| Author | Message | ||
| jlpicard
Advanced Member Username: jlpicard Post Number: 394 Registered: 7-2002 |
I've read somewhere that FatBoys are wound on the same magnet structure as the series pups. Does that mean that it also has the same apeture as well? I assume that there's another coil in there for humcanceling also. Is it mounted side by side or one on top of the other? Sonically ,I understand there's a bit more output and more bottom to the sound . Can anyone get more specific than that? If this has been discussed previously, Dave, could you please point me to the thread. Thanks Mike | ||
| bob
Senior Member Username: bob Post Number: 596 Registered: 11-2002 |
I think I can cover the easy stuff. Yes, the story is that they use the same size magnet, and hence the same aperture, as the Series pickups. The cancelling coil is below, not side by side. Yes, they are louder, and perhaps because "they listen to more of the string", I would say they tend to sound "fatter", with more bottom. I also have this sense that if you get them close to the strings, and play aggressively, you can start to overload them (more easily than AXY or MXY, which are sonically identical). But I'm not really that experienced with this stuff, and can't say anything at all about Series. For my own tastes, a FatBoy in the bridge position is a no-brainer. It gives you a much richer tone, lots of clarity but all that good bottom end stuff you (should) want. However, I feel that they tend to be too much in the neck position. Particularly as you play higher up the neck, the harmonic waveforms shift around a lot near the end of the fingerboard, plus you get a lot more first and second wave content in this region. So depending on where you are on the neck, some notes might come out excessively fat, deep, and rounded, while others may have much of the low stuff cancelling out within the aperature space, and end up sounding thin or hollow (hard to explain, and I'm probably oversensitive to this anyway). This is not a criticism of the FatBoy itself, but more a personal preference for a narrow aperture up here - it gets too confusing and inconsistent, if I may put it that way, to "listen" to too much of the string in this area. I'm sure Dave will be able to find you more discussion on this :-) | ||
| davehouck
Moderator Username: davehouck Post Number: 3496 Registered: 5-2002 |
According to Mica the "FatBoys have twice the aperture of the AXY or MXY pickups". I just spent a good amount of time perusing a bunch of past threads and I can't find a better description than Bob's. The question of aperture size is significant, and as Bob alluded to, bigger isn't always better. If you're really really interested in the subject and you have a lot of free time, read this thread; one of my all time favorite threads. But don't try to read it quickly, if could give you a headache! <g> | ||
| davehouck
Moderator Username: davehouck Post Number: 3497 Registered: 5-2002 |
While perusing past threads about FatBoys and aperture, I got to thinking about a narrow aperture Series pickup in the neck position. | ||
| palembic
Senior Member Username: palembic Post Number: 2337 Registered: 9-2002 |
Oh yes ...i remember that thread. I started to read it a dozen times I guess, I even printed it out but never made it to the end. There always a point that I start re-reading the sentences just before s o ...oh well ...maybe thi stime ... I plunge! PTBO | ||
| lg71
Junior Username: lg71 Post Number: 33 Registered: 3-2006 |
Well, this is a Fat thread for a Fat pickup  | ||
| bigredbass
Senior Member Username: bigredbass Post Number: 698 Registered: 9-2002 |
This is one of thos questions I can ask as I don't quite know what I'm talking about: Why can't you take a two-pickup FatBoy setup, tie the two cancelling coils in the bottom of each FatBoy, and wind up with a two single coil setup like S1s? This is why I do setups and stay the hell away from soldering irons! J o e y | ||
| jlpicard
Advanced Member Username: jlpicard Post Number: 397 Registered: 7-2002 |
Probably because you can't get access to the leads of each coil since they're sealed inside the body of the pup. | ||
| bigredbass
Senior Member Username: bigredbass Post Number: 700 Registered: 9-2002 |
OK, then wire some with separate taps for the top and bottom coils. Then what? J o e y | ||
| jlpicard
Senior Member Username: jlpicard Post Number: 403 Registered: 7-2002 |
I'm not sure but I think you're not going to get the same result because the magnet may be the same as a series pup but I though the Fat Boy was over wound. Also your able to adjust the gain of the Humcanceler to equal the active pups in order to minimize the noise level. At this point we need other clubmembers with intimate knowledge of the the way a series circuit works to chime in. Anyone? the Bobs maybe? | ||
| dfung60
Intermediate Member Username: dfung60 Post Number: 144 Registered: 5-2002 |
I think it would be pretty hard to exactly replicate the Series design with other pickups. It has to do with the way the pickups are constructed, and some explanation is in order. First, start with a single coil pickup. You make that by winding a coil around a magnet and disrupting the magnetic field with something like a vibrating ferrous string. The magnetic interference has the effect of generating a electrical signal in the coil, which you can amplify to reproduce an analog of the strings motion. You can tweak the sound of the pickup by varying the strength of the magnet, the shape of the magnetic field (this is the aperture), and the type and amount of wire on the coil. The "problem" with single coil pickups is that in addition to picking up the motion of the string, they also will pick up radiated electromagnetic (EM) fields, which you hear as hum and buzz. Humbucking and humcancelling pickups cleverly address this problem by using a matched set of pickup coils. If you reverse the polarity of a single-coil pickup magnet, you'll reverse the polarity of the output signal. You can also reverse the polarity of the signal by reversing the direction the coil is wound in. If you flip the magnet AND wind the coil in reverse, the pickup should sense string motion exactly like the regular pickup does. But picking up an EM/hum field doesn't depend on the magnet, just the coil. If you hook up a regular pickup and a "reverse" pickup, what will happen is that the magnetically-sensed sound will add normally, but the EM-induced buzz (which isn't dependent on magnetic polarity) will add up out of phase and will be cancelled out like magic. This is how the two coils in a Gibson-style humbucker are wired, or the two halves of a P-bass pickup. In modern Strats, the middle pickup is reverse-wound/reverse polarity which is why the "in-between" tones don't hum. In something like a Gibson humbucker, the two coils in each pickup have magnets and "hear" the string in slightly different places. This means that the audio outputs from the coils are slightly different and that small difference causes some additional out-of-phase cancellation of the audio signal. That's one reason why most humbuckers are less bright sounding than single coils. One way to reduce the amount of high-end cancellation is to stack the two coils one above the other. It works the same as side-by-side, but both coils are pretty much seeing the same string motion now. The problem with this design is that one pickup is farther away from the string, so you still don't get a perfect signal match (the closer pickup will have hotter attack for instance, so the summed signal won't be a perfect match). This is how stacked Strat pickups work. If you're willing to dedicate one coil to hum cancelling only, then you can perfectly capture the single coil sound by leaving the magnet out of one of the two coils entirely. The coil with the magnet "hears" the string, and the air coil only hears EM which it will cancel out of the other signal. This is what the Series bass is doing. The pickups are true single coils; the hum canceller (shared by both pickups) is a coil with no magnet which only serves to remove the hum when summed with the pickups. The EM/hum radiation is basically going to read identically anywhere on the instrument, so, with proper matching, you should be able to perfectly cancel the hum with minimal effect on the single coil sound. I'm not sure whether the Fatboy is a stacked humbucker or whether there's a pickup on top and a humcancelling coil beneath. In either case, there's some compromise vs the Series setup. If it's stacked, then it's an issue of coil imbalance. If it's an air coil humcanceller, then the problem is that the proximity of the air coil to the magnets of the pickup will cause some weaker signal to be induced again mismatching the outputs. That's why the Series humcanceller is physically located away from the pickup magnets. Whew! A couple of additional observations. First, Leo Fender was pretty clever in making the split-coil P-pickup. By making it that way, you can build a one pickup bass that doesn't hum and doesn't have high-frequency cancellation (only one coil reads each pair of strings but together then cancel the hum). Second, if you can pry the magnets out of the middle pickup of your Strat and do a little rewiring, you'll have the purest, humfree neck and bridge pickup tones you've ever heard. I'm surprised that you don't see more Gibson-style humbuckers with a live coil and an air coil, but I guess that doesn't sound at all like a traditional humbucker. Finally, this is a great example of Alembic's no-compromise design. There's lots of ways to get "pretty good" results, and only one way to do it that's ideal, and that's what you see on the Series. I know of only a few other basses that have this system - the original Paul Reed Smith basses had an extra hum-cancelling coil on the back, and there was a short run of Fender Elite Jazz basses that had this in the 80's. Alembic was first on this (certainly the first significant player) and never stopped since the 70's. David Fung | ||
| lbpesq
Senior Member Username: lbpesq Post Number: 1128 Registered: 7-2004 |
David: Very informative. Thanks. (Modder Dave - perhaps a nomination for inclusion in the "Must Reads" Hall of Fame?). As for the question about whether the Fatboy is a humbucker or a hum canceller, my understanding is that ALL Alembic pickups are single coil with hum canceller - NO humbuckers here. Bill, tgo | ||
| adriaan
Senior Member Username: adriaan Post Number: 809 Registered: 6-2002 |
Bill, You're halfway there: indeed there are no Alembic humbuckers, but apart from the pickups that you find in the Series instruments they are all humcancelling dual-coil pickups. The Series instruments indeed have single coil pickups, plus a single coil humcanceller. Check out this thread on the Must Read section: http://alembic.com/club/messages/16271/18779.html?1117034562 (Message edited by adriaan on March 20, 2006) | ||
| palembic
Senior Member Username: palembic Post Number: 2343 Registered: 9-2002 |
Brother David ...I understood EVERY WORD of the explanation! As an absolute electronic and technical moron ...that means something! VERY informative! Moder Dave ...I'm with Brother Bill the good-guitar one . HA Paul TBO | ||
| davehouck
Moderator Username: davehouck Post Number: 3501 Registered: 5-2002 |
David; great post! Now I know why I always seemed to prefer the "in-between" positions on a Strat! Bill and Paul; I've added it to this post in the Must Reads section that Adriaan cited. Thanks! | ||
| jlpicard
Senior Member Username: jlpicard Post Number: 404 Registered: 7-2002 |
What I don't get is why is there a humcanceler pot on the back of series basees for EACH pickup? | ||
| mica
Moderator Username: mica Post Number: 3179 Registered: 6-2000 |
They aren't humcancelling pots, they are hum-balance pots. The hum is adjusted to null for each pickup, because even if they have the exact number of turns, each pickup is slightly different and needs a different amount of influence from the humcancelling coil. | ||
| bigredbass
Senior Member Username: bigredbass Post Number: 706 Registered: 9-2002 |
Now I can't say I don't know what I'm talking about! Thanks! J o e y |
