Two rows of identical allen screws kill clarity..

[Tone-Analyst]

Re: Two rows of identical allen screws kill clarity..

I have no way of testing alloys personally but we can assume that major brands probably monitor that to have a consistent product. I know metal recyclers nowaday have handheld testers that give extremely precise results in seconds. The test I ran was simply swapping out 2 hex screws with slugs., eventually all the coil because the pickup clearly came alive again. The difference was very obvious, even playing with the height.

 

[orpheo]

Re: Two rows of identical allen screws kill clarity..

A superdistortion is made with 1970ies knowledge and is made nowadays to have the tone and specs of THOSE pickups. They weren't made to have the most articulate, most dynamic respons ever. They were made to be balls to the walls powerful. If you want to nail that riff to the wall, this pickup would've provided you with the nail and hammer in spades. The brass baseplate makes a HUGE HUGE HUGE impact tonally, even more so than the polepieces because of the eddy currents inside. Yes, adding slugs instead of the grub screws would make a difference but changing the baseplate, removing the bazillion pounds of epoxy and/or wax (depending on the year it was made) also makes a noticable difference.

If you are dead set on proving your point, read what others have read here: find the four polepiece shapes (fillester screw, hex grub, hex screw Duncan style (see Fullshred) and slug) of the SAME material and then test. Otherwise, your 'test' is utterly pointless.

 

[Big Mike Blues]

Re: Two rows of identical allen screws kill clarity..

You know what helps the most?

When you store them in a field 40 paces from a banana tree buried in a vintage mason jar, filled with purifdied yaak urine mixed with the tears of the guy that cried his eyes out after watching Andy Timmons play live. It also helps to put a sliver of wood from teh arc to get the truly 'grail' sounding mids.


:facepalm

Just play the effing thing. If it's not quite there, change the pickup. None of these changes mean jack diddly when the bass drum hits, or your rhythm player is using strat on the bridge pickup through a JBL loaded twin because he's been an iron worker so long his hearing is shot.

Are the asses wiggling and buying drinks at the bar?

it's fine.

The changes on this is so minimal it's better to spend time on a piece of the rig that returns more in terms of tone improvement.

 

[Masta' C]

Re: Two rows of identical allen screws kill clarity..

The test I ran was simply swapping out 2 hex screws with slugs, eventually all the coil because the pickup clearly came alive again. The difference was very obvious, even playing with the height.

Slugs produce a different magnetic field above the pickup than hex screws and they ultimately interact with the coils differently. Plus, I can almost guarantee that the slugs you used are a different alloy than the hex poles, as well. Yes, that matters (in a big way).

In a very general sense, slugs tend to provide the strongest response of all the pole piece types. That said, they are not necessarily the "clarity solution" you claim. Some of the most clear and articulate pickups use dual rows of hex poles, while some of the muddiest pickups made used dual rows of slugs. Could these designs be improved by swapping pole pieces around? Possibly. After all, there IS the potential for slugs to increase clarity of a particular design, but that's really a case by case basis, so blanket statements like your title aren't warranted.

Oftentimes, manufacturers resort to the screw/slug combination or dual rows of hex poles out of tradition (e.g. how many DiMarzio designs since the SuperD continue to use dual hex rows?). The original reason for moving away from dual slugs was to offer additional adjustability, allowing the poles to become better aligned to the radius of the strings and fine-tuning of response at the individual string level. Sometimes that fine-tuning does more for improving a pickup's response than the poles themselves. Because of the many factors at play, I would argue that the classic screw/slug combo or a similar hex/slug combo is really the best of all worlds...clarity, power and adjustability