The Steel Guitar Forum

I get lots of questions about the sound of my pickups relative to one another, so I thought I would make a video where everything is held constant except for the pickup - the parts played, the signal chain, the string clearance, etc. All details are explained in the video, steel is a Williams 700 Series D10.

The results can used to at least compare between the models and somewhat to extrapolate to other steels and signal chains.

I included my new humbucker models, one was developed working closely with a major steel manufacturer, and the other based upon a custom request. All the product pages are up at www.steeltronics.com .

I also added a comparison track of my tone touchstone 1969 ZB D10 for fun at the end of the video.

Heres the link

https://youtu.be/hyUgu0Bjpoc

Hi Scott, Nicely done. Those pickups sound great. My favorite (apart from the gorgeous ZB) was the Z Series pickup which had quite a nice vintage tone and suited the Williams well.

Could you raise the volume of the demo tracks by 6 to 8 dB and the PSG audio an additional 3 to 4 dB?

I think that would make the subtle differences in tone and response stand out a lot more and balance well with the voice track.

Steve, the balance of steel to track was set at the mixer at time of recording so I cannot change that.

I set the overall level so there was no digital clipping, I show absolute peaks of roughly -3 to -5 db in the mov files pre upload and average rms level of -19 to -20 dB on most of the tracks before upload. Youtube does normalize and/or compress if your content is too loud so I was trying to stay below where they are mucking with it but not be super quiet on playback.

I specifically avoided any mastering or post processing, the audio is exactly what entered the the iphone via the usb cable.

It's good to have choices and there are many there. To each his own, but I found the new PH10 w/individual pole pieces very pleasing with the demo gear.