Lewguitar
Old Know It All
If you turn a humbucking pickup over you'll see four round headed screws on the bottom that hold the two coils to the baseplate and which hold the whole pickup together.
Those screws can be brass or steel.
Early versions of the PAF pickup from 1957 used steel for these screws and the 57/08 also uses steel screws.
According to ThroBak, when Gibson switched to brass that changed the sound.
Steel becomes magnetic in the prescence of a magnet. Brass doesn't.
That means those little steel screws become additional polepieces. ThroBak says they affect the tone.
Duncan tends to use brass for those screws and brass is not magnetic so brass screws cannot act like pole pieces.
The result is a different tone.
I noticed that the SE Silver Sky pickups also have additional steel polepieces between the six main polepieces but you can only see them if you remove the covers. They're definitlely magnetized by the alnico polepieces.
Those screws can be brass or steel.
Early versions of the PAF pickup from 1957 used steel for these screws and the 57/08 also uses steel screws.
According to ThroBak, when Gibson switched to brass that changed the sound.
Steel becomes magnetic in the prescence of a magnet. Brass doesn't.
That means those little steel screws become additional polepieces. ThroBak says they affect the tone.
Duncan tends to use brass for those screws and brass is not magnetic so brass screws cannot act like pole pieces.
The result is a different tone.
I noticed that the SE Silver Sky pickups also have additional steel polepieces between the six main polepieces but you can only see them if you remove the covers. They're definitlely magnetized by the alnico polepieces.
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