What's the thing with "vintage" pickups?

[ExplorersRock]

Re: What's the thing with "vintage" pickups?

Just my 2 cents here... Sometimes you look at a design and the original designer just got it right. I still say the Fender Stratocaster is the most ergonomic design ever for a guitar and that was 1954. Coolest look to me? Explorer, 1958. I've seen many attempts to "improve" these and they fall short in my hands. Sometimes, the old adage applies: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

We honestly have plenty of improvements in the pup arena that have lead to more consistent tone and increased variety. Old Gibson pups had coils wound "until they were full." Never knew what you were getting! Now we keep specifics and can get that tone pretty much replicated. But not all advancements are preferred. Sure, active pups can do some amazing stuff. But for my ear, I still prefer passive. Burstbuckers were designed like old school Gibson pups, an idea that I found annoyingly nostalgic and seemed to me as a way to take some poor sucker's money... then I played them, and the BB3 is now a favorite of mine. Lots to love about a design that was well conceived from the first implementation which is why, to me, the PAF resonates with so many people.

Keep in mind that people out there still by vinyl in an area of CDs and iPods. Answer I get most often when I ask them why? "They sound better." Go figure.

 

[gripweed]

Re: What's the thing with "vintage" pickups?

I just like 'em better.

 

[Empty Pockets]

Re: What's the thing with "vintage" pickups?

It's a wheel. It rolls. It's not getting any rounder.

 

[Bludave]

Re: What's the thing with "vintage" pickups?

I mean, we've moved on. The PAF was invented 57 years ago. Those pickups were made in a time when people didn't know much about sound. Now we have much better amps, tons of effect pedals, an enormous choice of speakers and cabinets, very user-friendly recording software etc.
Why are 9 out of 10 pickup makers just trying to copy a 60 year-old design that wasn't made with the current gear in mind?
Who says vintage is better? Personally I prefer a brand new car to, let's say a Ford made in 1908. Why not make pickups that are suited for today's needs?

You have obviously never played a guitar with a real PAF in it! It's not something that can easily be explained away & the science of pickup manufacturing today is very detailed. Back in 57 they did not make neck & bridge pickups. They just grabbed them from a bin and wired them in. Some sounded amazing and some not so hot. Today all Paf's are getting well over $3,000 even the ones that were considered dogs.

Now your point regarding software..... Go back to 1966. Rubber Soul was recorded on a 4 track reel to reel on paul's living room table. Technology does not translate to great artistry. The reason why so many people are after that sound was because it was the sound used to record so much classic music. I listen to most stuff recorded today & granted the recordings are good & in some ways superior, but the artistry still sucks by comparison!

Joe Bonomassa just recently bought a 59 les Paul. He can afford it, most of us can't. The tragedy of this is those who really appreciate these wonderful guitars will never be able to play them. I feel blessed to have played a 52 tele all original, a 59 ls Paul in dead mint condition as well as a 59 335. Those Old Strats will make you cry they feel & sound so good! There IS something magical about a 60 year old guitar that has been played very hard. All pickup designers today make some form of replica of these great old pickups, but they can't repicate the 60 years of playing. Throwing a set of Antiquities in a new Les Paul will get you close but as I said there is something magical about these old guitars. Go play a few and I'm not talking about picking it up and strumming a few chords.... really play it. then you will begin to understand!

 

[Jeremiah]

Re: What's the thing with "vintage" pickups?

Related question: Why (in the guitar world) is "modern" usually taken to be synonymous with "high output/high gain/teh brootalz?"

 

[JeffB]

Re: What's the thing with "vintage" pickups?

If you have to ask the question, you dont get it, and no amount of internet banter will change anything.

Thats not meant to be harsh, just the way it is.

 

[LtKojak]

Re: What's the thing with "vintage" pickups?

Guitar Players in general will buy and use just about anything and pay just about any sum of money for it just as long as it'll allow'em to sound just the same as before.

That's reality check for ya!

 

[9unslin9er]

Re: What's the thing with "vintage" pickups?

Partly because so much of our favourite music was played on gear made in the 50s and 60s.

This.

Turn on the radio today and listen to what's on. Lil Wayne, Flo Rida, Niki Minaj, Rihanna.

There is all sorts of great gear on the market today, however our musical landscape has changed.

What people are doing with guitars today is different from what was popular back in the 50's/60's.

People are constantly chasing Clapton's blackie or Jimmy Page's '59 because of the music made from those instruments.

You could say frak it, let's move on, however the golden age of the electric guitar has passed. If you want to play the old songs, you might as well play it on the original gear.

 

[9unslin9er]

Re: What's the thing with "vintage" pickups?

Related question: Why (in the guitar world) is "modern" usually taken to be synonymous with "high output/high gain/teh brootalz?"

Because amplifiers and guitar tone in general has become progressively higher in terms of output.

If you listen to heavy metal from the 70's and 80's, when the genre was peaking, you'd think the amps are pretty high gain.

In reality, if you listen to Angus Young or Slash or Randy Rhoads, you'll notice they weren't actually using a ton of gain. They just cranked those amps up and let the mixer work its magic.

Go to a guitar shop today and most solid state amps will have considerably more gain than a Marshall JCM800 or Mesa Dual Rec. The way our ears perceive distortion has changed.

 

[misterwhizzy]

Re: What's the thing with "vintage" pickups?

It's a wheel. It rolls. It's not getting any rounder.

Holy cow is this a great post.

 

[Funkfingers]

Re: What's the thing with "vintage" pickups?

Never forget that many of today's favourite guitar sounds were arrived at by accident.

Leo Fender intended the Stratocaster to have three sounds NOT five. If he had employed a different selector switch, two of the all-time great guitar tones might never have been known to us.

Also, Leo designed his guitars for what we now consider Medium gauge strings. The common complaint that the bridge position pickup in a Stratocaster is too bright would not have arisen in 1954.

Likewise, Gibson intended the Les Paul model as a jazz guitar that would resist microphonic feedback through the increasingly powerful amplification systems of the Fifties.

Amplifier overdrive was an unwanted by-product of using low wattage amplifiers at big band gigs. The extra gain in the original Fender Bassman amplifier was there to compensate for the relatively low output of the '51 P Bass single coil pickup. It was not intended for guitarists to plug in and let rip.

For every "classic" decades old pickup design that we still celebrate today, there have been numerous others that did not stay the course. Some went out of production, others just never caught the public imagination to begin with.

Vintage style imitations of (in alphabetical order) P.A.F., P-90, Strat and Tele pickups are still in demand because they still sound good, regardless of changes in amplifier and recording technology or, for that matter, musical fashion.

 

[Mincer]

Re: What's the thing with "vintage" pickups?

You'd think we'd be using laser beams to scan the string by now, or some sort of digital system that can get every sound from every pickup in every position assigned to a switch. There are systems that approach this (Ernie Ball's Gamechanger and the Electric JT Variax), but nothing that has lasted. I don't know if Fender or Gibson got it right- I have heard old Fenders that have terrible pickups. And traditional designs get basically one sound. It is a classic sound, but not every guitarist is always interested in replicating that. It is, however, what sells the most.

 

[ErnestoMM]

I appreciated

I appreciated

responses very good! )

 

[aleclee]

Re: What's the thing with "vintage" pickups?

Most components in a guitarist's signal chain are designed around magnetic pickups with modest output. Further, most guitar signal chains have very limited bandwidth, particularly the speakers, which tend to roll off most content above 5 KHz.

I bring this up because what we consider "appropriate" guitar sounds are dependent the limited audio fidelity of a number of components. When you try to increase the fidelity of a particular component, the result is often described as "sterile" or "harsh". Unless there's a radical change in desired timbre or in type of gear used, the components in the signal chain tend to evolve very slowly.

That said, I think that there's a lot of misunderstanding about "vintage" sounding pickups. I'm not so much interested in aping Seth Lover's approach so much as I am frustrated by the tendency of higher output magnetic pickups to lose clarity and dynamics. While EMGs achieve higher output while maintaining clarity and dynamics, I don't appreciate their broader frequency response and find myself missing the little bit of compression that traditional pickups afford.

What's ironic is how even aficionados of "modern" guitar technology cling to vintage fundamentals. Other than Dimebag, name a rock guitarist who made his bones playing a non-tube amp. Heck, even he was in the process of moving towards tubes when he was killed.

As much as guitarists might want to think of themselves as modern, the sad truth is that our Luddite tendencies are much stronger than those of any other electric instrument. Keyboardists have embraced new technology ever since the Hammond and Rhodes offered alternatives to pipe organs and pianos. Bassists got away from tube amplification as soon as it became practical and have embraced instruments made from materials that Leo Fender and Ted McCarty never contemplated. It's us guitarists who are still clinging to archaic glowing bottles and instruments constructed from mahogany/ash/alder.

 

[RayBarbeeMusic]

Re: What's the thing with "vintage" pickups?

Marketing hooey, plain and simple. Most people who buy them have never played the real thing. Vintage doesn't = better, but sheeple and marketing have created that impression.

 

[atreidesheir]

Re: What's the thing with "vintage" pickups?

High output pickups were meant to drive cleaner preamps. When married to high gain preamps, it can get shrieky. Great if that is what you want, but...

Vintage pickups used the most advanced materials and concepts of their time. The strat, tele, p-90, and seth lover hb all were designed through a lot of trial and error at the factoryto have a pleasing sound. The pickups succeeded and that sound has become part of the lexicon of our culture.

It seems to me guitars went backwards in time due to the rediscovery of vinatge-y vibe by Slash, and Cobain (for me personally it was David Gilmour = Fender strat and some tele and Ian Bairnson from the Alan Parsons Project and his sweet Les Paul tone) and their big influence on the popular culture of the time. It led to the renaissance at Fender and Gibson, and Marshall, and Vox, then the boutique and reissue pedal effects market, and so on.

If it changes, it will probably require a new guitar saviour, and that hasn't happened in a generation.

But why do horned instruments and cello and violin still use age old designs? Why do people still love gravitate to piano when there are synths?

 

[BEACHBUM]

Re: What's the thing with "vintage" pickups?

Because it is what it is. Throughout the history of electric guitar music songs weren't written and then a guitar, amp or pickup invented to play them. All of that music was written and performed with the capabilities and limitations of the gear available at the time. Are there better designs out there today? I don't know. I guess it depends on what you call better. But what I do know is that good, bad, or ugly you can't go back and change what was to what could have been. So, if the intention is to recreate vintage tones for vintage tunes what kind of gear would you suggest that will do a better job at that than the vintage designs that the music was written on in the first place?

 

[indie folk guy]

Re: What's the thing with "vintage" pickups?

I too think that Leo Fender and Seth Lover pretty much nailed what the electric guitar, pickup, etc where when they made those designs back when.

What subtle changes/progress players have seeked have been done.

Modern manufacturing and boutique winders can pretty much get you whatever tone your heart desires and can do it consistently.

I think the problem here is that a lot of pickups have already been done/experimented with by the pioneers back in the day.

There were vintage PAF's that sounded like Super D's and whatever else due to manufacturing inconsistencies at the time.

I think there are plenty of "vintage" and "modern" designs and there have been some innovative designs based on vintage/modern ideas.

 

[gripweed]

Re: What's the thing with "vintage" pickups?

Most components in a guitarist's signal chain are designed around magnetic pickups with modest output. Further, most guitar signal chains have very limited bandwidth, particularly the speakers, which tend to roll off most content above 5 KHz.

I bring this up because what we consider "appropriate" guitar sounds are dependent the limited audio fidelity of a number of components. When you try to increase the fidelity of a particular component, the result is often described as "sterile" or "harsh". Unless there's a radical change in desired timbre or in type of gear used, the components in the signal chain tend to evolve very slowly.

That said, I think that there's a lot of misunderstanding about "vintage" sounding pickups. I'm not so much interested in aping Seth Lover's approach so much as I am frustrated by the tendency of higher output magnetic pickups to lose clarity and dynamics. While EMGs achieve higher output while maintaining clarity and dynamics, I don't appreciate their broader frequency response and find myself missing the little bit of compression that traditional pickups afford.

What's ironic is how even aficionados of "modern" guitar technology cling to vintage fundamentals. Other than Dimebag, name a rock guitarist who made his bones playing a non-tube amp. Heck, even he was in the process of moving towards tubes when he was killed.

As much as guitarists might want to think of themselves as modern, the sad truth is that our Luddite tendencies are much stronger than those of any other electric instrument. Keyboardists have embraced new technology ever since the Hammond and Rhodes offered alternatives to pipe organs and pianos. Bassists got away from tube amplification as soon as it became practical and have embraced instruments made from materials that Leo Fender and Ted McCarty never contemplated. It's us guitarists who are still clinging to archaic glowing bottles and instruments constructed from mahogany/ash/alder.

I'm of two minds in regard to this. First of all, I agree with everything you said. On the other hand, I still love my vintage style pickups and equipment.

I've never truly understood why guitarists are praised for technique, virtuosity or speed and yet few are praised for creativity. I'm thinking that there is a connection here. I hear guitarists all of the time saying that new guitar technology doesn't sound like ___________ . Well, maybe it doesn't need to. Maybe we can use the technology in ways that are not intended. Keyboardist have been doing this for a long time. Creative guitarists like Hendrix, The Edge and Tom Morello have done this, but are often criticized for having no talent or relying on effects. I say so what! The purpose is making music. If you're doing something interesting, I'm interested.

 

[indie folk guy]

Re: What's the thing with "vintage" pickups?

I'm of two minds in regard to this. First of all, I agree with everything you said. On the other hand, I still love my vintage style pickups and equipment.

I've never truly understood why guitarists are praised for technique, virtuosity or speed and yet few are praised for creativity. I'm thinking that there is a connection here. I hear guitarists all of the time saying that new guitar technology doesn't sound like ___________ . Well, maybe it doesn't need to. Maybe we can use the technology in ways that are not intended. Keyboardist have been doing this for a long time. Creative guitarists like Hendrix, The Edge and Tom Morello have done this, but are often criticized for having no talent or relying on effects. I say so what! The purpose is making music. If you're doing something interesting, I'm interested.

I couldn't agree more, sometimes relying on effects and creativity are more interesting than anything technology could conjure up. This is why I collect pedals and incorporate them into my playing. And I'd still argue that the quality of tone was better in the "analog" days.