US residents, too).

 

[freefrog]

Re: Gibson pups character to compare with Duncan or DiMarzio - any such resource?

i doubt a pickup company would ever do this but a 3rd party could. the trick is, what is their motivation? youd have to find some crazy guitar nerd with a lot of time, the right equipment, and either disposable income to buy all the pups or a large guitarist friend group in order to borrow the pups.

There's people doing such things. But the one who has put the most data online is also someone controversial, who has admitted to be partly driven by anger against pickups makers (not to mention that he has tried to teach how pickups work to... Frank Falbo, former Duncan designer).

Just running white noise to a speaker - coil close enough to a pickup, not even mounted - can tell a story about character. Make an estimate with three bars at some average, done. As the guitar is not part of generating the sound, rather neutral.

Hello,

Doing what you mention, all you'd obtain is the transfer function of the pickup as a LRC (inductive / resistive / capacitive) filter.

Here is the raw response of a Gibson 500T excited by some pink noise:



And here is the raw resonant peak of a (nickel covered) BBpro excited by a swept mono signal, through another testing rig / software:



Such curves alone (or left unexplained) don't say much about "BMT": they just make obvious the resonance of the coils associated to a defined resistive and capacitive load...

It gives a rough idea of how each pickup would deal with harmonics (IOW: with treble frequencies)... but it doesn't show how much bass each pickup would produce. To find that, it would be necessary to know the Gauss level of their mags.

Granted, we could guess their perceived midrange by taking in account the Q factor of the resonant peak AND the Gauss level of their mags... high Q factor AND more gaussed magnet = apparently "scooped" midrange. That's why a BBpro sounds so caricatural: its A5 mag is 33% more charged than the A5 mag of any Duncan HB...

BUT the output level of the pickups couldn't be deduced from there, nor their dynamic behavior (linked to eddy currents). And so on...

Anyway, the sound of a pickup changes not only along the history of the product or according to the guitar hosting it but in the SAME guitar, it will ALSO change according to...
-the presence of a cover or not;
-its height settings... AND the height settings of the other pickup(s) in their way to interact with vibrating strings / magnetic neighborhood (!!!);
-the composition of the strings used;
-the resistance of the volume / tone pot(s);
-the overall stray capacitance of inner wiring AND cable from guitar to first buferred input;
-the input impedance of the effect or amp input...

This complexity is really hard to simplify for anyone and dealing with it seems irritating for many users: when I post screenshots like those above, there's sometimes someone to claim that my charts are BS / irrelevant / useless... and it's true to some extent since "simple" LRC specs are engrained in a mind-boggling series of interactive parms. A resonant peak tells something important about the voicing but still reveals a really small part of the overall tonal picture.

So, the best way to compare pickups is still... to try them directly. AFAIK, IMHO & IME at least.

Sorry for the lenght of this answer: being jailed at home gives me more time to post... )

 

[Larioso]

Re: Gibson pups character to compare with Duncan or DiMarzio - any such resource?

Many thank FreeFrog.
I found this link that I bookmarked before, from this forum I believe. A bunch of pdf's most of it.
http://www.moore.org.au/pick001.htm

I just looked for a resource of this kind listing Gibson pups and thought it would be useful.
What was obvious with BBpro for me, was an edgy treble even on neck position - but hard to tell the rest.
Some I read on forum felt they were alright, they just put tone knob down a bit etc.
Others felt like me, and exchanged them.