The Seymour Duncan Ryan “Fluff” Bruce FLF Signature Pickup!

I cannot stand Fluff and his "How do you do, fellow kids" vibe meets "I know people in high places" attitude, but oooff, I'd love to hear a JB/BW hybrid. Those are pretty much my two favorite Duncans.

My thoughts exactly! Would love to check this pickup out though!!!!!
 
Bruce FLF Signature Pickup combines the North Coil of a JB Model and the South Coil of a Black Winter and uses Alnico 4 magnets for an even mid-range and a sweet top end.

Wait a minute! Isn't that black winter a variant of JB already? They both share the very same bobbins, AFAIR. So the only thing new about that new signature pickup is another JB derivative with alnico 4 magnet. I always like to have JBs with weaker magnets while i do like them with powerful A5s too :) So that's gonna be something i may enjoy :)
 
Wait a minute! Isn't that black winter a variant of JB already? They both share the very same bobbins, AFAIR. So the only thing new about that new signature pickup is another JB derivative with alnico 4 magnet.

Remember, the first rule about Fight Club is that we don't talk about Fight Club...
 
I am absolutely not interested in Fluff or his pickup. I see 0 appeal to this. Completely uninteresting.

The BW does have a different insulation than the JB if memory serves, so it is a different pickup. Even if the dcr and magnets etc are the same, insulation alone does a lot for a pickup.
 
right, and the bw has different magnets than the jb or the fluff

Yes BW has 3 big ceramics, just like Invader but i think Invaders spacer magnets were a bit smaller, not sure. But BW has big ceramics.
 

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So BW is, consequently, JB-ised Invader :)

Well, if the insulation is different that means the capacitance is different, which would change the sound, and then if the Fluff is a hybrid you'll have a capacitive mismatch between the two coils which would change the sound even more... right? I'm wondering if they used A4 to tame a peaky-sounding upper midrange caused by that mismatch.

One of my favorite pickups along these lines is a hybrid I made from a hex screw modded Invader and a 500T. It's just that little bit brighter and more open-sounding than either donor pickup, which makes it sound clearer with a bunch of gain. Fluff or no, I'm interested in this pickup.
 
I have his channel blocked on youtube. If you look up anything guitar related you get his videos and it makes no difference what he's demonstrating it all ends up homogenized faux double tracked detuned crap.
 
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Well, if the insulation is different that means the capacitance is different, which would change the sound, and then if the Fluff is a hybrid you'll have a capacitive mismatch between the two coils which would change the sound even more... right? I'm wondering if they used A4 to tame a peaky-sounding upper midrange caused by that mismatch.

One of my favorite pickups along these lines is a hybrid I made from a hex screw modded Invader and a 500T. It's just that little bit brighter and more open-sounding than either donor pickup, which makes it sound clearer with a bunch of gain. Fluff or no, I'm interested in this pickup.
I would rather say the A4 is probably to further accentuate those upper mids if he's going for something along the lines of what he had with his Fishman pickup. That's another thing I don't like about Fluff. The tones he goes fore are really not what I personally like. Listening to his guitar's clip in the last page, it seemed soft, stuffy, and overly midrange-focused for my taste. Not to blame the pickup, though. That's more to do with the way he dials amps in and mixes them in his tracks.

That's interesting about the 500T hybrid. I'd love to hear what it sounds like. The 500T, though, as far as I know is 43AWG like the Custom.
 
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I would rather say the A4 is probably to further accentuate those upper mids if he's going for something along the lines of what he had with his Fishman pickup. That's another thing I don't like about Fluff. The tones he goes fore are really not what I personally like. Listening to his guitar's clip in the last page, it seemed soft, stuffy, and overly midrange-focused for my taste. Not to blame the pickup, though. That's more to do with the way he dials amps in and mixes them in his tracks.

That's interesting about the 500T hybrid. I'd love to hear what it sounds like. The 500T, though, as far as I know is 43AWG like the Custom.

I actually thought of your tone journey when I was making the pickup. I wound up giving it to a friend, which I regret for a few reasons now, and it's in my basement waiting for me to install in one of his guitars. Oh well. I do have the other hybrid from it, with the 500T slug coil and a different magnet setup, and that one's great too.

But - wouldn't an A4 flatten the EQ, and also make the response a bit less immediate compared to ceramics? I don't have an opinion one way or the other about Fluff or his other pickups, but all of the hybrids I've put together have had peakier upper mids than their donors, in some cases harsh and uncontrolled, so I wonder if that happened and this magnet is their way of compensating for it.

In any case, Nienturi and Masta' C were suggesting they're all the same wind with different magnets and poles, and that makes the whole idea of a hybrid between them meaningless. Whereas, if the insulation is different, then one can't just say the Black Winter is a JB with triple double-thick ceramics, or an Invader with the hex screw mod, and a hybrid between the two makes sense and interests me.
 
The guitar is ugly AF... But the pickup is very intriguing.

I had always been under the impression that the BW was a Distortion derivative?
 
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I am not a fan of the guitar, either, and my favorite guitar I own is an Ernie Ball. Just not that one.
 
In any case, Nienturi and Masta' C were suggesting they're all the same wind with different magnets and poles, and that makes the whole idea of a hybrid between them meaningless. Whereas, if the insulation is different, then one can't just say the Black Winter is a JB with triple double-thick ceramics, or an Invader with the hex screw mod, and a hybrid between the two makes sense and interests me.

Hey, I was just talking about Fight Club, not sure what you're on about! ;)

You're on the right track with regards to the insulation types. There is a difference in terms of inter-winding capacitance due to the relative thickness of each insulation type, but the effect on the overall recipe is subtle.

The use of poly insulation in the Black Winter is just the "icing on the cake" when striving for a clear, modern sound with a focused resonant peak that isn't too shrill. But, even then, swapping magnets would result in a much bigger tonal shift than switching to plain enamel as found on the (very similar) JB, Distortion, etc.

sd-bw-vs-jb-yHNKaAV
 
Difference doesn't come through too well, but the BW's insulation is a lot more "red" than the many examples of the JB and Distortion I have here:

AavYVSk.jpeg
 
Not to blame the pickup, though. That's more to do with the way he dials amps in and mixes them in his tracks.

Obviously, there are SO many things that influence the recorded tone more than a guitar's pickups...the amp and speakers being 80% of that, especially with the types of tones Fluff favors.
 
Well, if the insulation is different that means the capacitance is different, which would change the sound, and then if the Fluff is a hybrid you'll have a capacitive mismatch between the two coils which would change the sound even more... right? I'm wondering if they used A4 to tame a peaky-sounding upper midrange caused by that mismatch.

Capacitance, of course matters. The measured capacitance of BW bridge is 145.56pF while calculated cap. of JB is 128pF. That's a difference. But, I generally don't think about the insulation material much because, according to my experince winding tension effects much more than the insulation. Yes, i have not tried all the wires with different insulations BTW :) And the achieving methods are different on those two tests. On the other hand, you might be very right about it, too :)

Nevertheless, my claim is still valid :) BW is produced in the "JB" platform; so hybriding it with BW doesnt make a good sense to me :) At the end, it is just a JB with A4 magnet. That's not bad, just an option, right?
 
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