Fishman Fluence Single Width and Fluence Classic Humbucker

104 Guitarist June 2015
Fret-King Corona 60 & 70 FluenCe equipped £1,699 each
ElEctrics
’cos it’s going to change the
sound. Now, plenty of people do
exploit that, but many don’t.
So, even the greatest-sounding
pickups have this negative side.”
Getting powered
“I said, ‘Okay, let’s fix that,’
Larry remembers. “The first
decision – and it was a tough
one because I know how
reticent this industry is to
change – was to go active. We’re
going to power these pickups
because I can solve a thousand
problems that way and bring so
much to the table. But before we
got there, I wanted to get in
some zone where I could
standardise the coil – I didn’t
want a different stack for every
pickup design. Going powered
allowed me to do that: it was a
blessing in disguise and was the
beginning of this whole system.
“We decided, for a variety of
reasons, to go with a 48-layer
stack, which makes it a
relatively low-inductance
pickup. That brought a lot to the
party, as the coil is dead flat in
terms of response. That alone
would be a horrible-sounding
electric guitar pickup, but it’s
a great place to start sculpting.
Also, because they are low
inductance, if I want to stack
them for hum cancelling, the
mutual inductance is so low
they don’t talk to each other. So
even our ‘single coil’ [the Single
Width] has a hum-cancelling
stack on the bottom. But that
doesn’t affect anything, because
that stack isn’t ‘seeing’ anything,
like the string. There’s a spacer
[between the two coils] – so
they don’t talk to each other.”
Learning the art
“The thing we didn’t know
about too much in the
beginning is that there are two
circuits in a pickup,” adds Larry.
“There’s the electrical circuit,
the resistance, capacitance and
inductance of the coil, there’s
the magnetic circuit. We started
looking at these and bought
some great sounding pickups
and started to analyse them.
“We have a great guy, head of
R&D, driving the research –
Ching-Yu Lin. I was driving him
crazy with these different
designs and asking him to map
their response. He ended up
creating a three-dimensional
magnetic field ‘mapper’ that we
can look at on a computer
screen and see, in 3D, the shape
of all the fields of all the
magnetic pickups you’d ever
want. It was astonishing how
small differences can make a
huge change. Over time, we
learned a lot about the shape
of the magnetic fields that make
a great vintage pickup.
“So, having understood that
and having our low-inductance
coil [that has no microphonics]
when we put them in a
humbucking pair, they balance
within half a per cent of each
other: they are humbucking. All
– I say
all ,” laughs Fishman, “we
had to do was make them sound
good! They had to have the right
frequency response, and they
also had to have the right
dynamic response to make
a great pickup.
“I pulled in a bunch of great
guitar players and some other
people from the industry that
had experience in traditional
magnetic pickups, and guitars
in general. So we’d take an
original pickup, do our analysis,
then we’d build the circuit that
gives it the resonant response,
the high- and low-frequency
roll-offs. I also built another
real-time digital system for
R&D that we could run our
pickup through and put in our
target filter and actually have
dials to tweak the resonant
frequency to a few Hertz. By the
way, that would take my friend,
Seymour Duncan, about three
months and about 50 variations
of winding to get to the same
place: we can do it in 10
minutes. Basically, we went
from zero to 125mph in that
18-month period.
“While we were at it, putting
that ‘voice’ into the pickup, we
said, ‘Let’s put two voices in
there, so Fluence are actually
multi-voice pickups.’”
“It’s a modern world,”
concludes Fishman. “We pay
great homage to those old
sounds we grew up with, and
many of the more modern ones
the metal guys are using, but
you don’t build a house with a
hammer any more: you use a
nail gun because it’s faster. You
don’t fly aeroplanes in bad
weather without radar any
more. And this is not rocket
science, this is basic stuff.”
The Fluence Core signals a new
dawn for the humble pickup
When physics and guitars
collide: a revolutionary
pickup without a wound coil
GIT394.rev_fret.indd 104 16/04/2015 14:22