Help me understand EMG pickups

[uOpt]

Surely somebody must have X-rayed a couple of EMG pickups by now?

 

[amdkj]

ound the same as every other demo I've heard on youtube

Please, for the love of everything good and green on this Earth, stop using YouTube as a basis for evaluation. YouTube's audio is horribly low quality, only recently reaching the dizzing heights of late-90s .mp3s. (And even that is only for YouTube Music, not videos.) You especially can not expect to evaluate very high and very low frequencies through YouTube. It's like trying to inspect visual quality on a 13" CRT.

but what you said about an "acoustically dull guitar" is plain wrong. Acoustically resonant guitars

You've taken that far too literally and added your own notion of resonance. I did not mean in the sense of how an acoustic guitar sounds, which I thought was rather obvious. Electric guitars each have their own inherent sound, whether that's bright, dark, warm, thin, whatever, which always influences the signal you get out of them. You can evaluate that inherent sound by playing the guitar acoustically, i.e. not plugged into an amp. In my experience, many LTD guitars have a dulled top end. (Some will credit it to the thicker finish, some to wood quality, some to hardware; whatever the cause, I've had a lot of ESP and LTD guitars, and the LTDs are always duller, or 'warmer' if you prefer to interpret it that way, than the ESP equivalents.) If your guitar inherently has a dull top end like that, it'll be reflected in whatever signal comes out of whatever pickups you have, too; a pickup can't invent frequencies the guitar doesn't produce in the first place.

I don't know if you've tried the X series

I literally have two sets of X series—60AX and 89X/89RX—sat in guitars in this room right now. The 60AXs were the first pair of 60AXs EMG manufactured, given to me before they were publicly announced. Suffice to say I know what I'm talking about here.

The X series preamp is actually not radically different from the regular preamp.

That is correct, it isn't , but it's different enough in key ways to make a difference to the behaviour and, more importantly, it is the preamp found in the 57 and 66, which was the actual question at hand.

FWIW, the 81 and the 85 also have the "narrow aperture" (that's how EMG calls them) coils. So inside the cover, those all look like mini humbuckers.

Unless something's changed in the manufacturing in the last 4 years—which I do not dispute could be a possibility—the 81 uses bobbins only outwardly fractionally smaller than standard passive humbuckers, but larger than the others, and for all intents and purposes is a normal-sized humbucker. (Albeit one with rail poles.) The 85 used another size down early on, then took to using the 60's bobbins but still physically spread further (they've got quite a bit more wire on them); the 89 also uses that size but closer and with less wire, since it needs to cram in two pickups under one cover, hence why the humbucker mode sounds clearer than a normal 85, though EMG market it as being an 85.
So if you're pedantic then yes, they're all smaller than standard and therefore could be called 'mini' purely in the sense that they are technically fractionally not the full size, but only the 60 and 60A are the width of actual 'minibuckers'. (Or Firebird pickups, whichever reference point you prefer.) It's kind of like saying a Tele neck pickup is a 'mini single coil' because it's not the size of a Strat pickup.

IOW: EMG 57/66 seem to be voiced to mimic passive humbuckers through a long cable / high capacitive load, probably supposed to emulate the tone darkening conditions in which "vintage" humbuckers were played.

I don't remember ever being told that mimicing the load of a cable was the specific reasoning, but yes, that sound is the end result, in any case.
They still should not sound "chopped off" as Top-L is saying, hence I believe there may be some kind of fault or additional influence being overlooked. When I had them they were brighter than the '59 set they replaced, for instance. (But not as bright as the 60AX, which replaced them in turn.)


One aspect which in retrospect I should have stressed more initially, is the 57 and 66 have a stronger magnetic field than the older designs, and so if you put them right up to the strings like other actives can be, you're going to get overwhelming low-mids and dodgy tuning. They were designed to be set like common passive pickups, so don't try the old 81/85 trick of having them practically touching the strings. Less is considerably more with the 57, 66, Hot 70 and Fat 55.
This goes double for the TW versions, which are taller pickups and have even stronger (and slightly uneven) magnets.

 

[freefrog]

I don't remember ever being told that mimicing the load of a cable was the specific reasoning, but yes, that sound is the end result, in any case.
They still should not sound "chopped off" as Top-L is saying, hence I believe there may be some kind of fault or additional influence being overlooked. When I had them they were brighter than the '59 set they replaced, for instance. (But not as bright as the 60AX, which replaced them in turn.)

My own experience makes me think that someone accustomed to passive pickups + low capacitive load won't hear active PU's in the same way than a user accustomed to passive PU's + higher parasitic capacitance - and that this factor might therefore influence how two users hear the 57/66 when compared to their own passive pickups.

Surely somebody must have X-rayed a couple of EMG pickups by now?

Some seem to have done worse than this. ;-)

 

[Rex_Rocker]

That is correct, it isn't , but it's different enough in key ways to make a difference to the behaviour and, more importantly, it is the preamp found in the 57 and 66, which was the actual question at hand.

It is not. I've read that before, but I have recorded DI's with the 81, 81X, and 57, and the 57 has the same exact amount of heardoom as the 81.

Funny thing is the 57, like the 85, is actually louder before the preamp than the 81, so it clips more. But the highest peaks reach the same level on the 85, 81, and 57 (at 9V) because of the clipping of the preamp.