What is a trapezodial pickup

Chuck Trombley · Post by **Chuck Trombley** » 29 May 2001 8:47 am

What is a trapezodial pickup as used on the early Fender Professional instruments? How does the sound compare to the later Stringmaster? Need to know before I take the plunge. Mahalo.

Ian McLatchie · Post by **Ian McLatchie** » 29 May 2001 12:49 pm

Chuck: Scroll down the page and you'll see that this topic was covered recently in the posting "Fender vs. Fender." The trapezoidal or "Direct Contact" pickups are much hotter and brighter-sounding than the later Stringmaster style. In the posting mentioned above, I said that I was equally fond of both styles. Since then, I've had a few days to play my Dual Professional whose outer pickup was just rewound by Lindy Fralin, and I take back what I said before: the trapezoidal's simply a better sounding pickup. It is purely a matter of taste, though, and depending on what type of music you're playing, you may find you prefer the Stringmaster. The best advice I can give is grab as many Fender steels as you can. They're all great instruments in their own way.<FONT SIZE=1 COLOR="#8e236b"><p align=CENTER>[This message was edited by Ian McLatchie on 29 May 2001 at 01:52 PM.]</p></FONT>

Jason Lollar · Post by **Jason Lollar** » 29 May 2001 5:10 pm

The big difference from the stringmaster is the traps have a coil that the strings run through the center of and the magnetic field completly surrounds the pickup so it has a rather high gain but doesnt use alot of wire like a modern high gain pickup would so it still has a wide frequency response. It also has no iron core (poles) in the coil so that changes frequency response too.
Stringmasters are closer to a Fender strat pickup in design but is a dual pickup system with which you can vary the tone quite a bit.
The traps have an angled coil so you get a bit fatter bass than the pro? which uses the same pickup design except for a change in the bobbin and cover that is not angled.
They all sound good.

Jody Carver · Post by **Jody Carver** » 8 Jun 2001 5:18 pm

Chuck,,,,check your e mail ,,,,,Jody

Herb Steiner · Post by **Herb Steiner** » 9 Jun 2001 8:28 am

I too love the sound of the Direct Contact pickup, and I have 3 guitars with this pickup... a Deluxe, a Dual Pro, and a Custom. The sound is great, but the drawback to these guitars for me is that the pickup design necessitates holding your hand in front of the pickup and so it's hard to play high up the neck Murphey style. Your hands keep butting into each other. So when I do play "retro" gigs, I play either a Stringmaster or a Bigsby.

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