What Are Hot Rails Pickups? | Too Afraid To Ask

hello guys Colin here and today I'm tackling your Tatas the questions that at this stage you are too afraid to ask mixed nuts has asked are no fewer than two occasions can you do a video explaining what hot rails are hot rails is the name given by Seymour Duncan to their single coil sized humbucking guitar pack up with a twin real design other manufacturers make their own versions of this design under different names but hot rails has become like Hoover or Vail crow a specific brand name that's so well recognized in the public consciousness that is used to describe any product shilling the same characteristics it's fortuitous that they happen to have all the components necessary to build my own version of the hot rails design and a brand new coil winder from manufacturing guitar pickups so this will give me the perfect opportunity to show you all how this type of pickup is constructed ahead of getting into the specifics of pickup construction allow me to take a moment to talk of its Skillshare who have made this video possible Skillshare is an online learning community of over 25,000 classes and music production graphic design filmmaking marketing and technology perhaps you want to brush up on your musical theory Skillshare has courses for that learn how to market your own personal brand for online success Skillshare has classes to get you started one thing I've always wanted to learn is how to create beautiful animated images for my videos one of my favorite creators of animated videos is kurkistan and they have a Skillshare course which shows how to animate in their style using After Effects so I've been following along and the hope that one day I can be as good as them the first 500 people to click the link provided in the description receive two months free Skillshare membership that's around sixty TS to cram your head flew as much knowledge as a human if possible if you feel like you've learned everything you possibly can in those two months then no one is stopping you leaving but if you want to stick around and expand your knowledge further than a skill share annual subscription is less than ten dollars a month and a premium membership gets you unlimited access to all the learning that your brain can handle so whether it's video editing watercolor painting or demystifying the stock market interest you skill share is the police to layer click link in the description to get Europe 2 month free trial before we begin let's clarify a few terms a pick up is used on a guitar to transform the string vibration into an electric signal which can be amplified well acoustic instruments will likely opt for Hedden contact pickups like an under saddle piezo which directly senses string vibration electric guitars opt for the more obvious magnetic pickup which picks up the string vibrations indirectly through changes in the pickups magnetic field two of the most common types of magnetic backup our single coils as seen on Stratocaster type instruments and humbuckers originally introduced when Gibson Les Paul's a single coil as the name suggests is one coil of copper wire surrounding sex individual magnetic pole pcs the job of the pole pcs is to focus the magnetic field of the pickup underneath each string as any coil of wire acts as an antenna a single coil pickup has the unfortunate side effect of backing up outside electromagnetic interference which manifests as noise and hum and signal a humbucker is two coils wired in such a way the outputs of each some together but due to each coil having the opposite magnetic polarity any noise picked up in the coils gets cancelled out leaving the signal hum free so it may be desirable therefore to equip a single coil loaded guitar with humbuckers in order to defeat noise and give a more powerful output but this presents a problem as humbuckers are physically larger than single coils now if you don't want to modify your instrument then you're gonna have to find a humbucking pickup let's just seem size as a single coil one of the easiest ways to achieve this is with the hot reels format this 20 lor bleed humbucker is constructed in exactly the same way as any other humbucker just scaled down to a smaller form factor it consists of two bobbins which are wound with insulated copper wire I'm using 43 gauge wire so that I can get decent amount of turns on each of these small bobbins the number of turns and the overall resistance of the copper once fully wound will determine what the output of the pickup will be well the physical dimensions and distribution of the coil will decide in large part what the pickups tonality will be there's a fine artistry in balancing all these elements to get the correct sound unlike in no single cause or humbuckers this tiny humbucker is far too small to use standard sized pull pieces so another solution must be found it is possible to use much smaller screws to keep the magnetic field focused under each string but another solution is to use one continuous pull piece rather than sects individual ones this changes the magnetic distribution under the strings allowing for equal magnetic sensation across the entire width of the pickup using this bottle of ferrofluids you can see how the magnetically attracted nanoparticles line up over each individual pool piece when bending strings on a conventional pickup as inevitably means the string will move away from the pool piece reducing the pickups ability to sense the string some players can notice this drop in volume in the pack up when they bend a string continuous played pool pieces get around this issue if consistent volume on string bands is important to the player then these types of pickups will sense the string the same no matter where it says above the pickup provided it remains at the same height using the ferrofluid again we can see that it lines up definitely on the reel than it dead on the individual poles so that is what the reel is all about here allows for a consistent magnetic pickup pattern across the entire span of the strings while allowing this humbucker to be constructed to the same dimensions as a single coil pickup the reels are made of steel and connected to a bar magnet at their base annal neckl 5 magnet in this case when fully constructed we have two bobbins full of copper wire surrounding steel pool pcs with a magnet providing a different magnetic polarity to each reel the whole arrangement can fit and save a single coil cavity on a guitar well this one may be small-sized reels can be used on standard single coils and full sized humbuckers they offer a different sound and response to your conventional individual poles and it may be an advantage depending on your style of playing if you have any questions of your own that you're too afraid to ask please leave them in the comments section of this video and perhaps they'll become the topic of a future Tata video it's never too late to learn and if you liked this video and you want to see more content from me then you can hit that subscribe button which will notify for new videos as they come my patients also therefore exclusive secret stuff t-shirts are available and that's other videos that you may not have seen but us all for now guys keep allowed and I'll see you later even bubble wraps are trademark brand name look it up

Channel: Science of Loud

Views: 434,594

Keywords: CSGuitars, Colin, all the gain, guitcon, scotland, victory, pickups, science, will it shred, whats the difference, studio, recording, guitar, amplifier, pedal, tata, too afraid to ask, hot rails, humbucker, single coil, sized, rails, rail, blade, seymour duncan, how its made

Id: kzMFVVEx_kE

Length: 6min 50sec (410 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 15 2019