And there is still no such thing as a "drop out" between strings on a functioning humbucker, P90, Rod single coil, Mini, Firebird, Filtertron, etc.
I've found an interesting sentence about that on another forum: "
I can attest that the volume drop off in between the screws is pretty significant".
Suggestively, these words came from a super strongly opiniated contributor whose usual thesis is that nothing makes no difference in magnetic transducers... So, why did he suddenly acknowledge the possibility of a drop out between poles for a given model? That's the question...
A lot of my customers have complained about balance issues and perceived drop out between poles (which manifests at least at the middle and especially the neck - not so much the bridge) on conventional pickups. See there. That's all I wanted to know. I am not alone. Even some famous guitarists...
www.tdpri.com
Personally, I'll just stop to testify about my own experience on this. Systematical denegations won't change what I've lived nor our experimental data anyway - albeit actually, I wish they'd do: it would have avoided me to struggle a few times with "perceived drop out between poles", to quote what the founder of Zexcoil pickups said in the topic above.
Agreed about magnets and alloys of screws / slugs/ keeper bars as being important, that said. So, who knows what can happen with super unevenly charged bar magnets, not that rare among vintage magnets and/or rough cast ones? ;-)
Classic sounds more open and less congested; rails has noticeably more low mids and thicker sound. And I wish people would post YT videos that weren't gained out and brutalz because it's very hard to hear much of anything once you compress it into a singularity.
Neck/bridge PU differences aside, the rails pickups whose response is displayed in my answer 14 has basically the same core clean tone than the JB rails in this case... And all the tests done here on full sized humbuckers with thin rails (from the 80's to contemporary era and from various brands) did show the same kind of frequency response than in my answer 14, giving the same kind of core clean tone than in the vid.
I've realized while rereading my replies above that characterizing this tone as "flatter" might be misunderstood : I was talking about the leveled output from low to high mids of a neck PU with rails, giving a flat / horizontal line on the screen of a frequency analyzer...
In this video above, I hear the Classic JB as giving more "ping", contributing to the impression of openess, but also a
fuller response of fundamental notes. Now and even through the heavy filtering of the amp and cab used, this fullness looks "comb filtered", with vertical rounded "festoons" reflecting the uneven sensitivity of vertical poles (while the rails give a visually flattened frequential curve bristled with narrower and pointier peaks). Subjective perceptions may differ, of course.
Differences of perception due to external causes with such samples are incidentally why I tend to share screenshots rather than sonic examples : soundcards and loudspeakers alter the tone. Even the worst screen leaves intact the frequencies and dB scale of a graph... (in the following minutes, I'll try to edit my answer 14 above to add a clearer graph, that said. This second pic will include the response of a P90 under chords).
