I love Ilitch.

[Larry Mal]

If anyone is at all curious about installing one of his products, he is as good a guy as there can be. I have been on the phone with him a couple of times, and he is funny, and gracious, and will spend a good amount of time making sure that his solution is the best it can be for you. You send him an email and he just calls you up and it's fun and it's a great way to do business.

Just wanted to throw that out there. He's a wonderful guy with a great product.

[Rgand]

It's good when you have a pleasant experience with a supplier.

For some reason, the link doesn't come up for me.

[mcatano]

I'm guessing he means https://www.ilitchelectronics.com/

[Rgand]

Cool. Thanks. I think he has a great idea with those hum-cancelling coils.

[601210]

I'm guessing he means https://www.ilitchelectronics.com/

Either that, or he just had an extremely good experience at Little Caesars.

[Shadoweclipse13]

You send him an email and he just calls you up and it's fun and it's a great way to do business.

That is a really cool way to do things. I also expect that he's busy but not SO busy that he can't call everyone. I've never really looked into his stuff, and never really looked into noiseless setups in any case, but that's really good to know. I love supporting people like that.

[Larry Mal]

I think he just finds it cumbersome to respond to emails so he calls you on the phone. The thing is, he's funny and nice on the phone and the conversations are illuminating.

I will recommend his products, also- I have two Telecasters with them, and they are about 90% less noisy than they were before. It's a real pleasure for recording in my noisy environment.

[Shadoweclipse13]

That's pretty awesome. I'll have to check out some of his stuff. For your Teles, less noisy is fantastic, but do they sound any different to you?

[Larry Mal]

I haven't found them to, but one of the Teles I went from the very lackluster American Standard stock Alnico 5s to some Q pickups Alnico 3s , so there was a big change done at the same time as the Ilitch guard. Not to mention, the American Standard pickups don't have the brass plate on the bridge pickup because Fender is cheap and lame, but the Q pickups do.

The other Tele was an AVRI '62 model, I kept those pickups stock and don't really notice any kind of difference.

You'll see all over the internet that other people say that the Ilitch guards and for that matter any kind of shielding at all removes high end, I haven't noticed that at all. If it is happening, it's happening at a level that I find imperceptible and unimportant.

[Shadoweclipse13]

Interesting. I frequently find that the people who make claims like that are looking for reasons to dislike something, because of some buyer's remorse or something, instead of admitting that they just don't want it. I don't really have much that's standard shape, but I might check him out.

[jakeisjake]

I'm guessing he means https://www.ilitchelectronics.com/

I thought he liked Tolstoy...

[Larry Mal]

If you feel inclined to get the guitar or guitar body to him, he'll route your guitar out for his stuff. I haven't ever wanted to meet the expense of that, one of our first phone calls was me discussing a Gibson Firebird with three P90s that I have, and his suggestion was to ship it to him. I figured it would be $160-180 just getting it to him and back, plus $250-300 for the noise cancelling, and I just don't have that kind of money.

But if you had a Jazzmaster or something, then you could just ship the loaded body to him, that's quite a bit more feasible.

And yeah, I think that guitarists are so conservative in nature that they reject any kind of noise cancelling or even electrical shielding since Jimi didn't do it that way or something.

That being said, I have been told that adding more actual wire will increase the impedance to some degree, thus changing the sound to some degree, and that other is impossible. I don't know enough to do anything other than accept that, so I do.

That being said, sometimes people will say to just put a dummy coil in your guitar in some form or the other. So, cool, you can do that, but how much wire do you put in there? Too much and you are shunting off high frequencies as I understand it, too little and you have just wasted your time. So how do you know how much to put in there?

I don't- that's why I am willing to pay Ilitch, because I don't know and don't want to spend the time figuring it out. His stuff is designed to have as little of a footprint as possible while still reducing noise and is adjustable to your specific guitar, and since I see it works, I'll just pay for that.

[Larry Mal]

And where we are with this story is, after my phone conversation he asked me for some audio files of the noise. This Ilitch plate would be for my G&L Legacy which now has some Bill Lawrence/Wilde pickups Microcoils with the neodymium magnets in there. This is probably very boring for most people at this point.

Long story short, those Microcoil pickups sound wonderful and would probably be very low noise to most people in most environments, in my own, though, they are noisy. My apartment sucks, basically. I was hoping to use this guitar to record with and it kind of bugs me.

But he wasn't familiar with those pickups and wanted to hear the noise profile, so on Friday I recorded the single coil noise of my Fender Lead 2 and the Legacy with the Microcoils. We'll see what he says- to me, it sounded like the exact same noise.

[Embenny]

I'm interested to hear what he has to say about that noise. As we've discussed, the microcoils are "supposed to be" the lowest-noise true single coil design ever made, but you seem to have a really noisy environment. I wonder whether your house/room just has particularly bad 60Hz hum, or if it's some other type of EMF interference.

In any case, it would seem that microcoils and the Ilitch air coil are a match made in heaven, since the microcoils have the notable features of 1) lower inherent noise, and 2) an extended high-frequency response. Since the ilitch design eliminates most (but not all) 60Hz hum, starting with a low-noise signal is obviously ideal, but the second matter of extended frequency response would lead me to expect that the one downside of "maybe a tiny bit of high frequency losses" with Ilitch's design would be largely negated.

I also never noticed HF loss with my Ilitch backplate, but I never bothered to install a switch and do an A/B running through a frequency analyzer or anything like that. I've always felt it's in the "not enough to care about" category of losses, like the difference between a 10 foot or 15 foot patch cord, which does have a measurable (but not relevant, to me) impact on the frequency response of a passive pickup.

I actually remember Bill Lawrence once wrote an article all about Jimi's coiled patch cords - apparently those have so much capacitance that they shift the resonant peak of a single coil down by something like 1-2kHz. He said that the patch cord actually had a bigger role in create "the Jimi tone" than the backwards bridge pickup that gets talked about so much in magazines and on forums - especially since he spent a lot of time playing on the neck pickup, too.

That's a bit of a digression, but I just meant to say that the tiny bit of resistance inherent in the Ilitch design is probably not going to be something that could "ruin" a guitar's tone, least of all the microcoils.

[alexpigment]

I can't imagine that 60 cycle hum vs EMF would make any difference - I suspect Larry is dealing more with the latter. In my experience, 60 cycle hum is usually more of a 'hum' that sits around the normal sound, and EMF is usually more of a buzz that eats into the sound of the guitar. Unless Ilitch is doing something wildly different than a normal dummy coil, both types of noise should be cancelled.

Generally speaking, if the middle position of your guitar does not exhibit the hum/buzz in question, then it should be able to be cancelled by any coil-based noise reduction system.