Ilitch not possible for JM. Now what?

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Embenny
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Re: Ilitch not possible for JM. Now what?

Post by Embenny » Mon Feb 22, 2021 3:07 pm

alexpigment wrote:
Mon Feb 22, 2021 2:38 pm

It's not that I prefer the dummy coil sound in any notable way. I only started using them when I moved into a location that had a hum problem and I wanted desperately to keep my *existing* sound. I tried various noiseless sets and couldn't get the tone I already had. At any rate, I do understand the science of all this from a fairly basic standpoint. What I'm saying is that I had a toggle, and when the toggle was switched, there was very little tonal difference. That's not really a scientific analysis, but it is what I would call an indisputable statement. This may be related to my pickup choices, pots, positioning, and many other details. Who knows why your experience differed so much.

As for the orientation and placement, I disagree with that fairly wholeheartedly. I know with certainty that the axis is the most important factor (they should both be pointing at the same magnetic direction). The other factors are much, much less important. As you almost certainly know, the middle position on a JM is pretty darn quiet, and the pickups are quite far apart. The strings may sound very different under those two pickup positions, but the hum/interference they pick up should be relatively the same. The same principle certainly applies to normal humbuckers.

More importantly, turning the dummy coil 90 degrees CW/CCW from the orientation of the pickups seems to have very little effect, and is not at all worth the trouble of trying to shoehorn (or route) into a cavity that will not accept them. Fender has known this for years, as they always install the dummy coils in applicable models (certain Strats) along the side of the control knobs, so roughly 45 degrees from the actual pickups in the guitar. My Fender Powerhouse Strat from 98, which came factory with a dummy coil is exactly like this. The guitar is at least as silent as any humbucker guitar I have (and actually more silent in some cases).

In other words, I understand what you're saying from a scientific standpoint, but you'll have to trust that I've done the testing on this, and extensively so, and I think I can speak with some authority that your points are not universally true or relevant in practice. I don't know why your JM sounded so vastly different with a dummy coil, but I ask that you resist the urge to counter these points based on your own less-than-ideal experience, as I believe this information may be very useful to the OP who is asking specifically about Ilitch alternatives.
When I say position, I'm talking about orientation relative to the plane of the existing pickups, not physical proximity. Of course you can move the coil to a cavity, but if it's oriented along a different plane relative to the pickups, you can and will pick up different amounts of hum. Rotating within the plane defined by the existing pickups, like you described, does nothing. We're saying the same thing.

I'm glad you're happy with your dummy coils.
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Re: Ilitch not possible for JM. Now what?

Post by Always-Ben » Mon Feb 22, 2021 5:28 pm

Larry Mal wrote:
Mon Feb 22, 2021 6:28 am
Incidentally I went through the same process, I've had good luck with Ilitch stuff in Telecasters, and wanted it in my Jazzmasters. No luck, like the OP says.

I ended up buying some Kinman pickups just to try them out and I am an immediate convert to that, and that'll likely be my go to for the future. That being said, I also have some Fralin and Wilde noiseless pickups, they are very good also.

I'm done with single coils. The alternatives out there have arrived and are not only good noiseless single coil alternatives but they are just very good pickups in their own way, they now have the dynamic range and frequency response as the pickups they replaced if not the exact same resonant peak/EQ curve.
Which of those noiseless options have the closes resonant peak/EQ curve to Fender's Pure Vintage 65 pickups?

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Re: Ilitch not possible for JM. Now what?

Post by charmonder » Mon Feb 22, 2021 6:09 pm

mbene085 wrote:
Sun Feb 21, 2021 11:24 pm

I also disagree strongly with the use of any kind of noise gate being proposed as a solution, because it fundamentally does not work. Noise gates only stop hum when you're not playing, by design. Turn up the gain, play softly, and the gate is doing nothing while the mains hum destroys your SNR.

Pedals and processors that work to reduce hum while you're playing aren't noise gates, though they sometimes additionally include noise gates, and are sometimes mislabeled as noise gates (kinda like the whole Fender Vibrato on amps being tremolo, and Tremolo bridges being vibratos). Noise-reduction processors aimed at canceling mains hum use a couple of tricks, including generating mains hum and phase-shifting it so that it cancels out what the pickups are generating, applying narrow-band EQ, dynamic filtering, etc.

All of those are expensive bandaids, and all come at a certain penalty, tone-wise, though you might be happy to pay that penalty, or might even enjoy the tone more after processing since it's all a matter of taste.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, though, and preventing hum is way more effective than trying to deal with it once it's there.
100% agree with this. The best you can get from a noise gate pedal (proper) is only a clever kill switch. I have the EHX hum canceller, which honestly, it works astonishingly on open chords but around the 7th fret and higher and it could not sound more processed. Its almost charming how it ruins the sound of your lead bits wtih robotic sounding short delay. Both these pedals work fantastically at what they do but it doesn't actually solve the problem better than finding a low noise pickup you like

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Re: Ilitch not possible for JM. Now what?

Post by Larry Mal » Mon Feb 22, 2021 6:23 pm

Always-Ben wrote:
Mon Feb 22, 2021 5:28 pm


Which of those noiseless options have the closes resonant peak/EQ curve to Fender's Pure Vintage 65 pickups?
Sorry, Ben, I would only be speculating. I wish there were frequency response graphs available out there but I'm not aware of any.

The only noiseless pickups in the Jazzmaster format that I have are Kinman Thickmasters, which are wonderful pickups. Kinman makes some pickups that are voiced to be more like the vintage Jazzmaster (the "Surfmasters") and that's what will go in my other Jazzmaster when I get the money together.

I don't know that I would be willing to say how close any of that sounds to the AVRI pickups that the Thickmasters replaced, I can say that I found the Kinman pickups to be excellent pickups in every way in terms of frequency response and dynamic range. But you can imagine that since these pickups cost $500 a set that I'm a little hesitant to talk you into them.

At some point I did A/B the Kinman Thickmasters and some hand wound vintage wind pickups that I have in my other Jazzmaster, and I really liked those Thickmasters a whole lot. I prefer them by a fair margin, but mainly because they are just fantastic pickups and not because they are especially vintage voiced (and they aren't supposed to be, either).

I should mention that I also have a set of Fralin noise cancelling P90s but with the Alnico rods in there, and my boy Mike (mbene above) tells us that these pickups are the exact same as what Fralin would call a noiseless Jazzmaster pickup but in the P90 form factor, and I believe him. I'm also pleased with these pickups, but I will say that they don't "crush" like typical P90s do and I think that they don't particularly sound like Jazzmaster pickups, of course they are in a Gibson Firebird so you wouldn't really expect them to sound the same in there. I think I would like them just fine in a Jazzmaster but my guess is that these would be a little off from the vintage Jazzmaster pickup experience.

Sorry I can't be more specific... this stuff is subjective, and I wish I could back this up with actual resonant peak and EQ curves. I hope you can find a way to hear some sound samples or try them out in some way and I certainly wish you the best with your search.
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Re: Ilitch not possible for JM. Now what?

Post by charmonder » Mon Feb 22, 2021 6:31 pm

Larry Mal wrote:
Mon Feb 22, 2021 6:23 pm
Always-Ben wrote:
Mon Feb 22, 2021 5:28 pm


Which of those noiseless options have the closes resonant peak/EQ curve to Fender's Pure Vintage 65 pickups?
Sorry, Ben, I would only be speculating. I wish there were frequency response graphs available out there but I'm not aware of any.

The only noiseless pickups in the Jazzmaster format that I have are Kinman Thickmasters, which are wonderful pickups. Kinman makes some pickups that are voiced to be more like the vintage Jazzmaster (the "Surfmasters") and that's what will go in my other Jazzmaster when I get the money together.

I don't know that I would be willing to say how close any of that sounds to the AVRI pickups that the Thickmasters replaced, I can say that I found the Kinman pickups to be excellent pickups in every way in terms of frequency response and dynamic range. But you can imagine that since these pickups cost $500 a set that I'm a little hesitant to talk you into them.

At some point I did A/B the Kinman Thickmasters and some hand wound vintage wind pickups that I have in my other Jazzmaster, and I really liked those Thickmasters a whole lot. I prefer them by a fair margin, but mainly because they are just fantastic pickups and not because they are especially vintage voiced (and they aren't supposed to be, either).

I should mention that I also have a set of Fralin noise cancelling P90s but with the Alnico rods in there, and my boy Mike (mbene above) tells us that these pickups are the exact same as what Fralin would call a noiseless Jazzmaster pickup but in the P90 form factor, and I believe him. I'm also pleased with these pickups, but I will say that they don't "crush" like typical P90s do and I think that they don't particularly sound like Jazzmaster pickups, of course they are in a Gibson Firebird so you wouldn't really expect them to sound the same in there. I think I would like them just fine in a Jazzmaster but my guess is that these would be a little off from the vintage Jazzmaster pickup experience.

Sorry I can't be more specific... this stuff is subjective, and I wish I could back this up with actual resonant peak and EQ curves. I hope you can find a way to hear some sound samples or try them out in some way and I certainly wish you the best with your search.
nice I actually just ordered thickmasters yesterday I'm so excited

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Re: Ilitch not possible for JM. Now what?

Post by Larry Mal » Mon Feb 22, 2021 6:47 pm

charmonder wrote:
Mon Feb 22, 2021 6:31 pm

nice I actually just ordered thickmasters yesterday I'm so excited
I think you will be very pleased. I got one for cheap on eBay, and so I bought another one, and frankly none of this was particularly well researched or thought out. To be honest I didn't expect to win the eBay auction and had forgotten about it.

So I was pretty nervous having them put in, I was feeling like I might have turned my AVRI Jazzmaster into something more like my Les Paul Studio.

All that went away immediately upon hearing them, and after an hour or so of playing them I was just convinced that these were incredible pickups that did everything a pickup is supposed to do very well. At some point I kind of quit caring or even remembering what these sounded like compared to the AVRI pickups, which is why I don't feel confident being able to speak to that very well, unfortunately.
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Re: Ilitch not possible for JM. Now what?

Post by Always-Ben » Mon Mar 01, 2021 11:01 am

charmonder wrote:
Mon Feb 22, 2021 6:31 pm
Larry Mal wrote:
Mon Feb 22, 2021 6:23 pm
Always-Ben wrote:
Mon Feb 22, 2021 5:28 pm


Which of those noiseless options have the closes resonant peak/EQ curve to Fender's Pure Vintage 65 pickups?
Sorry, Ben, I would only be speculating. I wish there were frequency response graphs available out there but I'm not aware of any.

The only noiseless pickups in the Jazzmaster format that I have are Kinman Thickmasters, which are wonderful pickups. Kinman makes some pickups that are voiced to be more like the vintage Jazzmaster (the "Surfmasters") and that's what will go in my other Jazzmaster when I get the money together.

I don't know that I would be willing to say how close any of that sounds to the AVRI pickups that the Thickmasters replaced, I can say that I found the Kinman pickups to be excellent pickups in every way in terms of frequency response and dynamic range. But you can imagine that since these pickups cost $500 a set that I'm a little hesitant to talk you into them.

At some point I did A/B the Kinman Thickmasters and some hand wound vintage wind pickups that I have in my other Jazzmaster, and I really liked those Thickmasters a whole lot. I prefer them by a fair margin, but mainly because they are just fantastic pickups and not because they are especially vintage voiced (and they aren't supposed to be, either).

I should mention that I also have a set of Fralin noise cancelling P90s but with the Alnico rods in there, and my boy Mike (mbene above) tells us that these pickups are the exact same as what Fralin would call a noiseless Jazzmaster pickup but in the P90 form factor, and I believe him. I'm also pleased with these pickups, but I will say that they don't "crush" like typical P90s do and I think that they don't particularly sound like Jazzmaster pickups, of course they are in a Gibson Firebird so you wouldn't really expect them to sound the same in there. I think I would like them just fine in a Jazzmaster but my guess is that these would be a little off from the vintage Jazzmaster pickup experience.

Sorry I can't be more specific... this stuff is subjective, and I wish I could back this up with actual resonant peak and EQ curves. I hope you can find a way to hear some sound samples or try them out in some way and I certainly wish you the best with your search.
nice I actually just ordered thickmasters yesterday I'm so excited
Get those Thickmasters in yet?

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Re: Ilitch not possible for JM. Now what?

Post by charmonder » Mon Mar 01, 2021 3:05 pm

Always-Ben wrote:
Mon Mar 01, 2021 11:01 am

Get those Thickmasters in yet?
still in mail, heads up though the final price should be around $360 for a set at the moment

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Re: Ilitch not possible for JM. Now what?

Post by Norrin Radd » Mon Mar 01, 2021 8:41 pm

Larry Mal wrote:
Mon Feb 22, 2021 5:27 am
They taught me in school that the best way to deal with noise is to not have it in the first place. Similar to any other problem, I guess. That's my zen outlook for the day.

From my own experience, I am about to pull an Ilitch system out of a guitar and put some very nice pickups on the block because there is still too much noise: I had forgotten that rule, and I counted on the Ilitch system to mitigate the noise rather than disallowed the noise in the first place.

This isn't a slam on Ilitch, they work well at reducing hum in guitars in which noise can be prevented with very effective shielding.

Again from my experience: I see that noise cancelling pickups are not being considered here, but I've been over all the ground there is trying to preserve "real" vintage sound without noise. I've come to conclude that it's not really worth the effort, single coil form factor pickups without hum are every bit as good as vintage type pickups are now, and they do the important thing of stopping noise in your chain before it happens.

In the future, I won't be bothering with Ilitch stuff or other dummy coils and I'll just be pulling the old noisy kind of pickups out of my guitars and putting in noise free pickups.
Amen to this! After many years I’ve discovered the same. The Novak’s in my JM and the Kinman’s in my Strat are spectacular! The DiMarzios in my other guitars are good as well. Eventually I’d like to have Kinman’s or Novak’s in everything I own. I love single coil tone but hate the hum. And now I CAN have both! 8)

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Re: Ilitch not possible for JM. Now what?

Post by jonnyrocket » Tue Jul 20, 2021 8:23 am

I'm also in search for noiseless Jazzmaster pickups and was wondering if anyone here has tried Brandonwound pickups? The price seem quite good!

I am still ok with single coils but mainly in Strats or Teles. My LsL Saticoy (strat type) is shielded and so silent that it has never been an issue. I have one of the EP Custom pickups on my Squier Jazzmaster which is shielded as well and it's not terribly noisy but once you add gain it's quite noisy. I love the sound of these pickups and though of going the Ilitch route by doing the routing myself but once Ilitch found out that I wanted to do the routing myself, he stopped responding to my emails. I'm assuming he wants to have some control on how these are installed to make sure that he does not end up getting bad reviews from improperly installed systems but if that's the case, I would have liked him to say it plain and simple!

I do have an Ilitch tele pick guard and the guitar is silent but not as silent as I was hoping for. Since this guitar has pretty low output pickups, I figured that the Ilitch system might just not be as effective with bigger pickups like Jazzmaster.

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Re: Ilitch not possible for JM. Now what?

Post by Larry Mal » Tue Jul 20, 2021 8:33 am

jonnyrocket wrote:
Tue Jul 20, 2021 8:23 am
I'm also in search for noiseless Jazzmaster pickups and was wondering if anyone here has tried Brandonwound pickups? The price seem quite good!
I do have a set of Brandonwound pickups in my MIJ Jazzmaster and as you might have read I have the Thickmasters in my AVRI.

I like the Brandonwounds, and I feel that they capture the authentic Jazzmaster pickup sound very faithfully.

I also feel that I like the Kinmans more, and that if I was buying again I would get the Kinman Surfmasters instead. Not, however, enough to actually do that, because I'm overall happy with the Brandonwounds and feel that they nail the Jazzmaster pickup experience.

That is to say, the Brandonwounds nail the Jazzmaster pickup experience with the great qualities and the not so great, they capture all the idiosyncratic nature of those pickups.

The Kinmans, at least my Thickmasters, don't try to be a faithful recreation and aren't, but they are arguably the better pickup.

But I don't have anything negative to say about the Brandonwounds and if you feel that you would like them based on what you've read and heard, I expect that you will.
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Re: Ilitch not possible for JM. Now what?

Post by Embenny » Tue Jul 20, 2021 9:06 am

Oh, I didn't know that you got Brandonwounds.

I will say that this one quote from his page is reason enough for me to avoid them, personally:
The bridge output is around 9k and neck output around 8k.
I mean, I have to presume that he knows that DC resistance has nothing to do with output, so he's just deliberately contributing to the ignorance and voodoo surrounding guitar pickups. It also makes him sound stupider than I'm sure he is.

Especially since he says this on the same page:
Without giving away secrets, I have found the best way to capture the classic jazzmaster tone we all know but without the annoying 60 cycle hum. There are a few other builders who have their own great versions but mine are built quite differently.
Any pickup built differently to another has incomparable DC resistance. That's guitar pickup 101. A 3.5k Charlie Christian or 7k Firebird are higher output than an 8k Jazzmaster single coil.

It's ridiculous to advertise an "8k output" on a $125 pickup of non-standard design.
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Re: Ilitch not possible for JM. Now what?

Post by Larry Mal » Tue Jul 20, 2021 9:38 am

I also don't understand what can be so different about them, they are humbuckers of some variant I can only imagine. I took the cover off, but the rest of the pickup was wrapped so I couldn't tell if it was some kind of stacked or side by side coil, side by side would be my guess because the pickups aren't very deep.

But they sound good, and they are noiseless, and they do sound like Jazzmaster pickups, I'll give them that.
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Re: Ilitch not possible for JM. Now what?

Post by Embenny » Tue Jul 20, 2021 10:30 am

There's plenty of room for variations on a theme within a Jazzmaster cover, but ultimately your two coils either have to be next to each other, on top of each other, or within each other (i.e. concentric). Fralin went for a single set of magnets with side by side sidewinder coils. Mojotone doesn't do JMs, but their other Fender "quiet coils" are blade magnets side by side like tiny Firebird pickups. Kinman is a stacked design (albeit a highly engineered one). Novak does side by side coils.

I could imagine multiple ways you could call a noiseless JM "built differently" from current options. A P90-sized coil around the magnets with a narrow air coil wedged into one edge. A Thunderbird pickup with the magnet removed from one coil. An asymmetrically-wound Firebird pickup.

All of those could easily be wound to ~3H inductance and would give a Jazzmaster-like resonance peak. Of the options I just named, the first two would likely end up around 8-9k resistance if you used 42 or 43 AWG for the main coil. In fact, you could just straight up pop one magnet out of a Thunderbird and have a noiseless pickup with a ballpark vintage Fender voice that fits into a JM cover.

That actually sounds like a fun hypothesis to test. There are these, which are relatively cheap, so it might be a fun experiment to see how those would sound with one bobbin converted to a dummy coil.

Some day, I swear I'm going to find the time to build a pickup winder and start doing experiments myself.
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Re: Ilitch not possible for JM. Now what?

Post by HarlowTheFish » Tue Jul 20, 2021 10:46 am

I've got the Brandonwound set in my parts 'stang (25.5" and with a JM bridge and trem though, so the body shape is the real difference) and they actually sound really good. I was kinda skeptical just looking at his page (which is why I started a thread over on the mod board for it) but a couple folks got them in and were pretty happy, and from the time I've had with Fender JMs, they do sound like them (though the bridge is a bit hotter, which IMO is a bit more usable). Honestly, for the price, they're about as good a deal as you're gonna get on a niche design (noiseless) of a niche pickup (JM), and I think they sound phenomenal.

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