Pickups...

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Re: Pickups...

Postby Tab » Fri Oct 02, 2020 7:32 am

Hi Ian, I have been following this thread as I am using CS54s, Sliders and Chris' modern Hank set on various guitars and I am very interested in the new pickups.
You are correct, there is a post missing.
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Re: Strat pickups perfected

Postby dave robinson » Fri Oct 02, 2020 10:52 am

Chris Kinman wrote:Dave Robinson, like Hank Marvin himself, more and more players are realizing hum is a dissonant, un-harmonious and generally annoying noise that pollutes their sound. Kinman pickups provides a solution without sacrificing sonic character … and now we’ve gone one better in perfecting Hank’s 60’s sounds along with Zero-Hum. You obviously have no understanding of what it took to design a noiseless pickup that is this good, there is not another noiseless that even comes close to the Magnum Opus and even Fender’s CS-54 falls short. And be aware I am just one little bloke doing my RE&D, not part of a big company that has an R&D budget … and yet my products outshine theirs.

And contrary to your insinuation that I am peddling ordinary products to gullible people solely for profit I assure you that, given the technology and the 26 odd years of development that bought me to this high point, my products represent extreme value for money … in fact a bargain considering what goes into them. Should be twice the price.

There are other benefits too,
-low string pull that minimizes that confounded Strat-itis.
-Optimized string-over-magnet alignment regardless of Vintage or Modern narrow bridges (there is more to that than simply arranging a closer magnet spread which buggers up the sound).
-Balanced G-3rd string output level.
-Beautiful pristine crystaline highs without the ragged ice pick of Fender pickups.
-Better clarity and transparency than Fender pickups which many customers testify sound veiled in side-by-side comparisons with the latest Gen-2 Kinmans.

The latter two being Paul Rossiter and Gary Taylors observations as well as a lot of my customers, they all can’t be wrong. But of course some players have wooden ears and can not discern the sonic flaws nearly as well as other players do ;)

I’m afraid you are displaying ignorance and lack of awareness with your simplistic assertion that “pickups are magnets & wire, nothing more, nothing less”. Kinman pickups are most certainly a hellava lot more than magnets and wire, there are 4 silicon steel core strips, 3 silicon steel magnetic shields, 2 types of steel core pins, wrap-around insulators that prevent short-circuiting between coil and core pins & magnets, 2 different coils wound with different turns count and different gauge wire, other stuff that grounds the magnets but not the magnetic shields and not the lower 11 steel core pins, embedded eyelets and printed circuitry that saves space by eliminating bulky hook-up wires and a few other things ... as well there are seven (7) Electrical Engineering Patents to prove it (and more coming soon). The new Magnum Opus pickups are packed with un-obvious technologies in order to solve the above-mentioned flaws with Fender pickups. These technologies are the fruits of a lifetime of dedication to improving the flaws that Leo failed to address and which, over time, became increasingly objectionable to discerning and fastidious players.

As with echo units, amplifiers, strings and indeed guitars and pickups there are good ones and there are bad ones and I'm happy to say more than one American guitar manufacturer report they have not heard a less-than-average Kinman yet, they all are outstanding.

I have found that practically all Fender type Stratocaster pickups produced after 1960 succumb to TCS. I have a set of Fender 1963 pickups and a bunch of others from later years and all of them have TCS, some are worse than others. Paul and Gary agree, they tested many. I believe Hanks original 1959 specimens are among the last pickups made that don’t easily succumb to TCS. Either that or his picking technique is so highly sophisticated and orchestrated as to avoid it.

However, one must invest in a high quality low capacitance lead. Read our Blog article “Any old cable won’t do” https://kinman.com/Bad-things-cables-can-do.php Maybe that’s the reason you had a bad experience a long time ago. Ordinary cables make good pickups sound dull and uninteresting.

CK



To Chris Kinman, thank you for your detailed reply to my comments.
Over the past sixty years I have enjoyed listening to as well as playing my favourite guitar music and picking up information along the way. I made a good living from my guitar, being part of a band that had our fair share of chart success for over seven years, still being asked to play for them even today when the need arises.
My alleged 'wooden ears' are most certainly as result of chemotherapy and radium treatment for my throat cancer, but todays hearing aids are excellent and believe me, I know when something I'm hearing is worthy of praise - or not.
I stand by what I said about Kinman Noiseless pickups, in that the first set that I bought and tried on the recommendation of the person they were designed for sounded 'lifeless' and ruined the sound of my Strat at the time. Not until I changed them for the Traditional Avn set did I get any satisfaction until changing back to normal Strat pickups, this time from Sliders. OK they are not noiseless but to be honest they don't need to be, I rarely have a problem with hum.
I notice that Kinman have continued to introduce 'improved' versions of the Noiseless Pickups throughout the past two decades so does that perhaps mean that the money people spent on the first sets was wasted ? I'll leave it to the people who removed them from their instruments to comment on that, though I know many but doubt they can be bothered, or are even still here on this site.
That said, these latest ones sound great from the snippets we've heard, but is everyone that desperate to lose the 'hum' or are they finding like myself that it's negligible, bearing in mind they'll be shelling out around £250 for a set - again.
By the way, it wasn't me who coined the phrase that pickups are magnets & wire, I pinched it from an article I read by Seth Lover, whoever he thinks he is.

The point is, all the music I love was recorded using pickups from the 'old school' and history is packed with the stuff, be it single coil or humbucking.

Leo Fender did it right the first time around and he did improve on his work later with his new pickups on the G&L series of guitars with his MFD design, which I like a lot.

By the way, all my cables have always been top quality, usually Van Dam or Whirlwind, so I know that wasn't an issue.

That's it really, I look forward to the future what's left of it and will be watching with interest how musical history is influenced with all this new technology. :)
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Re: Pickups...

Postby rogera » Fri Oct 02, 2020 2:51 pm

I'm sure that these latest Kinman pickups are very good but often when I'm reading on these pages about how good the latest echo unit / pickup / amplifier etc is then I tend to think back to what equipment Hank had in the late 50's and early 60's.
His pickups were merely those that came with the guitar and I feel sure that the cables used were not 'high quality' low capacitance ones. In addition to that, in every film or photo that I've seen of the Shadows playing, the guitar leads are quite long which inevitably increases capacitance.
I don't think that any of us would disagree that his talent played a big part of the sound that we hear on the recordings.
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Re: Pickups...

Postby fenderplucker » Fri Oct 02, 2020 3:08 pm

Hi Roger,

I agree with your points, but the problem is most of us can't get a '59 Strat, Meazzi drum echo unit or original Vox AC15/30, so some of us are trying to get the same sound with modern equipment and make it available to others. I think that we have come very close with echoes (without all the hassles of magnetic drums), amplifiers and conventional pickups and now Chris had added the advantage of low noise with no loss of sound quality. Nobody is compelled to use any of this, but at least it is available to those who do want to. The missing part is of course Hank's incredible talent so at least there is a challenge still remaining!

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Re: Pickups...

Postby roger bayliss » Fri Oct 02, 2020 3:55 pm

I think Chris Kinman should be commended really for all his efforts in achieving a vintage sounding pickup that is noiseless and actually sounds like the real deal. I remember when the impersonator 54 came out and I tried a guitar with them fitted and thought how good they sounded for vintage Shads. Any work he has done since has resulted in great sounding vintage pickups. No other noiseless pickup hits the vintage spot to my knowledge, so hats off !
American Pro Series Strat 2017, G&L S500 Natural Ash
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Re: Pickups...

Postby leddo » Sat Oct 03, 2020 10:41 am

I have had several sets of Chris Kinman pickups, the Blues set and the HBM ones, and they are the best "noiseless" pickups I have ever used. I will be sorely tempted to try these new ones when they are available.
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The creation of a new Kinman pickup

Postby Chris Kinman » Sat Oct 03, 2020 11:16 am

roger bayliss wrote: No other noiseless pickup hits the vintage spot to my knowledge, so hats off !


Thanks for that Roger and leddo (Phil Lynch), and of course I agree with you wholeheartedly LOL. Going back to Hanks request for true 50's sounding pickup some years ago, I tried hard but he hadn't allowed enough time, see, development of these kinds of high performance pickups takes years, not months. The technical challenges are formidable and the Impersonator series Strat pickups wouldn't have materialized at all if not for a patented magnetic circuit invention I previously designed (2009) to bring my P-90 Hx to life. And bring it to life it did, superbly. I wondered if it could be applied to Fender type pickups with rod magnets since the P-90 Hx has bar magnets and a different magnetic circuit. I didn't do anything but wonder ... and cringe at the amount of work and wasted wire and components finding out required because I had learnt from the P-90 Hx that this magnetic circuit device demanded way way different coil design and thinking than anything I has previously come up with. The formidable challenge of inventing my compact design with differential coils was the other great challenge but in many ways the magnetic device was even more formidable because of it's hypersensitivity to small changes in coil specifications.

It was Hanks request that prompted me to to begin development on this new kind of Strat pickup which, after years of work, gave rise to the Gen-2 Impersonator models, way too late for Hank's final Shadows concerts. I felt the Impersonator '54 was close to the mark and Hank agreed, but it was sufficiently fatter and less sharp that he adopted it for his modern sound. I also found it could do a fair rendition of Shadows tunes with a bit of knob tweaking too. But, however good the 54 is, Paul and Gary felt the goal of absolute replica of Hank's 59 Stratocaster sound still had not been achieved. Some time later I developed the Impersonator E69 and I sent specimens to Paul for evaluation. He and Gary were ecstatic as it was the closest to the goal so far. Praise flowed in from both of them until the day Gary recorded Dance On ,,, and then the bad news came. Paul described the distorted sound on strong upstrokes on the low E-6th notes and sent a sound file, sometime later Paul and I gave it the name of Torn Cone Syndrome (TCS). So a whole new challenge had emerged, one that was to eventually take another 2 years to solve and eventually culminate in the current new Magnum Opus model. I have dozens and dozens of test pickups lying around on shelves and in boxes, the wasteful and time consuming but necessary part of developing new kinds of Zero-Hum pickups at Kinman.

TCS is a mysterious distortion and has no history of attempted solution that I know about. I surmise that either other pickup makers are not aware of it or they failed to find a solution and therefore stayed silent about it, with the same outcome. I tore a lot of hair out over TCS, I was so frustrated because no single design modification made a significant impact on it and I was slowly coming around to believing there was no solution ... at least for Strat pickups ... it was part n parcel of overly simple Strat pickup coil geometry and magnetic circuit and to change that required a bigger pickup cover. Well, it's pretty obvious that idea didn't gain much traction because my pickup would necessarily have to fit into standard pickguard openings.

I was on the verge of giving up when I decided to try one last time with a combinations of ideas .... and lucky I did, because right away I detected a significant improvement. It spurred me on and over the next week and with a dozen or so more test pickups and exhaustive testing I finally arrived at the definitive solution. It consists of modified coil geometry, very different coil specifications (wire gauge, di-electric coating, precisely controlled winding speed, feed rate and tension, my special Alnico rod magnets, high performing silicon-steel magnetic components that facilitate a unique magnetic circuit .... and a few other things. It took the combination of all these elements to solve a 60 year flaw with Strat pickups. It's no bloody wonder a solution has not been found before. The pickup industry thinks a week or two of development is all that is worth investing in new pickups, they balk at months .... and years are not entertained in the least.

But my belief didn't automatically mean Paul and Gary would agree. I had to face the ultimate test, a recording of Dance On ... so I sent a few specimen pickups to Paul and waited with bated breath. The rest is history, happy history and a big load off my shoulders and a huge sigh of relief. My engineering draftsman and I set about designing all the component parts with CAD software, tolerances were specified and the parts were proved with computer modelling and then the e-files were sent to our various suppliers for quantity production. The last of the special parts will arrive within 2 weeks and then production in earnest of the acclaimed Magnum Opus Strat pickups will begin.

The Magnum Opus produces a better twang from the low wound strings than the Impersonator E69 as well as minimizing TCS.

This story is typical of what goes into the development of my Zero-Hum pickups, and yet my prices are only marginally more expensive than non-noiseless Strat copy pickup that have no technology to speak of and less than a quarter the number of components and require one sixth the time to make. My accountant thinks I'm mad for not charging more and I told him it's all the market is accustomed to paying for what many perceive as a humble pickup. He said "What's so humble about Kinman pickups?" I just sighed and lamented "it's just the way it is". And I think about the relatively high prices of guitars, amplifiers, even good quality leads and of course the ubiquitous effects pedals and the large number of them many guitar players own. It seems to me that many don't value the difference a great pickup makes and yet it's the start of the signal chain and often plays a make-or-break role in the sonic outcome. All the Fx pedals in the world can't restore sonic character that is not there in the first place. Still I am thankful for the consistent and steady flow of incoming orders from appreciative guitar players all around the world.

This story no doubt will enlighten folks that criticize me and my products, thankfully there are only a few that simply have no idea of the lengths I go to create new products that simply didn't exist before. It's called inventive progress and without it we would forever be stuck in the dark ages. Thanks for listening, I hope you enjoyed.

PS these new pickups can be ordered by clicking on the BUY button on this page https://kinman.com/model-products.php?pid=4&products=Stratocaster&linegroup=yes&modelid=20&model=Hank+Marvin+sets&group=Named%20Sets

CK
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Re: Pickups...

Postby David Martin » Mon Oct 05, 2020 7:37 am

Good to hear from you Chris...
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Re: Pickups...

Postby Chris Kinman » Tue Oct 06, 2020 12:51 pm

thanks for the welcome, it's good to be here Dave.
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Re: Pickups...

Postby Hank2k » Tue Oct 06, 2020 5:16 pm

that was certainly an interesting post and welcome Chris good to have your knowledge here for all of us.
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