It started with a new Electric Pickup design!

1+1=?

Actually... it all began with a magnetic riddle so to speak.

A little over a year ago my cohort David and I (they call us Dave and Daver around the shop) were working on some new pickup designs for our T5 Guitar line and something wasn't adding up in the design process. We were building proto types using a traditional humbucking design to test some ideas and make some decisions on output and physical size when we noticed something. As long as we physically built everything the way it's always been done everything worked fine...however when the physical design was altered the audio results became extremely random and unpredictable. Understand we are not novices in this field by any means but we also admit that both our brains put together hardly equal the level of an adult chimpanzee in the space program. We do however have enough common sense and observational skill to notice something unusual and not dismiss it quickly. We also possess enough genuine naivete to raise our hand and say...eeehem...excuse me teacher....why is it doing that?

Before I bore most of you to death with a science project let me go ahead and say that as a result of our experiments I have a different view than I had previously on magnetic flux theory. Yep as you might guess...we are now branded officially as magnetic heretics and everyone thinks we are building an alien propulsion system in our area. However before history (and friends) brand us as lone loonies I want to say that I have fortunately found at lease a few other like minded nuts on the Internet who seem to have abandoned the faith so to speak and joined us in our cult of Flux theory revision. Just for grins here are two pictures and a drawing of our design experiments.

The first picture is a round magnet glued to a pencil with ferro fluid (liquid magnetic fluid) being drawn out of the tube on the left side. Notice the oblong shape it is taking on...the shape is what you would expect to see if this was a model of the Earths magnetic field like the drawing on the right...however the polar field orientation on this magnet (North/South) is on the Right and Left not the top and bottom. The drawing on the right is the way field lines are typically represented with N on top and S on bottom and the shape as it is understood in current flux theory.

The second picture of the long object with all the spikes is a bar magnet with the liquid ferro fluid taking on the shape of the flux lines. We use ferro fluid instead of iron filings to visualize the field lines because its more exact. If you click on the pictures you can get a better look. If you want to see some really cool stuff using ferro fluid hit the link below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=me5Zzm2TXh4

While I can't divulge any trade secrets until we go through the infamous and ridiculously expensive patent process the bottom line is we seem to have come up with a pickup that regardless of the science yields something even your grandmother can hear! That's the best test of good and gooder as my dear friend and diving buddy Doc Malwin use to say!

The challenge for pickup designers is really pretty straight forward...to make a pickup louder what you do is wrap more copper wire around the bobbin and magnet to cut more lines of magnetic flux and increase the output voltage. The problem is the more you wrap the longer the wire becomes and the greater the resistance to the signal or the higher the impedance. The more you wrap the coil for output the darker and less defined the pickup becomes. The less bandwidth or frequency response and the greater the weird frequency peaks along the curve. The challenge is to get the output and keep the bandwidth. In musical terms it means keep the sweetness of the vintage sound and add the output of a modern pickup. The way most people solve this issue is by using less wraps and adding a small internal preamplifier creating an active pickup using a battery, ours are passive.

We approached the design problem differently and ended up with exactly what we wanted with less work and more predictability along the frequency bandwidth! Ok...sorry for the tec talk on a blog...

Hey Bob...want to see how spaceships fly?

One day last year after building numerous proto pickups, putting them in guitars and having a few key folks try them I felt like it was time to bring Bob in on what we were up to. He was out of town on a well deserved break so I wrote him an e-mail I headlined "Magnets and the rings of Saturn". After a few paragraphs on flux theory and the reason for Saturn's rings I told him we had something new to show him when he got back. He wrote back from some pool side resort that the waiter had just brought him a refreshing and delicious drink and that he could hardly wait! Seriously...he loves this kind of stuff, it keeps him up at night too! Bob is all about invention, creativity, and new design ideas.

When Bob arrived at the shop from being out of town he came right in to see and hear what was brewing. I gave him the background on a piece of drawing paper and we dove right in! After more than an hour of playing guitar we all realized that we had developed something new and genuinely special.

Bob put it like this....this pickup deserves to have a guitar built around it!
And now...a little over a year later....guess what...

Designing a new Guitar!

OK....so it's been a while since I posted...I'm sorry.

Since I last posted a few things have been brewing that I can now tell everyone about.
A little over a year ago a new design for an electric pickup was being tested and a few of us were hard at work designing a new bridge. Sometime earlier this year Bob (Taylor) got the special "yeah let's do it feeling" and officially approved an Electric Guitar line for manufacturing and release in 2008. Pretty exciting for all of us in the product development group and now that it's been seen here and there and the official launch is coming up I can post a few pictures and talk a little about some of the details that go into designing a totally new product.

BTW: You can see some of the promo stuff on our websight.

http://www.taylorguitars.com/


Officially the product line was slated to be released at Jan NAMM 08 but sometime around July it was decided (by Bob) that we would do a pre-release the day after Thanksgiving! While the implications of that decision may seem cool...to us it means we have to make somewhere around 1000 guitars before that time so they can be in the stores ready to go! Here we were on a design and manufacturing schedule where everything was in the bag for January, (for the first time by the way) with us sitting back all fat and happy with cigars and beers and along comes BT and moves everything up by uuuu...three months! Well...as we say in product development at Taylor "It's impossible...so it might take a little longer!"

Well...manufacturing started Oct 1st! 21 a day for two weeks to 60 a day by the end of the month! The parts and tooling are literally being completed sometimes a day before they have to move into the build cycle. The first guitars begin arriving from manufacturing to shipping on the 12th and we don't have cases or shipping boxes yet...those should be ready on the 11th! Yeah yeah yeah...so it's hectic and stressful...what about the promise to tell some of the development details?

Since the development of this guitar series happened over a year and a half at least I want to write about some of the really cool moments along the way and the real specifics of what goes into something like this!

I promise...I'll cover everything over the next few weeks so keep checking back!

Here's a shot of Tommy Shaw with one of the first proto's!