Jason Lollar | Truetone Lounge
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- Опубліковано 4 сер 2021
- Jason Lollar is one of the premier pickup makers in the world, and even wrote a book on the basics of winding, and how to turn your mother's sewing machine into the perfect winder. In our Truetone Lounge interview, Jason takes us through his education at the Roberto-Venn School of Lutherie, and how he transitioned from guitar builder to pickup winder for many of the great guitar builders of today. Lollar also reveals the R&D that is involved in birthing new pickup designs, and how his work has influenced an entire generation of winders.
I have bought 3 sets from Jason over the years. One time we spoke, I thought that a replacement pickup is what I needed, he recommended trying a different tone cap first. It's great when somebody helps jeven when they are losing a sale. Thanks again Jason.
Well said!
I could listen to talk about pickups all day. Thanks!
You bet!
Mr. Lollar’s emphasis on training and keeping employees for the long haul is one key to his success.
The low wind imperials are incredible
I have a Lollar bridge in my nashville tele great sounding pickup
Lollars in every single one of my guitars. 🙌
Excellent interview! He talked about the need for consistency in making pickups, I'd say he has nailed that! I have 3 teles with the same bridge pickup, purchased years apart...they sound the SAME! Keep on doing what you do Jason and I'll gladly keep buying!
this has become one of my favorite UA-cam channels.
Love Lollar pickups ! 🙏🙏🙏❤️❤️❤️🎸🎸🎸
I could listen to this all day. Thank you very much.
Thanks for listening
Have his Vintage Ts set and Charlie Christian/Tele slanted dot humbucker set. Worth every penny, made by a legend. Thank you Jason!
I bought a custom Rickenbacher lap steel (1 1/2 inch horseshoe pickup) from Jason through The Steel Guitar Forum way back in the day. It was really great to see this interview with Jason. Good health to you both!
Great interview. Jason Lollar isn't shooting blanks ! We all love those pickups ! More power to ya !
My dog ear p90 is a thing of beauty. Smooth to straight ripping your face off rock n roll. Love it
Another great use of my time - Lollar is great and so are your vids, Zac!
Glad you like them!
Love Jason's pickups. My Strat has Black face, my Tele has J Street, My SG has an Wolftone in the bridge but a Lollar El Rayo in the neck - absolutely love the El Reyo. I have a cheap Jazzmaster that is going to get Lollars one of these days - like a comment I read in comments below. I've been through a lot of pickups over the years and I haven't found anything better than Lollars
Great interview with a great pickup maker.
The jazzmaster set he wound for me is stunning, and makes my classic vibe JM stand toe to toe with any guitar. It also gives me a distinct alternative to my other fender tones (teles and strats). Thanks Jason, for all the hard work and research put in to achieving this.
I put a Special T set in my swamp ash Tele. It was exactly what the guitar needed. It transformed the guitar. The neck pickup is not muddy at all, and the bridge pickup is warm, but twangy. I can play a wide range of music now. Very versatile. Articulate. They are definitely staying in it.
This is exactly what a pickup guru should look like.
YES!!!!
Haha...indeed. .or any guru.
I used that same winder at Roberto-Venn in 1980!
Thank you sir! Jason and I were in shop class together and even got to jam with him a few times. Even at that young age, whether playing or building, the artistic talent shone through. Great interview.
charlie lease- so long ago- glad to see you! The shop class was the one I mentioned where shmeltzer let me make a guitar- you may not recall good to see you are around- amazing the people Ive met and or reunited with on the internet
Thanks Zac that was real interesting..I just put one of his vintage T pickups in my CIJ 62 Tele custom,I had a Duncan antiquity in it but wasnt happy..but that lollar has transformed it,I am now in twang heaven,fair play to him,and that is exceptional value for money..
Thank you Jason I really appreciate being able to hear your story. Zac these interviews have such value. Fantastic job.
My pleasure!
So much knowledge. Wonderful interview!
Great interview. Jason is right up there with Seymore.
Jason is the MAN! He's made tons of great pu's for me!!
Thanks, Arlen!
@@TruetoneFX thanks arlen- you are amazing
Timely, I was deciding which pickups to buy, and now I know. Anyone with a beard almost as long as mine is trusted! :)
Seriously fascinating interview, Zac!
Great interview!
I have a Schecter Corsair Limited Edition semi-hollow in black matte and gold hardware. It is a "never going to sell" guitar with a feel to the neck that is once in a lifetime. The only thing I'm going to install a set of Lollar Low Wind Imperials with the Gold Ring, Matte Black option and a POTS set with the Les Paul form. Add a Freeway pickup selector switch and boom, done. I wouldn't trade this guitar for any 335 on earth.
Thanks Zac for the interview, thanks Jason for sharing your experience of years in the trenches.
Any time!
I have the Lollar Chicago Steel for Strat pickup in one of my strats and it's amazing!
Very nice!
Cool interview Zac , great show again .!🎸👍
Thank you for this. What a great interview.
Thanks for listening
Thanks mate, much Joy and info gained here down under...
Thanks, Craig!!
I'm an engineering technician with decades of experience.
I've used complex signal analyzers as well as waveform/pattern generators.
What JL is talking about regarding scatter vs linear winding is part of test plans I've been working on for a couple years until I can get the gear and the space together to do it properly, with calibrated equipment, so I can answer a lot of questions I have not just about pickups but about pretty much everything that 99% of people would say falls into the "black magic" realm of music applications.
I guess I have to scrape together the cash to buy yet a couple more books...it's not the technical data that I assume is in there, it's the experiential results that are being shared are what I buy books for. Technical books always have errors and become stale quickly; methods and views, experiences hard won - absolutely golden and grateful for em when someone shares what they worked so hard to learn.
Thanks for putting this up - I'll have to watch it in bits because there's so much actual practical and applied knowledge being dumped rather than a lot of interviews which are recycled fluff because someone put up a new component or book or something.
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+1 for allparts mention - if you need tiny nylon screws, especially in bulk, it's pretty much them and another little robotics company that serves up tiny bits might still be in business today...nice to hear allparts is still going, anyone that's still alive in this century is something to be grateful for. Your suppliers are your lifeline, don't piss em off unless you have to.
This interview was pure gold!! thanks for sharing
Thanks for listening
Enjoyable and informative. Thanks!
Our pleasure!
Is Jason Lollar the "Alexander Dumble" of pickup design?
no, Lollar actually talks to people.
jason lollar is the real deal not like some of these carnival barker's out there he helped me out way back in his early day's way to go jason.
Great interview. If anybody is interested. The piano pickups Jason made, were for the artist Kristeen Young, a phenomenal talent in the US.
Hey now I recall= I think you were the middleman on that right>? long time ago!
He's like the Gandalf of tone!
I got his jazz bass pickups for my Franken bass. Mighty Mite body American Standard neck . Schaller bridgeI had laying around the house. It's a good bass.
What an incredible body of knowledge! Amazingly creative guest! Good job, Zac!
Thanks so much!
I have to laugh. I've been winding my own pickups for over 3 decades, now. And since the rolls of magnet wire I got also came from surplus and scrapper places, they were never any uniform size or weight. This made use of a mechanical winder pointless, for many of the reasons Jason describes. As a result, I wind everything by hand, placing the spool on its end on the floor, such that the wire unwinds itself from the spool as you pull it up. I run a skinny screw through the bobbin or coilform, clamp that into an old-fashioned hand-drill (the kind you turn a crank to operate, and guide the wire with my thumb and index finger as I crank the drill handle with the other hand. The drill is mounted parallel to the floor (making the coilform spin perpendicular to the floor) and held in place by a vise near the edge of the bench. I like to put a piece of black material of some sort on the floor under the spool, so that I can more easily see the wire against the black background, while the coilform spins like a propeller. I get 4.25 turns per handle-crank and when I'm on a roll, I can do about 80 turns of the handle per minute. But since that's not a speed I can keep up indefinitely, let's just say I get about 300 turns per minute. That works out to just under a half-hour to wind a Strat or Tele pickup. If I was trying to operate a business, that would be a money-losing proposition. It also wouldn't yield the degree of consistency needed for a commercial product. But these are pickups for *me*, and are one-offs. I make maybe 3 or 4 a year, often just to experiment with different magnets and such, so the per-unit time and effort is not a deal-breaker.
Once in a while one has to improvise, and go beyond standard commercially-available polepieces and flatwork. I have a pre-war Kalamazoo archtop that was crying out for a mag pickup at the end of the fingerboard. Unfortunately, not a lot of guitars from that historical period had much space between the strings and body (this one has about 3/8"), so no commercially available pickups would fit under there. And I'll be damned if I was going to cut a hole in that top for the sake of a pickup. I managed to find a sextet of little very lo-profile "button" neodymium magnets, and cut out some flatwork from some ultra-thin (but pretty stiff) fibreglass PCB material (I etched the copper off). The resulting aperture for the coil is about 3/32", in order to leave enough space for the flatwork and room for mounting and space between pickup and strings. As you can imagine, that sucker HAD to be wound entirely by hand, with no mechanical assistance of any kind. I mean, I suppose *some* sort of winding jog could have been made with the required precision, but honestly, for the sake of *one* pickup, it hardly seemed worth it. So I'd tack on another few hundred turns while watching this movie or that football game. I ended up with a coil of lovely green enamel Elektrisola #43 that measured just under 4k. I got a signal, and it didn't sound too bad, but I think I need to cut some bigger flatwork, and wind it again. After all, when the coil is but 3/32" tall, you can't pack that many turns on, *unless* you have the horizontal space to do so.
But in closing, I'll just note that Jason is a semi-regular on the Pickup-Makers forum on the Music-Electronics Forum (formerly known as AMPAGE) and has been *very* generous with his knowledge and insights over the years. We all deeply appreciate it.
The only time I had a problem with uncontrollable feedback from a pickup was with unpotted hi output humbuckers on a Gibson. They squealed even when muting the strings, depending where I stood onstage or in a cramped studio. Certain pickups just need potting. My PAF replicas are half the output of those. They will remain unpotted.
I've got a Nash Telemaster and I spend hours and hours with sound....something you just don't get a chance to do with some guitars.
Interesting interview. He correctly says pickup resistance (DCR) is near-meaningless, and inductance tells you much more. But what figures does he publish on his website ? Only DCR. He has a description on his site of what inductance is and how it's important in how two pickups (of the same dimensions, when placed in the same position in a guitar) sound different. But then why doesn't he give buyers those numbers ? If he wants pickup buyers to be more educated (he criticizes some peoples' obsession with DCR), then it would be great if he contributed to that. Please give us inductance.
I have an embroidery machine and the spools unwind same way
I havnt watched it all yet but was the question asked: where does the magic lie in PU's, if indeed there really is any? I have extensively compared a Mare with a lowly early 90's stock Fender PU, and they are surprisingly not that different, the Mare has more 'presence' but the Fender with some EQ doesnt sound bad at all and would not be noticed in a live situation, sorry off topic : )
The magic is in the thought put into the design.
Interesting
Anybody know anything about lollar rocking dogs?
Libraries were better than the interweb at times.
Is there a way to test the strength of the magnet ?
How do you like his 52 Tele bridge pick-up?
very interesting. a lot of great info. he needs to work on getting the right earbuds.
Lollars are the absolute shit. They're all I buy
Jason needs to perfect his own ear piece.
Just say you had China make you an upgrade 😅😅😅
Yeah but I bet he can’t wind pickups as good as Eddie Van Halen did! Dipped em in wax. Ed invented that technique😝
Leo was wax dipping in 1951
Junior not special i think