The Steel Guitar Forum

My first and only PSG is a Zum S12. It had a 20k Truetone in it, and I never really liked the tone. Today I unwound it to 17.4k, and I think the tone has improved substantially. I'm wondering if I should unwind more. I know there's no objectively correct answer, just hoping for some general wisdom/guidance from those who appreciate the sound of lower resistance single coil pickups. Does anyone know of any tone samples where someone goes from full coil to tapped that might help me hear the effect of going to relatively low resistance?

There is far more to pickup design than just the DC resistance and number of windings. Rather than destroying an excellent pickup because you are dissatisfied with the tone you are achieving I recommend you do some deep research on what other options are available, including the part your hands and amp EQ play in producing tone from your instrument and how to use the low strings not well supported by lower impedance pickups.

There is a reason Bruce installed that great 20k pickup you had, which is now basically junk to anyone else, especially on a 12 string rig with its extended low frequencies. I applaud your courage and initiative but I humbly suggest that perhaps there is a better way to find what you are looking for.

depending on what you want. Pickups for steel guitars have gotten hotter nowadays, what many players might prefer.
A lot of us are hooked on the older sounds of our ravourite records.
those were mainly recorded with much lighter pickups, genering a brighter sound and more twang especially on the low strings. there`s many threads about that in the forum.

in my case, after checking out six or seven different pickups on my guitar i ended up with a truetone i unwound from 18,5 to 16 K ohm. This is my best pickup, and I prefer it over a new single coil with 15,5 i purchased lately.

Ethan, i`m glad it worked for you so far.
The more you unwind the brighter you can expect your pickup to sound.
One of my favourite players, Tommy Detamore uses around 14,5 on his push pull guitars.
Old Emmons Single Coils can be around 12, even less sometimes.

I love the cutting and twangy Sound of the old Steel Guitars, on the other hand a mellower sound might be easier to control, especially if you play a tube amp like an old deluxe or twin. this combination can get pretty ear-piercing on the high strings. in the end it depends on your style of playing and your musical goals. Good luck

Dave Grafe wrote:...There is a reason Bruce installed that great 20k pickup you had, which is now basically junk to anyone else...

I appreciate your response, but can't find much to support your above assessment. Normally when asking for advice I wouldn't take the time to respond saying that I simply disagree, but on the chance that someone else looking for info re unwinding pickups stumbles across this thread, I thought it good to temper the absolutism of your statement lest they get too discouraged.

All one need do is visit this thread:
https://bb.steelguitarforum.com/viewtop ... 512566303b

There you'll find that 16% of respondents preferred there TT to be 16k or less. You'll also see a post from someone saying that Jerry Wallace himself was in the process of unwinding his (the poster's) pickup from 20.5k to 16.5k.

For a given PU design there simply is no magic or scientifically perfect amount of windings that will sound best to everyone. Experimentation may lead to tragedy-you may hate the resulting sound, or somehow break a wire deep in the coil rendering it dead-but I highly doubt one could ever safely say changing the resistance of a PU by +-10% is ever going to make it "basically junk to anyone else."

As I stated on the thread to which you linked, I tend to like single coils around 17.5K Ohms for my bread-and-butter pedal steel sound - for 10-string E9, that is. I also like the more Fender-ish sound around 9-12K Ohms, but that is a sort of specialty sound. I personally love Sneaky Pete's sound, but I can't get away with sounding like that all the time. So if I was gonna get a single-coil 10-string pickup wound, I would probably get one with a coil tap to really get that more Fender-ish sound without losing the more bread-and-butter sound at 17.5K.

But to the 12-string: my 12-string Zum universal came with a 17.5K Ohm single coil. I don't know if was a True Tone or a pickup that Bruce wound. And it sounded good. But I personally found it a hair thin in comparison to what my 17.5K True Tones sound like on my Zum D10, and I estimate for the reasons that Dave Grafe stated. Given a fixed DC resistance, the number of winds on a 12-string is gonna be smaller than the number of winds on a 10-string, and should sound different. For me, 'different' was 'a bit thin' for my bread-and-butter sound.

So I replaced that pickup with a Lawrence 912 and that, to my tastes, sounds better (I like a wee bit of extended upper-midrange in the sound to help cut through better) and cut the hum, which was becoming a problem at home and in certain clubs with bad interference issues, and especially when recording, where some people can get a bit persnickety about even small amounts of hum.

Anyway - I really do agree with Dave that it seems to me that it would be better to just get a pickup wound the way you want - perhaps with one or perhaps even two coil taps at lower DC resistance(s) - than to further unwind your pickup. I don't think it's very expensive to get one wound pretty much any way you want, and then you'd have some options without running the risk of really messing up the pickup you have. You might like < 17.4K better, you might not, or you might destroy the pickup - that is always a possibility when unwinding a pickup. And if you don't like the sound after unwinding, the only real way to go back to the higher DC resistance is to have the whole pickup re-wound.

I agree that any of these 'what sounds best' decisions are totally up to personal taste. But I personally think there is a good reason that most of the players in that poll prefer 17-18K. And I suspect that the vast majority of those responses were for 10-string, not 12-string.

Be of knowledge

https://guitarnuts2.proboards.com/threa ... ar-pickups

Good move Ethan! I agree that my Truetone sounds better with less wire. The empirical evidence is all you need and certainly trumps the theory. I've spent may hours reading pickup theory and with an HP network analyzer and those tools really don't tell you much about the actual tone of a pickup.

It's just a pickup and you can always have it restored back to original. Contrary to it being junk, I think a lot of people would love to try it out!

I had my ‘79 Emmons p/p pickups “de-wound” from 19.5 to 14.5 by an Emmons employee. The tonal difference is “night & day”. I felt the sound of my Emmons was acceptable prior to the de-winding but love the more vintage tone since having it done.