Simulating pickups with EQ...

Wolfenstein98k

Wolfenstein98k

Power User
Howdy,

I've recently been looking into Fishman Fluence pickups and liking the idea. But in their deeper promo material I spied a graphic they made from their results testing out pickups. The graphic makes sense to me (resonant peaks, roll-off, etc) in broad terms, but not really in specifics - and I also have little experience manipulating the PEQ and GEQ blocks.

How would you guys recommend making EQ blocks to simulate these response curves? I also am not sure how to read the logarithmic-looking graph, like how to get a slope that look like the Active curve, for instance.

Any experience EQing for pickups welcome, too!

PG-Fluence-freq-curves-df-v3_WEB.jpg
 
Could you be a little more specific as to what exactly you're trying to accomplish? It might be doable, and it might not, depending on what you're looking to do. If, for instance, you wanted to take one humbucker and make it sound more like another humbucker, you could do it reasonably well. If, however, you're trying to do something like make a humbucker sound like a single coil, it's really not going to happen, because there's a lot more going on than just EQ curves. The material and construction of the polepieces has a lot to do with it, magnet material also matters, etc.

I'm currently trying to have my cake and eat it, too by switching to Fluence pickups. I exchanged some PMs with Frank Falbo over on the Seymour Duncan forum, and he was very helpful. I told him I wanted something that could do both modern humbucker sounds and vintage Strat sounds, and he said the Tosin set would be exactly what I'm looking for. The Tosin set apparently has a lot of design crammed into it. It uses a hybrid magnetic circuit with individual alnico polepieces in one of the neck coils, to get authentic single coil sounds. Maybe something like that might be of interest to you?
 
I think a trickier aspect would be to know how to "flatten" your current pickups. It has its own EQ, applying another EQ without considering it would effectively be applying two pickup EQs.

Fluence pickups start from flat EQ I believe. So does Cycfi pickups.
 
With the exception of the active humbucker, all of those curves are the natural response of a passive pickup. The upper peak and roll-off is caused mostly by pickup inductance and cable capacitance.
 
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