Pickups for multiscale guitar

[string_man]

Hi,

I am looking for humbuckers for a 6 string multiscale (fanned fret) guitar that still give a good sound when slightly rotated so they fit with the fanned frets. It is important that the humbuckers have a regular size (not these bars you would use for 7 and 8 string guitars) and that they cover a wide range of different styles. Any recommendations?

[curtisa]

I'm not sure there's any information floating around as to the effects of rotating the pickup such that the poles of the humbucker bobbin pairs purposely misalign from the strings by a few degrees. There might be some kind of tonal difference, but I've no idea what it might be. My gut feel would be that any degree of change in tonality is dependent on the amount of twist of the pickup away from perpendicular (5 degrees of tilt may sound less noticeable than 10), but it would take a fair degree of twist before you really noticed anything significant, by which point you're probably more concerned about the way it looks than the way it sounds.

I guess you could assume that aside from any aesthetic issues perceived by skewing the pickup you should probably be guided by whatever normal assumptions you'd make about selecting the same pickup for a non-multiscale guitar and leaving the pickup un-rotated. 

I believe Bareknuckle humbucker pickups can be ordered with a 10 degree slant option, so you could always follow that route if you wanted a stock humbucker from their range with exposed pole pieces, but didn't want to worry about the look of a standard humbucker twisted about its axis?

[Bizman62]

The Master Luthier Veijo Rautia tutoring our course is a pickup maker as well. I once asked how important it is to get the pole pieces match with the strings. He supposed that the magnetic field is so large that a single mm or two either way shouldn't be audible.

When slanted one end of the pickup would be closer to the bridge than the other. The closer to the bridge the pickup is the thinner and snappier the sound which is why the Strat and Tele bridge pickup is slanted towards the neck on the bass side to give some beef, but as you know the humbuckers in the same position are straight. The closer to the neck you are the subtler any slight differences in positioning are. That said I don't believe putting the neck pickup at the same angle as the fanned frets would be a tonal issue.

[curtisa]

Twisting the pickup to match the frets (or at least the degree of scale length difference between treble and bass) in theory should be the equivalent of putting that same pickup perpendicularly at the equivalent relative position along the strings' length on a non-multiscale guitar. For example if you positioned the bridge pickup squarely on a single scale length guitar at, say 90% of the string length, to get the same positioning on a multiscale guitar and maintain the same 90% string length for all six strings the pickup has to adopt a reverse slant to match the differing scale lengths of each string.

But it's not really a valid comparison to use a certain pickup and expect a known tonal result on a multiscale vs single-scale guitar, as there are so many more fundamental differences about the two instruments (even if constructed from the same materials and hardware) that could affect the result. Bottom line - follow the advertised tonal properties of any pickup and use them as a baseline guide in your slightly-unusual application of it, just as you would do if you were deciding to try out a new pickup on a normal guitar. There is unlikely to be a known property about certain pickups that makes it particularly suited to being installed...well...crooked

[Crusader]

I dabbled in a fanned fret guitar with a slanted humbucker and didn't notice any loss of volume from the top and low E strings, but I didn't like that the pole pieces weren't the same distance from the saddle as usual. It was almost a reverse slant as Curtisa mentioned. So I shifted one of the coils, putting the screws through the holes already there (see second photo) and it works out nicely, what a fluke! and I'm confident there are no adverse effects from this mod

This project has been put aside for quite a while because it has some issues to sort out, ie. the pickup routes. And just for the record this is a simple procedure to me but if you've never opened up a pickup before.....don't do it. I was brought up by Bob The Builder so if I break something - no problem, I can fix it!

 

No seriously my father's name is Bob and he was a builder

 

...the other thing is I'm nearly 60 years old and if I break something I don't give a hoot

Edited January 14, 2021 by Crusader

[ScottR]

On 1/14/2021 at 12:20 PM, Crusader said:

No seriously my father's name is Bob and he was a builder

My ex father in law's name was Ron Ragen and his next door neighbor was named Billy Carter (same as ex president Jimmy Carter's beer guzzling brother.) As kids my ex and her siblings used to get a lot of mileage out of those little factoids.

SR

[string_man]

For those who are interesting, I found out that bare knuckle offers an additional option for their humbuckers with a slanted pole plate (1 degrees to 16 degrees). They charge an extra fee on that, but I thought it was worth a try and ordered a pair.