Alternate Pickup Types

[Der_Mangler]

To the management and staff of BKP: would you guys be willing to make bladed, bar magnet, 11-pole piece, or bass pickups? I'm designing a guitar and I've heard good reviews about your pickups. I've also heard that bladed and bar magnet pickups have more sustain.

 The 11-pole-piece pickups? I got that idea from Carvin. They claim that such an arrangement prevents volume changes during bending.

[HJM]

Hi there!

I'd guess the problem would be tooling for a small company like BKP.

The warpig allen bolts do a similar job of spreading the magnetic field.

Bass pickups are available, Mr Pig will tell you about them!

[PhilKing]

John Birch had the row of screws idea in his pickups in the 70's (look at Tony Iommi's old SG).  My bare knuckles sustain as much as I want (I can go make a coffee, read a book, come back and they are still ringing :twisted: ).  

I think most of the sustain comes from the interaction between the guitar, pickups and amp.  With my valve amps cranked, there is plenty of sustain (even on my stereo 3 watt!).

I have never really gone for the tone of blade pickups for classic rock.  They always seem ok for clean, but too metallic when driven.   I know a lot of people use the hot rails, so I am probably looking at it differently to other people, however for me the regular pickups give a great sound.

[Der_Mangler]

How about active pickups, can they do those?

[maliciousteve]

no mate, active pickups is something the guys from Bareknuckle aren't interested in. Active pickups lack something that passive pickups have. Plus bareknuckles are so good anyway that they blow away EMG and they don't even need a battery.

[Steve-Mr Pig 2U]

To the management and staff of BKP: would you guys be willing to make bladed, bar magnet, 11-pole piece, or bass pickups? I'm designing a guitar and I've heard good reviews about your pickups. I've also heard that bladed and bar magnet pickups have more sustain.

 The 11-pole-piece pickups? I got that idea from Carvin. They claim that such an arrangement prevents volume changes during bending.

We do make bass pickups, P and J style for 4 and 5 string. We just haven’t officially launched them as a product range yet.
Ive played a PRS bass with blade pickups in and it sounded terrible so I wouldn't go down that road for bass pickups.
We can make custom orders, in the way of unusual pole numbers, but only if the customer will source/provide the custom made components (see 8 string thread) as we simply do not have the time and we don’t want to be too distracted from our main product lines.
By bar magnet, are you referring to single coils? And 11 pole pieces, is that for an 11 string guitar?

[rinse_master]

And 11 pole pieces, is that for an 11 string guitar?

I think the Carvins have 12 pole peices, as in 2 for each string (one either side)

Have a look at this pic: http://www.carvin.com/products/guitar.php?ItemNumber=CT6M

Der_Mangler: Is that what you meant?...

[Tim]

You're right Carvin p/ups feature 12 tiny poles.................I'm going to be contentious here and go on record as saying 'gimmick'.
I'll be damned if anyone could hear any drop out from a properly built pickup when bending a string across poles.

Active pickups.................EMG make great actives and no one's bettered them, passives are our speciality and we'll stick to what we know.

[Der_Mangler]

The 11-pole pieced pickups seem to have been inspired by J-bass and P-bass pickups, which have 2 PPs to a string. However, guitars have much less string space, so they could only fit 11 PPs. A couple of weeks ago, I had this idea for pups with square pole pieces, to use up more of the space of the bobbin. I also came up with the idea of having one or two small blades for each string, in order to get the compactness of bladed pickups, but with the tone of traditional pickups.

[Steve-Mr Pig 2U]

If they had 2 poles to a string, you would get 12 poles in total. I don’t think that square poles would be a good idea as they would distribute the magnetic field unevenly.
Whenever you change the size and shape of the magnetic poles you will get a very different sound so you will never get a traditional tone from a blade pickup.
J an P bass pickups have two poles per sting because the strings are so thick and because the string moves so much more over the poles, This is not a problem with a guitar because the strings are allot thinner and move much less, so two poles are not necessary.

Basically if you've never seen something like square poles or small blades, it’s probably because someone’s tried it and it doesn't sound good so it never went into production.

[Ratrod]

I've seen pickups with square poles. It looked rediculous. Wasn't impressed by the sound. Just another gimmick.