Fishman Fluence Single Width and Fluence Classic Humbucker

102 Guitarist June 2015
Fret-King Corona 60 & 70 FluenCe equipped £1,699 each
ElEctrics
I
’ve been avoiding the
electric guitar pickup for
over 30 years because
Seymour Duncan, Rob Tuner
[EMG] and Steve Blucher and
Larry DiMarzio, they were
doing just fine,” states Larry
Fishman in his whiskey-toned
East Coast twang. “I didn’t have
anything extraordinary to say,
so I just stayed out of it and did
my thing with acoustic stuff.”
If you didn’t know better,
you’d think Larry was an old-
school pro musician who’d just
got up after a late-night session.
He is a very fine upright bass
player, but we know him as the
head and driving force of
Fishman Transducers. Acoustic
stuff is his business, but at the
winter NAMM show in 2014, he
entered the electric guitar
pickup market. Why?
mass coil that replaces the usual
bobbin. That intrigued me.
I said, ‘It’s certainly different’.
I loved the way it looked and felt
especially in terms of potential
manufacturing. So, I signed a
licensing deal with them not
knowing, at that point, if I could
actually make a pickup out of it:
a good electric guitar pickup.
“We made up a bunch of the
coils with these cores and I
started about an 18-month
process of trying to turn that
into an electric guitar pickup.
We looked at all the great
electric guitar pickups, going
back to George Beauchamp
“Well, over that 30-year
period we became very good at
measuring things, measuring
guitar response – we certainly
know about electronics, both
analogue and digital, and we
were building the company.
Because of that, I got
approached by an aerospace
company. One of their
physicists was a guitar player
and he figured you could make
a pretty interesting coil without
winding wire. They had filed
a patent on it then shopped the
idea around to see if someone
was interested in turning it into
a guitar pickup.
“So, basically, the Fluence
core is a 48-layered stack of
printed circuit boards, with race
track-like coils etched on each
layer, and all interconnected
with little taps. We have a solid-
80-something years ago and,
you know, nothing has really
changed: everything that has
come since is sort of a variation
on a variation. I looked at this
[electric guitar pickup] industry
and realised there is so much
voodoo going on; people don’t
know this from that. It seemed
to me that it was time to bring
some sensibility to the game.
Not change the way they sound
– I love the way a good set of
Seth Lover’s humbuckers in
a Les Paul sound. Or the
Telecaster, it’s bright, it’s
chiming, it’s magical. I love all
that, but there’s bad things that
come with all these pickups…
“Number one, single coils
hum and buzz; people have
been trying to get rid of that
forever, but doing that can kill
the pickup. All passive pickups
are subject to cable loading,
volume pot loading, tone pot
loading. It’s like… it’s archaic.
You can’t use your volume
control on your electric guitar
Sculpting Sound
When it comes to amplifying the acoustic instrument,
there’s little that Fishman doesn’t know. But the ‘dark art’
of the electromagnetic pickup is another story…
“The Fluence core is a 48-layered
stack of printed circuit boards, with
race track-like coils on each layer”
Are the coils and windings
of traditional guitar pickups
about to be superseded?
GIT394.rev_fret.indd 102 16/04/2015 14:22