Bill Lawrence Pickups

[GuitarAttack Forum]

All -

I have a number of old "Made in Middle Tennessee" Bill Lawrence pickups. They were used by Aerosmith back in the 70s and 80s...Dimebag from Pantera was also a noted user. Lots of players used them back in the day, and I have always liked using them.

Here is a bio of Bill:

www.billlawrence.com/Pages/About_Bill_Lawrence/Biography.htm

I encourage you to look around his site. But back to pickups...

I had a number of interactions with Bill over the years. Two things he said really stick with me. They are:

1. He never posted the resistance of his pickups because he said it was irrelevant.

2. He mocked me for asking which magnet's tone he preferred. He said, "Magnets have no tone!"

Do you think we are too consumed with specs when it comes to pickups?

John

[antares]

Not me John. I regard most of it as feldegarb.

As long as good quality materials are deployed and there is attention to detail in manufacturing, I could care less.
The engineer in me tells me that Ohms are Ohms, Henrys are Henrys, Gauss are Gauss, and the hapless Coulombs know no different.

The variables are neat contiguous layer winding against scatter winding (distributed capacitance), copper wire gauge and the capacitance associated wirh different insulation dielectric properties, and age exerting an affect on the components that influence *toan*.

Like for like and without the passage of the decades? Hmmm. Much else can be ameliorated with careful attention to mechanical set up.

There speaks another armchair internet expert that has never wound a pickup in his life, but also one that holds the tone of the much reviled ceramic mini humbuckers in his Firebird that highly that he wouldn't countenance a swapout in the relentless and inevitably futile pursuit of "toan".

I believe that whatever is left of the Bill Lawrence legacy operates / trades out of a small workshop not 8 miles from where I live, right near where I used to work. I may be mistaken- such is the way of the internet! Also, the Fender Danny Gatton Telecaster sports Bill Lawrence blades despite the fact that Joe Barden pups are available once more? I don't think they could be one and the same outfit but it is a little puzzling. Bill Lawrence was a major force in the pickup world.

I ~have~ rewound Chesapeake and Potomac 88mH telephone line loading coils to build a 700Hz narrow band audio band pass filter so I do have some credence!

Anyone heard of Red Rhodes? I have a "Velvet Hammer" stached away here.

e&oe...

[dnic]

Well if resistance and magnets or type of magnet makes no difference i'm going back to GFS 32.00$ pups. Now I have to go back to thinking wood makes the difference. And if resistance makes no difference I can use any K pots I like or even caps for that mater. I don't know, somebody tell me what's real...

[antares]

Dane I know where you are coming from, but I can't figure out how those much reviled ceramic accidents in my Firebird sound so good? Or perhaps it's not just the pickups? The Firebird is a massive lump of timber, yet (mine at least) has a kind an "alive" and non-amplified "springy sound" going on which trounces the same effect in an "S" type.

I put a GFS pickup in my home assembled Esquire which I put together around 1980. It is clandestinely mounted in the rhythm pickup cavity beneath the pickguard. It sounds OK-ish on its own but that is because the pole pieces are too far away from the strings with the pickguard setting the upper limit. It works very well fattening up the bridge pup in parallel and especially in series, but I can't comment regarding its sound when properly installed.

There is a simply massive amount of work published on the Guitarnuts2 forum. It really does approach this whole grey area from an objective perspective. It's too easy to get taken in with things just "because it is written", but if you can wade through even 1/10th of it then it does rather drag the whole shooting match down to first principles. At the end of the day, I'd place more credence in that particular comnentator's almost Asperger's like crusade than my own armchair opinions! GFS (and the sibling OEM products) fare pretty well under that microscope.

I think a little R 'n' R for my ears and brain are required!

e&oe...

[GuitarAttack Forum]

Aug 13, 2018 17:10:09 GMT -6 dnic said:

Well if resistance and magnets or type of magnet makes no difference i'm going back to GFS 32.00$ pups. Now I have to go back to thinking wood makes the difference. And if resistance makes no difference I can use any K pots I like or even caps for that mater. I don't know, somebody tell me what's real...

Dane -- deep breaths...haha

Bill Lawrence was a contrarian. As I recall, his thing was "perfectly wound coils" and a magnet matched for a particular output and impendence, not necessarily resistance. He thought impendence was a better predictor of the personality of the pickup. He relied on descriptions of his pickups geared toward a particular sound and position (rhythm or lead).

That being said, resistance does offer the casual observer a reference point on pickups. That is, generally a humbucker that measures 16k ohms on your volt ohm meter will, with all things being equal (including temperature) has more wire than a humbucker measuring 8k ohms. That will generally translate into higher output and less high end. It is very helpful for within-brand comparisons. For example, figuring out which Dimarzio humbucker is right for you.

I did a presentation on pickups for a local guitar company. While there was a deep dive on some of the specs, I did make one point for the crowd. I held up two identical-looking humbuckers and stated one read 8k ohms and the other read 10k. I then asked which one had more output. The shouts from the crowd indicated all agreed the one with 10k ohms. I then stated that the one with the higher reading actually had no magnet installed so it had no output at all. I think some of the guys got it; that is, resistance is just one important part of the equation. The rest thought I was just trying to be clever.

Yes, pots do make a difference in the signal chain!

John

[antares]

I acknowledge your deep breath and sympathise for I feel just the same John.

I certainly wont venture to take issue with you John. Only a fool would do that with someone that "walks the walk" as well as "talk the talk". However (and persuing my life-long maxim of continuous questioning to flesh out the nuts and bolts of anything you care to mention), on the subject of potentiometers- in what way do they make a difference? I still come back to Ohms are Ohms. If it's purely down to physical size as in full sized against those horrible little mini pots, then where does that leave us regarding surface mount technology without which much of todays electronic marvels simply wouldn't exist? They're pretty tiny and correspondingly difficult to work with, but they end up doung the same job. At RF, SMT ameliorates many stray capacitance issues too.

I'm ready to accept that one item may be more efficient than another, but certainly with respect to potentiometers (which are resistors) then at worst the cheap pot may fall over in any claim of amount of resistance, but otherwise it's still just resistance.

Exhale!

e&oe...

[GuitarAttack Forum]

Aug 14, 2018 7:34:56 GMT -6 antares said:

I acknowledge your deep breath and sympathise for I feel just the same John.

I certainly wont venture to take issue with you John. Only a fool would do that with someone that "walks the walk" as well as "talk the talk". However (and persuing my life-long maxim of continuous questioning to flesh out the nuts and bolts of anything you care to mention), on the subject of potentiometers- in what way do they make a difference? I still come back to Ohms are Ohms. If it's purely down to physical size as in full sized against those horrible little mini pots, then where does that leave us regarding surface mount technology without which much of todays electronic marvels simply wouldn't exist? They're pretty tiny and correspondingly difficult to work with, but they end up doung the same job. At RF, SMT ameliorates many stray capacitance issues too.

I'm ready to accept that one item may be more efficient than another, but certainly with respect to potentiometers (which are resistors) then at worst the cheap pot may fall over in any claim of amount of resistance, but otherwise it's still just resistance.

Exhale!

e&oe...

I do not mind being challenged. What I know: The quality of the pot does make a difference when it comes to the sound of the guitar, and I am shocked at the wide variance - and taper - in the resistance you can find in a bag of supposedly high-quality pots. I do know that 1 meg pots let more highs through than a 250k pot, and this is something Leo Fender put into practice in his guitars.

I recommend using high-quality pots in guitars as part of a quality signal chain. I believe that paying attention to all of the components will give the guitarist the best chance for a good sounding guitar.


John

[dnic]

I don't have anything to add. Just want to say I'm listening to the more enlightened minds as it were.

[antares]

I agree, I always put in the better components, but I can't ignore what instinct tells me. Same with Sprague Orange Drop capacitors- I use those but again only in the interests of covering all bases. Logic tells me I'm wasting my hard earned. Sure the different tapers affect the sound on a like for like position of pot travel. I put 1 meg. pots on my home made Tele with Joe Barden pups. It sounded awful and I rapidly returned to 250K. I should have taken the advice from JB! That kind of undermines my standpoint doesn't it!

By the way- in the pots I've pulled apart, they were not tapered, they had abrupt changes of track width. I am anxious to affirm that I'm not stating what is and is not gospel here, just admitting my lack of confidence in what to me seems to be more of a méme.

But this is off topic isn't it? I made another statement about Bill Lawrence but I think on reflection I may be confusing BL with John Birch. Hmmm. Age related!

Didn't BL "invent" blade type pups? I haven't tried any BL pups but he was indisputably one of the pup legends. Nice anecdote regarding the zero magnetism pickup. I would have jumped to the same conclusion as your audience John!

e&oe...

[GuitarAttack Forum]

I agree with the Orange Drops. They are beautiful to look at and make an electronics bay look "put together". However, when considering the super-low voltages coming out of guitar pickups, they are probably overkill. My current favorite are these little green mylar caps we get for about two cents each.

I believe Bill Lawrence did start the blade polepiece movement. He was also a proponent of the "air coil" and passive multiple-tone switching (Gibson L-6S and Ripper bass). He also told me he didn't like batteries in guitars!

John

[Deleted]

I have over the years heard a big difference in pots used. But the ones that get me are the dime size pots. I had run out of my quarter size pots and didn't want to wait on my order to come in. So I put in these dime size pots in the guitar. (Not the cheap dime size pots) So when I fired up the guitar I was amazed at how good the guitar sounded and how much control I had on the pots. Not like some of the other size pots I have installed. These dime sized ones I have smooth sound from one end to the other end.
That guitar still sounds as good and responds as good as the first day I installed them.

As far as tone caps... I use all kinds of them these days. I now try out different ones for that build. It seems like that is the other thing I have learned over the years, The same value tone cap does not always sound that good on all builds, even when I use the same kind of pickups in that build. I have one guitar I built where the tone knob has to set on 5 to 6 to get that guitar to sound it's best. But that is something else I have learned, that is to stop turning my tone knobs all the way up. LOL!

As far as pickups... I use to be a die hard fan of the higher the resistance the better the pickup. Buy I have I changed in the over the years. I have used all kinds of pickups.

Some of the best are from John. I have used the GFS, and Dragonfire,( GFS and Dragon use the same company and have the same specks) Also used a lot of SD pickups, Everything form single coil to humbuckers, to stacked, to rails, and so on.

But again some (not all) of the best pickups as far a sound goes were some of the cheap ones.

A long time ago I had bought these cheap single coil pickups off of eBay, only because I could not afford the more expensive ones. I think they cost me like $15.00 with free shipping. Now I was not expecting them to be a good sounding pickup, but once I got them and put them in the guitar, I was shocked at how good they sounded.
I sold that guitar to a guy that had to have the guitar because of how good the guitar sounded.

I went to buy more of them, but the person I got them from (eBay store) never got anymore of them. So those pickups really did a number to my way of thinking on pickups.
It really messed with my head. So I don't know what was in them pickups, but I have longed to have another set. I don't know if I had just lucked out and bought a set of unbranded (name brand) picups or what.

Then John came along and made me the first custom pickups for my Neck through LP. Wow I love that guitar. He nailed the sound I was after, and they are so responsive and sound as good clean as they do dirty. Then he made me a set for one of my Teles. Same thing, that guitars sound awesome!

So now I am really confused... I may not understand all the in's and outs of how a pickup is made or have a full understanding of the magnets out put and so on, but I do know what sounds good.

I have lived my whole musical life in getting the best sound out of guitars, amps and PA's. Even my stereos in my house and cars. I have even been hired to set up sound in concerts and in churches. People seem to like it when I set their sound up. So I think I have some idea on what sounds good.
So that is all I know, is what sounds good. I'll leave the teck stuff to you guys that help me sound good. LOL!

[antares]

I do recall reading somewhere that Bill Lawrence introduced us to Blade pickups, that's why I mentioned it, but I'm not sure that his discovery really predated P13 pickups...

e&oe...

[GuitarAttack Forum]

Aug 16, 2018 10:12:56 GMT -6 antares said:

I do recall reading somewhere that Bill Lawrence introduced us to Blade pickups, that's why I mentioned it, but I'm not sure that his discovery really predated P13 pickups...

e&oe...

Correct -- The "Charlie Christian Pickup" from the 1930s had a blade. Mr. Christian had this pickup in his Gibson ES-150. John Lennon had one installed in his Les Paul Junior in 1972, and Danny Gatton had one in his Tele in the 70s.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibson_ES-150

It is interesting that Gibson moved from blades to screw pole pieces pretty early in their drive to electrification.

John

[dnic]

I like the orange drops and the green ones also but I use the orange as my stock option on everything now. The little ceramic discs just look cheap, well because they are cheap. But like John or Steve already mentioned with the low voltage guitar circuit it makes no difference. Funny just a few days back I was reading something and the guy was still beating the dead horse of better sounding caps and he wasn't talking about their value.

You guys think that maybe Gibson went to pole pieces to help tone down the wonky B string? Or at least balance string volume?

[antares]

I reckon you're spot on about the change to individual pole pieces Dane, it was driven by the need to balance the output.

I do think that over specified capacitors have the unexpected benefit of better rigidity in their leads. That's the reason I go for the bigger orange drops. They do get a bit large though.

I considered fitting a reproduction Charlie Christian in my Heritage Sweet16, but I abandoned the fanciful notion when I began to consider the surgery required on the matching floating pickguard. John did you know that Danny Gatton had a belt buckle made from an old Charlie Christian pick up?

What a great thread John!

e&oe...