Supersonic pickup questions (and pickups volume in general)

For help with setups and other technical issues.
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oscillateur
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Supersonic pickup questions (and pickups volume in general)

Post by oscillateur » Mon Sep 26, 2022 5:18 am

TLDR :

Supersonic pickups are loud.
How does pipckup resistance value relate to perceived loudness ?


Longer version :

I recently bought a Squier Paranormal Supersonic. I really like it but the humbuckers in this guitar are quite loud, a bit too much for me.

I already adjusted pickup height to the minimum, which made things a bit better but did not make a huge difference.

For context, I only play it at home (even when I had time to play live it was not with guitars). My setup is also probably a bit unusual as I have a few effect pedals going into a Tech21 VT Bass DI and then into a small but decent Soundcraft mixer. I typically use monitoring headphones from that mixer (KRK 8400).

My "this guitar is too loud" test is basically a Smallsound/Bigsound Buzzz fuzz pedal. With the Supersonic, with the gain knob at 0, set to low gain and Si diode (i.e. the lowest gain settings that thing can get), I still can't get anything even remotely clean.

I can of course reduce the volume on the guitar, but that changes frequencies too and does not sound the same to me.

My other guitar is a Fender Japan Jaguar, which obviously has much lower volume single coils. I'm not expecting the same volume but something more punchy but still in the same ballpark would be nice.

I also need to change the volume potentiometers on the Supersonic as they seem to behave like linear rather than log, but that's another topic.

This being said, my question is about pickup volume.

The main spec available pertinent to pickup volume is resistance. From what I understand of pickups, there is a direct correlation between this and volume, but only as long as all the other parameters are equal (from wire gauge to number of turns or materials).

And more importantly, the scale is not something that's very clear. I.e. with all other things being equal, how much louder would a 12k pickup be compared to a 8k one ?

As human hearing more or less follows a logarithmic scale, should that also be applied to pickup values ?

A simpler question would be : the Supersonic's pickups are about 10k/neck and 15k/bridge, what difference in volume should I expect from for example 8k/neck, 9k/bridge ?

And would that be enough to make my Buzzz and the Supersonic best friends ever ?

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Embenny
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Re: Supersonic pickup questions (and pickups volume in general)

Post by Embenny » Mon Sep 26, 2022 5:18 pm

oscillateur wrote:
Mon Sep 26, 2022 5:18 am
TLDR :

Supersonic pickups are loud.
How does pipckup resistance value relate to perceived loudness ?
Short story - it doesn't.

You can swap an alnico II magnet for a ceramic or neodymium one, and the resistance won't change but the output sure would increase.

You can wind a Firebird pickup with the same wire to the same number of turns as a PAF and the output will be much higher. Same for a Telecaster pickup and a P90. Different construction makes direct comparisons of resistance useless, as in the case of your Jaguar vs the humbuckers.

You can change string gauge, string alloy or move the pickup closer or farther relative to the strings, and the output will change without any differences in pickup specification.

The closest thing you'll ever get to an output rating is the inductance of a pickup, which is essentially its efficiency at converting string movement into electrical current, but many pickup winders don't give that spec (and there's also a lot of messiness in how it's actually measured).

Volume problems require volume solutions.

Before I went digital, I picked up a cheap Artec Dual Booster, a clean boost that can go below unity gain.

It can run one or both sides at once. I set one side to about -5% ABDthe other to +10% volume, so as a result I had 4 different volume levels available (-5%, unity gain, +5%, +10%). I put it first on my board, so I could just step on the appropriate level of boost/cut when switching guitars and have everything downstream see roughly equivalent output.

It's a heck of a lot easier than changing pickups around and blindly guessing at the resulting output. Just boost the quieter guitar or attenuate the louder one and you're set.
The artist formerly known as mbene085.

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