DIY PCB Guitar Pickups - Will they work?
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- Опубліковано 26 тра 2023
- Big thanks to PCBWay for sponsoring this video. Check them out here and get a $5 coupon: www.pcbway.com/setinvite.aspx...
Would it be possible to build your own PCB guitar pickups as Fishman does with their Fluence line? Well, that's what I was wondering too so I built some. In this video, I show you how I did it and whether they sound any good.
Video by Dylan Talks Tone: • Whats Inside A Fishman...
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the scientific guitarist channel has a video on building dyi pickups to mimick different pickups by adding circuitry that might help you out as well
They might not sound the best BUT THEY WORKED! Man thats pretty rad!
Dude thank you for this video this is exactly what I was looking for last week
This design needs a preamp (as in active pickups) to make up for the lower output. Less turns equals lower inductance, thus less induced signal in the coils with fewer windings. The upside is, much broader and more even frequency response, apart from the low end, which actually is a good thing. A preamp with as high input impedance as you can manage (think bootstrapped JFET inputs) will greatly improve the low end reproduction if necessary, you just need to be generous with the value of the coupling capacitor, and design the cutoff with at least a factor of ten. Overall, I think you're on the right track with your design, be as it may it's going to have no cost benefit compared to a set of Fishman's.
You might want to try making alumitones next, those are really fun and pretty simple to make.
How do you make the small transformer for the Alumitone style pickup?
@@Gupr91 Several options. You can use a miniature speaker transformer in reverse, or you can use a current sensor. Of course you could also construct and wire your own transformer.
@@lucemiserlohn
I think it will need to have from about 5000 to 10000 turns to make the job, what do you think?
@@lucemiserlohn
Maybe 42 to 43 wire.gauge....
@@Gupr91 5k to 10k is in the right ballpark, yes. You will want to have a preamp after it anyways, otherwise the output level might be a bit too low. Personally, in my experiments I use a 1:5000 current sensor as the transformer and just run a bolt through the center.
That is really neat! I will say they do sound Microphonic/Phasey, but to get a functioning Pickups on the first go? Freaking awesome dude!
Bloody brilliant, you have so many skills, so impressive!
so many skills, except guitar playing
Thank you for making this video.
Anyone building a pickup should know that the VOLTAGE induced in the coil is a function of the speed of the change in the velocity of the magnetic field. (Simplified explanation ). That's why a coil with a large number of turns has more output on the low strings, but the large distributed capacitance and resistance of that winding will roll off the highs, even though the voltage induced by the hi strings may be higher. ( The voltage is also a function of how far the strings travel. (No one said it was easy). All this can cause a lot of coloration on the output. On the other hand, the low impedance pickups (one turn?) have CURRENT in the winding changing. This means the response is mostly only affected by the action of the strings. Most of this type pickup will use a transformer to match the low impedance to the amp. This transformer can also influence tone. The Lace pickup is a prime example. Everyone is welcome to their own opinion on pickups. Diversity is good.
Several people are recommending a weaker magnet for more bass… that’s not how it works. Conventional pickups get ‘warmer’ from weaker magnets on account of already existing BW limitations being exacerbated by the new weaker magnet’s lack of static magnetic field to drive currents in response to changing reluctance over the pole. Low-inductance transducers don’t have any such BW limitations - so a weaker magnet will just generate even weaker output with the same relative spectral response.
Nice👌🏽
I love that kind of experimental sht
Great video!! 🎉
You could try to make a small step-up transformer like on the lace alumitones to bring the resistance up to par.
You could try swapping the Alnico V for an Alnico II. My understaning is that they are warmer and pickup more of the lows. I really love this project and would love to have access to the board diagram. Perhaps the next step in this experiment is to find a way to design an EQ board that you can pop onto any set of passive puckups in order to create multiple "voicings"
Great video. The pickups looked amazing, at least. 😂
What if you add a step-up transformer to the pickup, to boost the voltage output
Stronger magnets will also give more bass and overall output. Try N52 neodymium magnets. It won't be world-changing, but it'll help.
with the tracks fixated to those pcb's there should be way less microphonic then when using wire
another option would be to add a small transformer (one out of a wallwart but connected to the pickup in reverse ) might make the tone a bit warmer too
That was cool!
Any chance you can give that pcb diagram? Interested on an order
Very cool!
Woooh ! You might wanna try castellated holes on the pcbs so you can hand solder them a little bit easier i think
Good idea, though I'm not sure if they offer them on such thin boards.
What about graduated magnet Diameters with larger for the bass
That's an amazing start!
Is PCBWay able to pack more traces into the "coils"? And is that the thinnest they can go with the boards? If they can get you more traces per "coil" in a thinner board the design is sound. You could stack more boards.
Possibly, as a thought, if you have two board versions where you have through-holes for the pads but the "output" of one board lines up with the "input" of the next board. My thinking (which could be a bunch of malarkey) is that you could run a wire through to connect everything and it would allow you to clamp all the boards together for a denser stack within the same height.
A key component of guitar pickups as far as output is how much surface area of the wire in the coil is interacting with the magnetic field and how strong that magnetic field is. That's why, all else being equal a coil of 43 gauge wire wound to the same physical size as a coil of 42 gauge wire will have higher output. It will also have a higher DCR reading, which is where people get confused about higher DCR being more output, but that's not necessarily true since you can have a higher DCR and the same or LOWER output.
There's so many factors to guitar pickups by themselves, before you even get to the factors of the rest of the guitar, that you can never reduce "tone" to one component.
So, if you do decide to continue with this, my suggestion is to pack the coil with as many traces as PCBWay can get you per board and then pack as many boards into the stack as you can. It seems that PCBWay does do those super-thin flexible PCBs if they can't do a rigid board super thin. I think that would be your best way forward.
This has me thinking of applying the ideas to Jaguar and Jazzmaster pickups since I've been on a huge offset guitar kick lately. LOL
I packed them as tight as their standard manufacturing allows. If you go with the advanced manufacturing plant they can do more, but then you have to order more and it gets quite a bit more expensive. Making coils is apparently quite difficult as any tiny defect will almost certainly make the whole pcb not work. The minimum traces for coils are quite a bit bigger than for regular pcbs, had to find that out the hard way :D It's definitely possible, but I think the more important area to focus on would be the signal processing to increase the output. The Fishmanns do have slightly tighter coils, but not by all that much.
really interesting video! as this designs might not be a good pickup, it might possible to design a singular pickup for every string? in order to use it on a polynote guitar to MIDI. maybe not worth it, but it would be nice to have an budget alternative if it is possible to make it budget friendly
Making them out of wire is much more budget friendly, unless you make thousands of them. There is nothing stopping you from making a separate coil for each string though, you just might have to stagger them but that shouldn't be an issue.
The magic of hexaphonic pickups is not in the pickup itself, but how you convert the signal to midi.
@@BrunodeSouzaLino yes, but that part is now available in the maker and open-source community. The missing parts are the pickups. Making pickups by hand is hard, but maybe using just stacked PCBs might be easier
It would almost certainly be cheaper and faster to make six little bobbins, wind them individually, and then stick them together. You will want to put this pickup a close to the bridge as possible so that the deflection of any string is next to zero and you don't have to worry about bleed from adjacent strings as much.
Would it be even simpler to make thin minihumbucker alumitone type pickups, with slightly different variables, and looking at different transformers to find out which works best and cheapest?
I am building one of them, though I wondered about pcb traced ones too, thing is alumitone style, even if you use them with a transformer - are taking up much more volume in which field is active. He'd have to go with flexible board design with his to get anywhere near what a regular pickup does. Funnier still I actually knew tech alumitones used ( not to that extent ), from old soviet era book where they told you how to make a bunch of home "electronics" toys. it was their recomendation if you couldn't get thin enough wire, to just slap on some thick one and run that guitar via matching transformer.
Since your pickups have a much lower impedance, you have to introduce less resistance in the signal path. Fluence pickups come with kits with replacement pots of 25k, whilst a regular humbucker would use a 250k or 500k pot or even 1M depending on application.
I had my pot completely on for all the tests, so there was no resistance in the signal path (apart from wire resistance). Interesting though that the Fishman pots are so much lower, that explains why they include them. Though they are after the signal processing, so the inductance of the coil has little significance at this point.
@@DarkArtGuitars EMG pickups also use 25k pots. Then you have the odd animal of Seymour Duncan Livewire, which uses 100k linear pots.
That is wrong. Higher load impedance does not hurt a low impedance source; however, since you can lower the load impedance with such a source, the thermal noise introduced by those parts will drop significantly. Passive magnetic pickups have higher pot values exactly to not load down the high impedance source too much, as that would introduce a low pass filter, whose corner frequency you want to raise as high as possible, making such high values necessary in passive designs.
Did you try different potentiometers? You can get a decent lowpass effect with different pots. If you had 500k in your guitar, maybe a 1k similar to what EMG recommends would work well?
You're right, I was probably using too large of a pot on the active one, but when fully on that will only make a small difference. My amplification circuit was mainly also not right as it is intended for pickups that already have a high impedance and not ones like mine.
I would love to see a circuit schematic for the PCB in Fluence pickups, looking at how they do their preamp and what components are used give some insight into tone.
I think a lot of what they're doing is done digitally, but I suppose you'd need to get a job at fishman to get access to them :D
I was thinking more like someone could heat up the epoxy and remove the bottom circuit board to see what’s on the other side
@@dataplatter Probably wouldn't tell you all that much as I believe they're doing much on the digital side.
From what I understand, the Fluences have a resonant frequency past 20kHz (this was from the mouth of the original designer), so they are for all intents and purposes flat in the audible range. The point seems to be that they get all their actual tone shaping from the preamp (aside from the magnetic field structure/coil geometry).
Yes, they're very low impedance, so the corner frequency is indeed outside of the audible spectrum, and they get voiced (and boosted) by the preamp.
Guitar pickups and electronics inside a guitar form a RCL filter, and because of the way their pickups are made, they work with the same inductor for every models, and because it's a pcb, it means that the inductor has a very low tolerance, which make their voicing easily repeatable.
The voicing would require some maths, or at least a simulation to get it right.
@@KahruSuomiPerkele I can't imagine that the voicing is very complex. Probably also a couple of simple filters based on LCR measurements of existing popular pickups. They've stated that they don't try to replicate magnetic field stuff, which make sense. It's likely a PITA to reproduce the comb filtering / integral over the string sensing area etc.
Capacitor networks, not dsp. Antigua has shown how to do it on guitar nutz.
Wouldn't it be easier to draw a full size pcb onto a thin non conductive sheet, and use glue and gold leaf to paint a microcircuit directly onto the sheet?
(I'm coming from a crafting background and don't know much if anything about electronics)
And then I noticed you have a 3D printer in the background.
I know very little about guitar pickups but found the video very interesting, thanks. The old school way of matching impedances would be to use a transformer. Low impedance does not automatically mean higher noise, magnetic phono (vinyl) cartridges are very low impedance and are matched to a low impedance amplifier. Common base transistor configurations were commonly used.
I do see the problem of low frequency response, that sounds like a magnetic problem if the pickup has a poor response, magnetic components do give higher outputs at higher frequencies. You can do a frequency response to see if the low frequency falloff is just magnetic response (lower at lower frequencies) or if your pickup is falling off faster than expected (6 dB per octave?).
Low impedance means lower noise by principle, as thermal noise is proportional to impedance squared. However, the necessary gain stage introduces some noise again by itself, so it's important to limit that by bootstrapping, which will also boost the low end.
@@lucemiserlohn thermal noise *power* is proportional to the noise resistance, voltage noise would be proportional to square root of resistance. V^2=4kTBR. Bootstrapping increases input impedance, reduces gain, effect on noise is more significant for high impedance systems, not here. You are muddying the water by introducing unnecessary concepts, for this application there are many tried circuits that are simple and effective for magnetic pickups.
Your problem with the coil defect makes me wonder what would happen if some or all of these seperate coils would be wired in parallel. Like what would it mean for the sound if instead of the magnetic field inducing signal in one coil, it induces a signal in many coils at once
I don't think it would be much different to having just one of the PCBs, as all the wires would be in parallel which would be like just using thicker wire. (neglecting any minor spacial differences in the magnetic field). It would come close to what Lace does with their pickup that only have a single loop and then use a transformer to amplify the signal and increase the impedance to the amp.
Rock On!
If I were to make a suggestion about how you could make the design easier to manufacture, there's no reason why you couldn't use the space in the humbucker footprint a bit differently.
If one were to use a single line of rod magnets, or even a bar magnet with the magnetic poles oriented towards and away from the strings, down the middle you would dramatically increase the amount of room for the tracks, allowing them to be wider and with a bit more room between them. You would just need to have half the stack going clockwise and the other going counterclockwise for the humbucking effect.
In terms of the amount of winds, the thing that matters most is the mass of the copper going around the pickup. That thin wire is just the most space efficient way to get the copper tightly fitted around the pole pieces, but on a pcb you can have the individual tracks as wide as you want, within reason.
You could even just have one PCB design, with it turned upside down for the reversed coil.
However you want to think about it, the surface area saved by doing this could allow you to get more copper into the coil with less layers.
I am immediately picking up on the fact that the space available is not equally distributed over the proposed area and that the shorter edges of the shape have much less room for expansion.
I'm guessing that it may be possible to vary the width of the tracks in order to compensate, however that could end up doing something very odd because the introduction of areas where the electron flow would be moving at different speeds (faster in the thin tracks and slower in the broader tracks, a bit like how water flows quicker through a narrow stream and then slows down in a wider river bed)
The output should be at the same frequency, but I don't know if I could be sure that it wouldn't introduce some weird phasing effects.
Thanks for your input, though I do have to correct you one one point. For the signal strength it is in fact the number of windings and not the mass of the copper that is relevant. The induced current by the magnetic field scales linearly with the windings. The thickness of the wire only matters for the resistance (and obviously how many winds you can fit in a given space).
This is a low impedance pickup. This is why the Fishman is active. You need to use either an active stage to boost the level or use a transformer.
An EMG is actually a high impedance pickup with a preamp. There’s no added gain.
Also it’s not hard to repeatedly make standard pickups. I do it all the time.
According to reverse engineering of the EMG81-85, the EMG are medium impedance (they're like 8k ohm, which is about half the impedance of a paf), and there is some boosting happening, as well as some voicing? because they emphasise the high end.
@@KahruSuomiPerkele I was one of the people who took EMGs apart. You can find photos of an SA with my hand holding it.
The 81 would be on par with a DiMarzio Super Distortion, *if* the two coils were wired in series. Basically the same as the HZ version.
But the way they are set up is it’s both coils going to the op amp in a differential manner. Each coil is grounded on one end. The other end goes to the + and - inputs. So they aren’t in series. They are in parallel, not not in the usual sense. The two coils don’t reduce their impedance.
8k is high impedance. A PAF is usually between 7.8 and 8.5. And that's the DC resistance, not the inductance.
An Alembic pickup is about 1.5k, and that’s medium impedance. A low Z microphone is about 250 ohms. Low impedance is 50 to 600 ohms.
This design needs an amplifier to boost the signal. Discrete or op amp. What I see inside my Fluence single coil is a discrete amplifier. The output of the bare coil is -20dB less than when powered on. Probably you need to amplify at least as much with your pickup +20dB or even more. Traditional coil can do the same when underwound and is way cheaper. Cool idea though.
19:30 I don't know what the problem is here: none of the strings resonate. Listen to the low E- what's wrong with this guitar? Nut? Fret buzz? Makes me think the problem is not the pickup here either: 12:40 -- these guitars are not set up?
They sounds like Danelectro lipstick pickups.
Went to the link. Dylan talks, and talks, and talks.
to be fair, it's in the channel name
dude you need to eat something
I wanted to watch this but I can't handle your rambling.
cool
Love @dylantalkstone