Pickup Lines
Aaron Armstrong of Armstrong Pickups cuts through the confusion and explains why designing your own pickups can often prove to be less of a gamble…
With such a vast amount of choice and information available, navigating today’s pickup market can sometimes prove difficult, time consuming and expensive. There is, however, an alternative approach to shopping around in circles – one that involves speaking directly to the person who actually builds the pickups. In the long run, consulting a custom-spec pickup builder and getting some one-to-one expert advice may be the quickest and easiest way of finding the sound you’ve been searching for.
Armstrong Pickups draws on a few generations’ worth of experience to offer a unique service that focuses on meeting the exacting needs of the customer. “The whole idea with Armstrong Pickups is that you can design your own sound,” Aaron Armstrong (son of pickup guru Kent Armstrong and grandson of the late, great Dan Armstrong) tells us. “The customer comes to us and speaks about the sound they’re trying to achieve. Our raison d’être is to offer something out of the ordinary and not just something you can buy off the shelf.
“We’ve been doing this for many years. My dad’s got his own brand of pickups [Kent Armstrong] that are sold through WD Music. They’re a great range of pickups, but what we’re trying to do here at Armstrong Pickups is tailor whatever we make for the individual customer, rather than giving set options. Everything we do here is hand-wound individually by me. Customers phone us and speak to us about the kind of sound they’re after – what they’re hearing in their head. That’s where the skill comes in: interpreting what people really want and delivering it to them. Quite often people will compare the sound they’re hearing to something else. They might say they like a certain pickup, but that it’s lacking in brightness and needs a bit more top-end, for example.
“We just pick through the details, but at the end of the day, pickups are really quite simple. The hype you often hear about the ‘magical voodoo’ in pickups really annoys me. It’s just not rocket science. You’ve got a coil and you’ve got a magnet. You put them together and it generates electricity! When it comes to magnet type, we have everything and anything available, although we don’t tend to use neodymium because they’re ridiculously powerful. We use Alnico II up to Alnico VIII. Alnico VIIIs aren’t very common, but they’re good for, say, people who are using bronze strings on jazz guitars. For instance, you could use Alnico VIII for the wound strings and then soften it down for the unwound strings.
“We have different wire types and gauges to choose from. We also do quite a bit of rewind work and so a lot of customers want the vintage-style wire. We have got formvar and plain enamel wire, but, in my opinion, it doesn’t make any difference to the sound [laughs]! It’s just harder to work with than old stuff because it doesn’t tin as well. People say they can hear the difference, but, personally, I can’t. I’m amazed that anyone can hear the difference in an A/B test, but people say they can, and I’m always going to believe the customer is right and give them what they want. The whole thing is very subjective. What one person hears can be very different to what another person hears. Some people’s ears are better than others’ and if someone tells me they can hear a difference, then all I can do is believe them and do what they want me to do.
“We can also customise the look of the pickup by getting the covers laser-etched. We can do any kind of graphics; as long as we can get something in a PDF file or similar, we can get it laser engraved. Customised covers look really cool – and they make great gifts. It’s not like we’re trying to reinvent the wheel, but it’s nice to offer something different for people who want to have something that’s not generic and off-the-shelf.” www.armstrongpickups.co.uk
“It’s very subjective. What one person hears can be very different to what another person hears” Aaron Armstrong