Pickup Placement

[Joseph Solomon]

Is it typical that you put the pickup with the highest resistance on the C6th neck, and the one with the less resistance on the E9th neck? Or, doesn't it matter?

[Bob Hoffnar]

Yes, that is typical. Players tend to want a brighter sounding pickup on the E neck. My impression is that the different tunings have different ranges. Like the E neck tends to be strongest in the violin range while the C neck is more in the viola range. The different windings give different Q points to closer match the voice of the tuning. There are no rules though so if you think you have a better idea feel free to try it out.

[Jim Sliff]

I agree with Bob.

It's usually termed "impedance", though...slightly different meanings. And impedance alone does not make a "bright" or "dark" pickup, but is often used as an indicator...and the genral rule is that lower impedance = brighter.

but - when you get above 15k or so sometimes the rules change, and as you get up in the 20-22k+ range pickups have more treble emphasis.

Regardless...my prefereance is for TWO pickups on a neck - a much wider range of sounds available that way. Many old non-pedal guitars were made that way...it's a mystery why it never has been a big thing in the pedal steel world (except among those of us who have added them ourselves).

[basilh]

Regarding tone, I think a lot has to do with the INPUT impedance of the amplifier, and how much of the first variable resistor is "In Circuit".

[Donny Hinson]

Most steels come with the same pickup on both necks, unless the buyer specifies something different.

[Brint Hannay]

My Sho-Bud Super Pro has 18k on the E9th and 20.8k on the C6th.

I once had a conversation with a well-respected steel designer, whom I won't name in case I might be misquoting him, who expressed the opinion that Sho-Bud should have done it the other way round, putting the brighter pickup on the darker neck and vice versa.

That seems to make sense--the E9th has the potential to be too thin, and the C6th has the potential to be too muddy. As is somewhat the case on this guitar. I wind up using the tone control on E9th and bypassing it on C6th.

Someday I'm going to try swapping the pickups and see what, if any, difference it makes.

[Jim Sliff]

Brint mentions another item often missing from steel nowadays - tone controls. Also volume controls on the guitar in a circuit combined with the tone control, which reacts quite differently than a volume pedal. IMO the "straight out" construction of modern steel electronics is less hassle for the maker but gives up a ton of tonal possibilities...but as discussed in previous threads, the thrust seems to be to try to get the to all sound the same, so it's kind of a moot point, I guess.

[Stu Schulman]

I like tone controls on my steel guitars!

[Brint Hannay]

I agree that all steels should have tone controls, with bypass. Why not? Parts and labor to include them can't be a big deal.

I also agree that more than one pickup should be a readily available option. I usually switch off between six-string and steel, and on the rare gigs where I only play steel I get bugged by only having the same tone all night. Guess I got spoiled by years of playing three-pickup Fender guitars!

[Bob Hoffnar]

If you want a tone control on your steel Goodrich makes a matchbox with a leg attachment that works great.

I don't use anything like that any more though.

Brit,

There is no reason to play with the same tone all night on your steel just because you only have one pickup. Get down to Buddy Charleton's and have him show you how to do it with your hands. He can show you how to go from Chalker to Mooney by only changing your mind !

I might ad that as a guy that is making and selling pickups I do think its a fantastic idea to buy and use as many pickups as possible !

[Brint Hannay]

Oh ,no, not another round of "It's all in the hands" vs. "It's not all in the hands" debate!

Yes, hands technique makes a big difference, OK??!!

The difference between Chalker and Mooney is nothing like the difference between neck pickup and bridge pickup on a Telecaster.

I'm tired of all these posts where people's answer to a variety of issues and questions is that the person posing them is simply an incompetent player.

[Donny Hinson]

Actually, most manufacturers started eliminating volume and tone controls when they discovered that most players were bypassing or removing them completely. The money involved never was the big issue, and I think most manufacturers will accomodate you today if you pay for it (certainly less than adding a pedal or lever, and most players don't wince at adding a few of those).

Tone controls are a mystery to some players, and that's because they don't understand them. Once you open your eyes to the fact that a tone control (any tone control) is just a volume control for a specific band of frequencies, understanding them is far easier. Most all tone controls (both those in guitars and those in amps) are "subtractive" - they add nothing! All they do is help emphasize one frequency band by reducing another. Of course, when you reduce one frequency band, you also lose a little signal, so every time you turn a tone control down, you have to compensate with additional volume. Some amps won't even work if the tone controls are all set at zero (or the loweest setting). The ballet between tone and volume controls can sometimes get complex, but it's not rocket science.

Of course, one other reason that the controls were eliminated from steels was the reliability factor. Pots (those used for volume and tone controls) don't like being ignored. If you don't use them regularly, they develop noise and sometimes quit altogether from dirt and corrosion. Those pots normally used in guitars were the "dollar store" variety, far less reliable than those used volume pedals.

[Eugene Cole]

Coil tapping has been common in the 6-string guitar world for well over 20 years. Adding series parallel switching to multiple pickup coils and phase switching for individual coils has also been around a long time in the 6-string guitar world. These options do not seem to have been widely adopted yet by the Steel Guitar community.

Back 1985 a local guitarist named Danny Gatton had a Les Paul he had customized on consignment at a local guitar shop. I do not recall that he had done any coil tapping but he had installed a bunch of mini-switches on the pick guard which took the series/parallel and phase switching of the guitars humbucking pickups to an extreme. I played the guitar and was intrigued by all of the options; but not intrigued enough to pay a premium for all of his then-exotic wiring work. But it did plant in to my mind an awareness of what a bit of creative pickup wiring could allow.

In 2002 I purchased a 19-20 year old Sierra PSG which came with a "triple range" coil-tapped pickup. I never checked the impedance (or even resistance) of the various coil tap options but I really liked the ability to switch between them on the fly. I sold that guitar recently so I can not check it now. That Sierra also had a tone knob and a switch to enable/disable the tone knob.

I found that most of the time I would just enable the tone knob in a set-it and forget-it manner; and that I primarily used the coil tap switch to change tonal voicing of the pickup.

My new Sierra (new to me 11 months ago) has an EMG pickup which is less-noisy than the Sierra pickup was but it does not have any coil taps. I still miss the ability change the guitars pickup voicing on the fly.

[Brint Hannay]

Gee, if tone controls are such a worthless idea, it goes to show what morons electric guitar manufacturers are for continuing to include them. Lots of guitar players never use them, either. Only those who see some value in sometimes cutting back the highs in their sound. Which of course would only be those precious few who have figured out that that's what a tone control does.

[Eugene Cole]

Most basic on-board tone controls utilize 1 capacitor (aka a "cap") and 1 potentometer (aka a "pot"). The capacitor absorbes (decreases) some portion of the audio spectrum. The pot controls how much of the signal is directed to the capacitor. Typically a .02µF to a .05µF capacitor is used for an electric guitar tone control.

With magnetic pickups it is always the higher frequencies that are excessive. Selecting the right capacitor and the quality of potentometer pretty much determines whether you you will be happy with the roll off characteristics you get.

I have a Goodrich Model 60 Matchbox which I can clamp on to the leg of my MSA; the MSA unlike my Sierra has round legs. The clamp which came withmy Matchbox will only fit a round leg. The input is on the top of the box and the output in on the bottom of the box. This box is does a little more that just add a capacitor and potentiometer to control high frequency roll off. It is a very nice little box which for my MSA works very well.

My Goodrich Model 60 Matchbox however has the following annoying attributes.
1. I have to unplug the output when I am not playing the guitar to avoid running down the battery.
2. Draping the unplugged cable over the top of the box is problematic because the cable usually falls on the floor when the guitar is bumped as I stand-up and/or sit down to play the guitar.
3. This box came with no provision for being run off of an external power source.
4. This unit requires a screwdriver to replace the battery.
5. On my MSA's legs it tends to slip down the leg as time passes.

I may modify the box to use external power someday but it is an awkward substitute for an on-board tone knob like I had on my Sierra.

[Jim Sliff]

Of course, one other reason that the controls were eliminated from steels was the reliability factor.

Donny, respectfully I finds that a bit silly. Virtually every six-string guitar and bass made has pots, and the makers have not removed them. What would be different about steel?

There's also a big difference between the outboard tone controls of the Matchbox (or Steeldriver - I have a SDII and had a Matchbox) and onboard tone circuits. The usual tone/volume circuits used in guitars are somewhat interactive, and the outboard units do NOT work the same way. Useful, yes...same effect, no.

Brint, as far as extra pickups, I know exactly how you feel. I added a second to my 400 and am kicking around asking GFI to pop another on my Ultra. The 400 has two stock pickups, a Tele control plate/circuit (but with 1meg pots) and a huge tonal range, from Tele-like treble to complete mud. Some of the treble-rollof "jazzy" sounds are tremendous, and you can't get there with an outboard box.

[b0b]

I have a tone pot on my Williams to dial back the treble from my E9th neck. My Sierra Olympic came equipped with volume and tone pots. (I removed them, btw, because they were scratchy and I don't need them.)

I bought a new Sho-Bud 6139 in 1974 and a new Emmons push-pull in 1978. Both came equipped with tone pots.

Having a volume pot on the steel seems silly if you play with a volume pedal. It's really easy to add one, but few people bother. If steel players saw them as a useful feature, builders would add them. But most of us have no use for volume pots on the guitar.

[Per Berner]

My old AVM from '79 had coil tap and phase reversal switches. The tapped sound was way too bright to be of any use, and the out-of-phase sound was totally unfocused and very thin.

What I would really like is the ability to slide the pickup closer to the fretboard to get different tones. I'm incorporating this feature in the steel I am building for myself from scratch - but seeing how little time I have to spend on building, it will take another year or two before I know what can be achieved that way.

[Jim Palenscar]

Eugene- you can fix the problem of the cable falling by simply getting a Geo L's cable that's 6" (or whatever length you like) from the guitar to the Matchbox- it will generally cost you about $10-$15 and will definitely solve your problem- also you can suspend the Matchbox- also- adding a titch of the soft side of Velcro to the inside of the clamp should solve the slipping problem. As far as tone/volume controls- it is my opinion that anytime a pot is involved in the loop the signal is degraded and we, as steel players (as opposed to guitar players) want absolutely the cleanest signal that we can get (we might be a bit obsessive about this).
I agree with Bob that having a volume control on a guitar is redundant when we have a volume pedal already in the circuit.

[ed packard]

Per B...Happy building! I get a lot of pleasure out of trying "things" on the instrument.

One of the "things" was putting two tapped pickups on the BEAST, and the switching to use either, both, or phased combinations of each.

I also tried the ACTIVE approach by building in the electronics that I did in the SIERRA CYBER II box....then decided that with the advent of the computer effects unit, I did not need the extra clutter, so it is relegated to the end of the instrument as
a box again when I want it.

I do like having two (parallel) output jacks on my instruments...it allows adding "things" across the pickup(s), and having modified and inmodified channels.

Happy construction project...pictures of the progress/results please.

[ed packard]

Per B...Happy building! I get a lot of pleasure out of trying "things" on the instrument.

One of the "things" was putting two tapped pickups on the BEAST, and the switching to use either, both, or phased combinations of each.

I also tried the ACTIVE approach by building in the electronics that I did in the SIERRA CYBER II box....then decided that with the advent of the computer effects unit, I did not need the extra clutter, so it is relegated to the end of the instrument as
a box again when I want it.

I do like having two (parallel) output jacks on my instruments...it allows adding "things" across the pickup(s), and having modified and inmodified channels.

Happy construction project...pictures of the progress/results please.

[Per Berner]

Ed, I really like your idea of integrating the tuners with the changer, that's another thinng I would like to have on mine. It would be difficult to do on the changer I have bought for the project (all the rest is from scratch, excluding legs & pickup), and would also be a bit too much to undertake on a first project - I'm used to building 6-string guitars, but all new to the milling machine. But next time around...

Build progress is painfully slow... To date, I have finished all the pull rods, two bell cranks, one pedal and the rails for the aluminum chassis... so no pics yet, I'm afraid.

[Steve Waltz]

I've seen some Millers where the pickup cavity was about four inches long going from the changer towards the fret board. The pickup was mounted so that you could slide it forwards and backwards.

I'm not sure if there was a negative effect of having such a large hole in the neck. It would be interesting to have that to see if it made much of a difference. But it obviously didn't catch on.

Steve

[Jackie Anderson]

A normal tone control consisting of a pot and a single capacitor simply rolls off varying amounts of the signal above a certain frequency. My favorite tone control, which I have put into a couple of 6-strings and a can for using outboard of any electric instrument, has a rotary switch to select among as many as 10 different values of capacitor, each of which provides a different roll-off frequency. I find this much more useful than a standard single-cap control. However, these days I don't want anything between my pickup and my Black Box!

Also, I usually can reach my amp or rack preamp, or the impedance knob on my upgraded BB, any of which gives me better tone shaping than any of the aforementioned. Accordingly, I raided my Sho-Bud 6139 for the A-B pots, and I am tempted to take the tone controls off my push-pull because it gets in my way (but at least it has a bypass switch).

P.S. To make up for the topic drift, let me add that I think a moveable pickup is a great idea. The PSG I built in 1975 had two pickups, and that too gave me a great choice of tones.

[Donny Hinson]

Gee, if tone controls are such a worthless idea, it goes to show what morons electric guitar manufacturers are for continuing to include them. Lots of guitar players never use them, either. Only those who see some value in sometimes cutting back the highs in their sound. Which of course would only be those precious few who have figured out that that's what a tone control does.

You got it, Brint! Probably 80% of the steelers out there want singing, screaming treble, and nothing else. Indeed, the entire pedal steel manufacturing market has geared itself to one (unmovable) pickup, one body style, one sound, and one tone.

Of course, we really can't blame the manufacturers. They're just responding to the narrow-minded customer dictates. Most steelers have fixed in their minds what a steel should look like, sound like, and how it should be made. Variety, or the urge to hear or see something different, just never enters their minds.