Pickup Lines
Stompbox designer Dan Coggins explains why ‘transparency’ does not always equal success when it comes to pickups and effects…
We often hear of effects pedals being favourably described as ‘transparent’, which means that, following processing, the essential sound qualities of the instrument and its pickup(s) are left relatively intact while its inherent character remains easily identifiable. Being able to explore and appreciate the finer subtleties of a guitar is something many strive for, especially those lucky enough to own an expensive top-shelf model. For some players, however, an effect’s so-called transparency may not be the most relevant consideration, while for others, it appears to defeat the object entirely – as J Mascis once said: “If it doesn’t have a sound, why would I want to use it?”
“If you’re plugging into a Big Muff, it can be really difficult to tell the difference between a Tele single coil or a Les Paul humbucker,” says Dan Coggins, circuit designer for the likes of Lovetone, Dinosaural and ThorpyFX. “It just sounds like a Big Muff more than anything. In my book, the word ‘transparent’ in relation to effects just means that it’s got very low noise, very wide bandwidth and it doesn’t impart a sonic agenda on the pickups; it’s letting the sound through. Transparency depends on how much of a sonic agenda the pedal has and how much it dominates the EQ and timbre of the pickups.
“I recently saw a clip of Steve Howe from the Tales From Topographic Oceans tour in the mid-70s,” continues Dan. “He was playing a Les Paul Junior with one P-90 in the bridge and it sounded like he was playing it through a Big Muff. When he turned the fuzz off, it sounded like a bridge pickup, but with it on, it sounded like Robert Fripp playing the neck [humbucker] of a Les Paul. That’s because the Big Muff filters everything really heavily and can make it sound like ‘woman’ tone, regardless of what the pickups are, or where they’re positioned.”
By the same token, certain amplifiers can also have an extreme and overriding (albeit potentially desirable) effect on the sound of a guitar’s pickup. “A mate of mine was playing through an HH IC100 head, which is a solid-state amp from the early 70s,” recalls Dan. “That [model] was apparently used on a lot of the early Quo records and he was using it to emulate Rick Parfitt’s guitar sound. It sounds absolutely spot on! It sounds bang on for all that early 70s Quo. Interestingly, it almost doesn’t matter which guitar you plug into it because it just makes that sound; it’s got so much gain it does its own thing. It’s almost as if your instrument is just telling it which notes to put out!
“If you’re going into tons of distortion, it’s more about a difference in timbre than anything else, because you’ve got more than enough gain to make up for any discrepancies in pickup level. When you switch guitars and change the pickup, you can actually hear a difference, but it’s got more to do with the change in frequency response. That’s why humbuckers can sound clearer with tons of distortion: they often have a narrower frequency response than Fender single coils, so you’re focusing the sound, as well as driving it more.
“Certainly, the character’s going to be different between different pickups and different guitars. You might find that playing humbuckers through a chorus pedal, for example, gives you quite a thick sound, just because there’s more going on in the midrange. Modulation pedals very much thrive on what’s put into them. That’s why Andy Summers with his fairly bright, stark-sounding Tele bridge pickup benefitted from using an [MXR] Dyna Comp compressor into an [Electro-Harmonix] Electric Mistress. The compressor thickens up and broadens the sound – it brings up all those harmonics – and then when you put a flanger or a chorus on top of that, you’ve got a much more even sound with more going on more of the time, and you can really hear the sweep and the movement of the modulation pedal.”
“Transparency depends on how much of a sonic agenda the pedal has”