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...