SD "Mortal Coil" 3-Voice Active Humbuckers....Say What?!

Masta' C

Masta' C

Well-known member
Looks like SD has been doing some backroom innovating with the ESP clan!

Some of ESP's more premium LTD models are coming with new "Mortal Coil" 3-voice active humbuckers this year.

I wonder if they'll be available at retail or if they're an ESP-exclusive product like the Ibanez Hyperions, etc.

Been waiting years for SD to step up their active pickup game!

Definitely looks interesting... 👀

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Interesting. Maybe borrowing some tech from Fishman Fluence?

P.S. I love everything about that guitar, but I'm wary of the Autotune bridge. Would it know when I'm doing a deep bend on a string? Just seems like unnecessary cost and complication. Has anyone tried one?
 
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EverTune, not Autotune. Very different things! An EverTune bridge feels similar to playing with a floating vibrato (or Bigsby), only instead of the bridge all moving up and down as one with a few springs for the whole bridge, each saddle has its own spring. So, unlike with a floating vibrato, one string does not affect the others and you can play double-stops. But overall it's still got that slightly softer feel that a vibrato bridge has. They work fine; if you only use one tuning per guitar then they're no more complicated to work with than any vibrato bridge. If you want to retune or swap string gauge then you're pretty screwed and in some cases will have to replace (not inexpensive) parts.
I don't like them, but I also don't like playing with vibratos of any kind and I think they're extremely ugly. I'm not a prog-metal shredder, either. There certainly is an audience who absolutely love them and won't have a guitar without them now.

As for the pickups, yeah, that looks like ESP's deal with Fishman ran out and SD have moved in. Again, not a kind of product I like myself, but Fishman's pickups technically do what they claim, and I don't doubt SD have made an equally-competent equivalent.
 
EDIT: This is legit, from the description of this


Seymour Duncan’s MortalCoil pickups are a new evolution of active pickup design, born from over half a century of experience. Perfectly calibrated as a matching set, MortalCoils offer three distinct voicings that Sweetwater guitarists can’t get enough of, turning any guitar into a veritable all-in-one tone machine. Voice 1 is brutal and relentless, with a tight low end, sharp presence, and a balanced sound perfect for high-gain styles such as modern metal. For a lighter touch, Voice 2 faithfully reproduces the crisp highs, sustain, and full-bodied bite of Seymour Duncan’s popular JB and Jazz humbucking pickups, delivering an organic, passive-style tone. Finally, Voice 3 offers sparkling split-coil tones that rival single-coil pickups, great for clean, blooming tones and light gain.
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idsnowdog said:
It sounds like an EMG89.
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The 89 is very different to the Fluence, and the description of these new SDs.
The 89 (and 89R) is literally their SA stacked Strat pickup with a bonus third coil and second preamp on the side. When you switch to humbucker mode the bottom coil and usual preamp of the SA are taken out and the side coil and preamp are put in their place, so you get a side-by-side normal humbucker arrangement with a suitable volume adjustment. It's always two coils of the usual copper wire, with an A5 bar magnet, and you're just choosing what width of string you want it to sense; the narrow window of a single coil or the wider window of a humbucker.
(Interestingly, the 81TW is made as the 81 humbucker first, and the single coil mode is the 'bonus'. This is why the 81TW sounds exactly like the 81 in humbucker mode but doesn't sound like an S in single mode, whereas an 89 sounds exactly like an SA in single mode and doesn't sound like an 85 in humbucker mode.)

The Fluence isn't made like any other pickup I've ever encountered. It doesn't have coils of wire; the 'coils' are 50 or so very small printed circuits, and there are two of those per pickup (i.e. 100-ish circuits). The mode switch is changing which combination of those circuits are connected. Whereas the 89 simply changes the position of the subordinate coil, the Fluence is more like winding a pickup with a hundred coil taps.

If I were to liken the Fluence design to any other pickup, I'd say it's actually closer to the P-Rail in a Triple Shot ring.

Of course we can only guess wildly that the new SDs work along the same lines, just because the description seems to match and they're replacing the Fishman pickups in the ESP line up. But much like how Blackouts aren't just clones of EMGs, I suspect SD's MortalCoils aren't operating exactly as Fluences do, either. I'd love to crack one open and have a look under the hood. (If only I was any good at putting things back together afterward...)
 
amdkj said:
The 89 is very different to the Fluence, and the description of these new SDs.
The 89 (and 89R) is literally their SA stacked Strat pickup with a bonus third coil and second preamp on the side. When you switch to humbucker mode the bottom coil and usual preamp of the SA are taken out and the side coil and preamp are put in their place, so you get a side-by-side normal humbucker arrangement with a suitable volume adjustment. It's always two coils of the usual copper wire, with an A5 bar magnet, and you're just choosing what width of string you want it to sense; the narrow window of a single coil or the wider window of a humbucker.
(Interestingly, the 81TW is made as the 81 humbucker first, and the single coil mode is the 'bonus'. This is why the 81TW sounds exactly like the 81 in humbucker mode but doesn't sound like an S in single mode, whereas an 89 sounds exactly like an SA in single mode and doesn't sound like an 85 in humbucker mode.)

The Fluence isn't made like any other pickup I've ever encountered. It doesn't have coils of wire; the 'coils' are 50 or so very small printed circuits, and there are two of those per pickup (i.e. 100-ish circuits). The mode switch is changing which combination of those circuits are connected. Whereas the 89 simply changes the position of the subordinate coil, the Fluence is more like winding a pickup with a hundred coil taps.

If I were to liken the Fluence design to any other pickup, I'd say it's actually closer to the P-Rail in a Triple Shot ring.

Of course we can only guess wildly that the new SDs work along the same lines, just because the description seems to match and they're replacing the Fishman pickups in the ESP line up. But much like how Blackouts aren't just clones of EMGs, I suspect SD's MortalCoils aren't operating exactly as Fluences do, either. I'd love to crack one open and have a look under the hood. (If only I was any good at putting things back together afterward...)
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There's a similarity in concept if not design.
 
That's very reductive. In that sense, every humbucker with 4-way wire or any single with a tap wire could be said to be similar to this.
 
I agree with you, but I don't know how much is worth arguing. There's only so many ways to tap/split/stack coils in a humbucker format and we all know the Fluence construction is very different from the traditional, wire-wrapped coil approach in most regards.

That said, just because the Mortal Coils are replacing the Fluence in ESP's lineup, that doesn't mean they're built similarly at all. It'll be interesting to learn what Duncan has done with the Mortal Coil set and if they've retained any preamp tech from their previous active technologies, like the Blackouts or Dualities.

It seems to me SD has left a lot on the table when it came to the potential for their active technologies. Also, who knows if these will remain exclusive to ESP or if we'll see other iterations at retail in the near future.
 
with passive pups, theres lots of limitations. with actives, you can do a lot more. whether you like that or not is up to you.
 
i have one active guitar, the rest are all passive. i was talking about tone shaping of the pup, but im sure you knew that ;)

i tend to only use fuzz with single coils most of the time. fuzzface, tone bender, foxxtone type stuff
 
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