OT: Upside Down Pickups

[phillip]

I've always wondered exactly what affect on tone installing single coil pickups (ala Hendrix) upside down has on the guitar's tone.  

Does anyone know the physics of the upside down single coils?

Phillip

[The Tone God]

Off the top of my head I can see two things that can happen. If the pickup has fixed staggard pole pieces then the hights will be reversed cause different volume changes in each string's output. The other is if you use two pickups at once you can have different signal bucking things happen.

Andrew

[petemoore]

Seems there wouuld be a complimentary phase reversal, free with the reversing of the Pickups polarity in relation to the strings

[Fret Wire]

Restringing a lefty to play right handed wouldn't change any phasing. The wiring doesnt change. But as the Tone God pointed out, if the guitar had staggered pole pieces, the output volume would be different. Also, the bridge pickup would sound different as it is angled toward the bridge on the treble side.

But you're talking about just turning the pickups around on a right handed strat? Not sure, really.

[Lonehdrider]

Probably make a very slight change sonically, not sure if most would even hear it. Jimi's tone and the ingredient of it is pretty well documented, not sure how much the small things like that were a part of it. I've heard all manner of stuff that 'might' have attributed to it, some of it I didn't see on the vids, like a brass nut, the restring also made his bass e string path longer although I'm not sure how much that made a difference.
I do know he had a nickname of 'marbles' to the people on the scene at the time, he got that because they thought he lost his cause the cat always had a guitar with him, he also did marathon practice sessions from dusk till dawn, while he was remarkable, the cat earned the skills he had from dedication to the instrument (and well he was inventive and the cid probably didn't hurt his creativity)  :lol: . Having really long fingers didn't hurt either haha... Check his vids sometime, he could easily span 7 frets!

Regards,

Lone

[george]

bridge pickup would sound different as it is angled toward the bridge on the treble side.
.

Ian Moss in Australia has a custom (RH) strat with the bridge pickup angled this way.  I can see that this would be good because the standard strat pickup angled normally can get pretty screechy ....

But you're talking about just turning the pickups around on a right handed strat? Not sure, really.

You'd also have some routing to do to fit the bottom of the pickup where the wires attach, into the pickup slots, because this would be pointing to the front instead of the back ...

[Ansil]

are you talking about turnig them 180 degrees around or actualy upside down...  please clarifiy..  if you are talking about 180degrees aroudn.. i do all my guitars this way.......  doing all my pickups like this.  and the nothc filters i use give it a vocal quality.

[phillip]

I guess I meant 180 degress...like stringing a left handed guitar right handed, or vice versa.

Phillip

[petemoore]

Just for conversation...I'm talking about leaving two of three strat pups alone, wire coming from bottom of each, but the third pickup is inverted, it's wire now coming off the 'top' or fat wound string instead of the thin plain steel.
 The part I don't understand about this is: are strat pickups wired specially somehow so that [besides the fixed string pole pieces] it matters which way they go in...upside up / or upside down.
 Is there a 'bass'/top and a'treble'/bottom ..built into to the magnets or windings?
 This is an easy way to reverse phase on a pickup, and have it wired with one that's in phase without having to lift ground or do any soldering if the pickup wires are long enough.
 Of course not being the one to know all about phase switching and what it does, I would need a switch anyway, so I could go back to 'normal' and be able to decide.
 I bet I'd like that switch too.
 Still got that nasty 'aftertaste' from all the other times I got into guitar wiring though...might be a time before that goes away enough where I'd wanna try it again.

[Nasse]

if the guitar had staggered pole pieces, the output volume would be different. Also, the bridge pickup would sound different as it is angled toward the bridge on the treble side

I think Fret Wire nailed it down just right. I have a seventies strat, and it does not have staggered pole pieces, they are just flat. And such guitar is what Hendrix is mostly photographed with.

[javacody]

No way man, the late 60's pups had a stagger to them. Check out the Fender Custom Shop 69's, which are an almost exact copy of lates 60's pups. They are staggered. Check out my USA Custom Guitars S model:



You can clearly see the magnet stagger of the Fender Custom Shop 69's (which I have). Also notice the orientation of the bridge pickup. Warmoth will make you a pickguard with the exact same placement. It does alter the bridge pup sound slightly.

Remember, Jimi didn't play many "70's strats" as he died in 1970. 99% of the strats he played would have been made between 65 and 70. The neck shape was also different  (70's strats had a U shape to them) and 70's strats had a different trem from the original Fender "synchronized" trem. I highly recommend that strat afficionados check out the Fender Stratocaster book. It details all of the strats changes from the early 50's to the present.

[Nasse]

:oops: :oops:  Sorry my misinformation :oops:  :oops:

I have staggered pole pieces in my second strat and it is just as difficult to play like Jimi as with the flat pole p 70´s one. The headstock is bigger in my flat-polepiece-pickup strat, so the guitar looks just like Hendrix strat, at a distance :wink:

How it is angled toward the bridge and the excact position of the mike at the leght of the string does have more affection to the tone. Some strat clones have the neck pickup in slightly different place (closer to the bridge), mostly because 22 or 24 fret board (stock strat has 21)

[javacody]

No problem, if you are a strat lover, you have to get the Stratocaster book. It has some awesome photos of vintage strats and tells you about all of the changes that happened over the years.

[WGTP]

This was my obsession for a while and there is a good link at AMPAGE pickup makers forum that demonstrates the effect of pickup placement at various locations on the string.  

The main effect is that the bass (wound) strings are "sensed" closer to the bridge and will have more twang and less bass and the treble (plain) strings will be "sensed" farther from the bridge and will have less twang and more mellow.  

The reason is that harmonics are picked up in different places and the closer you get to the bridge, the ratio between the volume of the high and lows changes.  You can demonstrate this by picking in different locations.

I think the magnet stagger will have a lesser effect.

This would only account for Jimi's bridge pickup sounding different and wouldn't make any difference on the middle and neck pup.  

[Mark Hammer]

About 20 years back I had a Strat-like assembly on my guitar but I had hastily made the pickguard working from memory, and I knew much less then so the memory was even more fallible.  The bridge pickup ended up being slanted in "Hendrix" fashion instead of the usual Strat slant in the other direction.

Here's how it works.

Lower notes have longer wavelengths.  If you were to fret at the 5th, pluck a note, and snap a high-speed photo with a strobe or something, you'd see that the high E would appear to be divided up into much much smaller "wiggles" than the low E.

The peak of each "wiggle" is, of course, the point where the string is moving back and forth the most, and capable of generating the biggest impact on the pickup coil (which senses *changes*, not static position of string).

The slant on the bridge pickup of the Strat and Tele and any other guitar using a slanted bridge pickup is intended to position the polepieces so as to be more sensitive to the same harmonics across the strings.  Since the wavelength of different notes varies, you would expect that the maximum "wiggle" for same harmonic (one octave, 2 octaves, 3 octaves up, etc.) would be farther away from the bridge for lower notes than it would be for higher notes (which have a shorted wavelength).

Reverse-slanting of the bridge pickup, then, ends up shifting the harmonic emphasis such that lower order harmonics are emphasized more for high notes than they are for low notes.  Conversely, higher-order harmonics are emphasized for low notes, more than they are for high notes.

The tonal impact of this is that the unwound strings will sound a lot meatier and the wound strings will sound somewhat tinnier.  That presents not only a tonal change, but a modest change in signal level hitting the amp from each string as well.

The other thing it does, of course, is to change the relationship between middle and bridge pickups, and their respective harmonic contribution, for the M+B switch position.  Since 3-way switches were pretty much all you had to work with on Strats in 1969, I doubt whether this was relevant to decoding the tone of any of Hendrix' work.  On the other hand, for those wishing to emulate Jimi by attempting the slant-flip, you should note that the pleasing "cluck" position, so easily obtainable now 35 years on with the advent (and dominance) of 5-way switches, will not sound the same.

[javacody]

It sure don't. I've also got the so called "Hendrix mod" in this strat, and the neck and bridge pups together sound wild, kind of like a tele, but it has this weird, kind of phase cancelling sound, I can't describe it, but it is very unique, and very funky.

[Ge_Whiz]

Have none of you seen the 'Hendrix Strat' issued by Fender, which is an upside-down left-hander designed to be played by right-handers? It's staggered-pole pickups are the wrong way round and the bridge pu slanted the wrong way to give 'the tone', the head is upside-down, and the writing on the head is printed back-to-front as a final joke!

[javacody]

I've seen the Hendrix strat, its logo is designed so you look like you're playing Jimi's guitar when you look in a mirror. I'm not a big fan of playing wrong handed guitars. I suspect most of it is "voodoo" and "mojo". I like my righty guitars played righty.

[The Tone God]

One time I took one of my guitars and restrung it to learn how to play reversed. It turns out "sucks" is ambidextrous.

Have you guys looked at the issue of have the magnets out of phase ?

Andrew

[george]

Check out my USA Custom Guitars S model:

It does alter the bridge pup sound slightly.

Hey javacody I am curious to know how it sounds compared to a normal strat

Thanks George