What is TCI? Myth or reality

[Domingo Lantigua]

I'm really interested in the TCI pickup "process". Never been able to get my head around it. Is it something that's done to the pickup while it is being wound, or afterwards. I've read beginning with the new models TCI will be applied across the board, depending on the guitar (individual guitar or guitar model?) IMO it would not be cost effective to do a process to tune each individual guitar. I could see each model, but not each individual guitar. Bottom line, Is it marketing or an actual thing that's being done? Thoughts?

 

[HANGAR18]

I heard PRSh's explanation in person this weekend but I am unable to retell the explanation accurately. I wish I would have recorded it.

 

[AP515]

I have a very uninformed idea about it. It's not new to tune circuits. We do that in the electronics industry all the time, but it may be new to apply that to pickups. It's called an RLC circuit. I remember hearing Paul once say that they intently studied a good PAF pickup and they found a lot of the things everyone else had found...and then found something completely unknown previously (or some such thing). Maybe that was the start of figuring out the TCI thing.

To tune a pickup they would have to have figured out what constitutes an optimum frequency response graph and then tune the impedance to that response. It may already be known that a "flat" response, across all frequencies that a person can hear, is best, I don't know. If so, then they would need to add resistance, and/or capacitance to achieve some predetermined optimum. I doubt they would add inductance as a pickup is just a big inductor. They would probably have a known target and just add in the amount of each that the pickup is lacking to get an optimal setting. Depending on how precise it needs to be, you might have to do it to each pickup. It wouldn't take much to determine how each pickup compared to some perfect graph, but you would have to solder components into the circuit after assembly to get the tuning right.

Course I may be way off base here.

 

[andy474x]

My gathering from different clips and explanations is that it’s a process they’ve created to calibrate the electrical characteristics of a pickup (obviously, capacitance and inductance are the main ones) to predictably control the sonic qualities. Probably the resonant peak, and other things I’m not smart enough to understand, or heck, even know about!

 

[Boogie]

Some of what I’ve picked up hints to tuning the pickups in a particular guitar, yielding the same tonal response, consistently. Every single guitar would be the same, regardless of the rest of the wood/hardware equation. But like I’ve said before, if it were my new trade secret, I’d try really hard to keep it a secret for as long as possible.

 

[Bob Hundemer]

https://www.pressreader.com/australia/guitarist/20190531/282278141800576

Take a look at that article. It's a decent read into TCI.

 

[toothace]

https://www.pressreader.com/australia/guitarist/20190531/282278141800576

Take a look at that article. It's a decent read into TCI.

Nice read...thanks for posting!

 

[bodia]

Nice read...thanks for posting!

Yeah, this!

 

[bodia]

I could see each model, but not each individual guitar. Bottom line, Is it marketing or an actual thing that's being done? Thoughts?

Oh yeah, it would be each individual guitar. PRS is serious about this kind of stuff. For example, Shawn explained in one of the Silver Sky threads that they measure the resistance of every pot that goes into the Silver Sky and add in a resistor to make sure that they are all as close to the same as possible. Knowing that resistance in a pot can vary quite a bit. I'd say that's real attention to detail.

 

[HANGAR18]

I have a very uninformed idea about it. It's not new to tune circuits. We do that in the electronics industry all the time, but it may be new to apply that to pickups. It's called an RLC circuit. I remember hearing Paul once say that they intently studied a good PAF pickup and they found a lot of the things everyone else had found...and then found something completely unknown previously (or some such thing). Maybe that was the start of figuring out the TCI thing.

To tune a pickup they would have to have figured out what constitutes an optimum frequency response graph and then tune the impedance to that response. It may already be known that a "flat" response, across all frequencies that a person can hear, is best, I don't know. If so, then they would need to add resistance, and/or capacitance to achieve some predetermined optimum. I doubt they would add inductance as a pickup is just a big inductor. They would probably have a known target and just add in the amount of each that the pickup is lacking to get an optimal setting. Depending on how precise it needs to be, you might have to do it to each pickup. It wouldn't take much to determine how each pickup compared to some perfect graph, but you would have to solder components into the circuit after assembly to get the tuning right.

Course I may be way off base here.

You may be pretty close. PRSh did start off the explanation mentioning capacitance, inductance and resistance with an extremely simplified definition of each. He also mentioned a Neve board and seemed to describe that the signal path in a Neve board basically modifies the tone by manipulating each of those (capacitance, inductance and resistance) values. He mentioned how the guitar/pickup industry has thus far only been interested in only one of those three things when it comes to pickups (ie resistance) but they never consider the other two (capacitance and inductance). So I am left with the impression that they are doing some sort of mojo with these TCI pickups, manipulating all three of those specific values in their design in order to modify the signal path through the pickups in order to produce the tone they want.

 

[Hotblack Desiato]

If I've understood all of this, TCI isn't a singular model of pickup such as the 85/15 but is instead a process applied to a pickup after manufacturing in order for it to meet a 'signature sound' when used in a particular model of guitar.

The next obvious question is, where the PRS website notes a guitar to have TCI (Paul's Guitar) or TCI-S pickups (SE Paul's Guitar & the 35th Anniversary SE Custom), we don't know which pickups they're based on, correct?

So does anyone know what the above mentioned TCI pickups use as their foundation model? Do we have a mole on the inside who can carry out a bit of light industrial espionage on our behalf?

(Good grief, and I thought their regular - regular vintage - pattern wide - wide regular - irregular regular necks were confusing enough.)

 

[Great Gazoo]

TCI WTH?

 

[Hotblack Desiato]

TCI WTH?

You may have inadvertantly started a caption competition.

What he's really thinking is, "If I play this behind my neck, will that attract more chicks or dudes?".

 

[Tucson Thump]

"If I put some mirrors on the front I wonder if I can get a Jimmy Page endorsement? He already uses my bows."

 

[WA Paul]

“Why did I waste all my Pernambuco on f$&@!? bows!”

 

[Alnus Rubra]

You may have inadvertantly started a caption competition.

What he's really thinking is, "If I play this behind my neck, will that attract more chicks or dudes?".

“I wonder if I could get a couple of humbuckers in that gap!”

“Why did I waste all my Pernambuco on f$&@!? bows!”

Genuine uncontrollable laughter!

 

[Mozzi]

If I've understood all of this, TCI isn't a singular model of pickup such as the 85/15 but is instead a process applied to a pickup after manufacturing in order for it to meet a 'signature sound' when used in a particular model of guitar.

The next obvious question is, where the PRS website notes a guitar to have TCI (Paul's Guitar) or TCI-S pickups (SE Paul's Guitar & the 35th Anniversary SE Custom), we don't know which pickups they're based on, correct?

So does anyone know what the above mentioned TCI pickups use as their foundation model? Do we have a mole on the inside who can carry out a bit of light industrial espionage on our behalf?

(Good grief, and I thought their regular - regular vintage - pattern wide - wide regular - irregular regular necks were confusing enough.)

TCI is a process that can be applied to ANY pick-up. It doesn't require a foundation as such so an 85/15 is the base Pick-up in a Custom 24 or 22. Paul's guitar uses a 408 style pick-up but its been tweaked to sound the way Paul wants - much like a Signature pick-up would be. TCI pick-ups were named more after the process, not the actual pick-up - they could easily of been called 'Paul's' Pick-up and, if you bought at set and fitted them to any guitar yourself, they would be just like any other after market pick-up.

The TCI process, at least as I understand it, is taking a set of standard pick-ups and, by knowing exactly how they sound, their inductance for example, know exactly what electronics (pots, resistors etc) are needed for that specific instrument to get the exact sound coming out. Other manufacturers would simply take the same Pick-ups and wire them up with 'stock' parts that are supposedly all the same but everything is slightly different even if they are manufactured in exactly the same way with exactly the same materials. A Pick-up for example isn't exactly the same output despite being theoretically the same. A 500k pot may differ by +/-30k so its all about making sure that the individual values are known so they person picks the right pots, resistors etc when assembling the instrument.

I would be surprised if you couldn't take a set of 85/15's from a Custom 24 that's been through the TCI process and find you can't wire those into a different guitar or wiring them into an 'older' guitar giving exactly the same result. By the same token, opting to swap the stock pick-ups won't be an issue as far as the wiring goes but with the electronics fitted specifically for the stock pick-ups, the results may not be quite as expected. Even if you take 85/15's from one TCI Custom 24 and put those into another TCI Custom 24, the resulting sound could be different despite them both sounding alike before you tried swapping.

The point seems to be about compensating for the small differences to improve the consistency of the tone - tuned to sound a certain way across all guitars in that model meaning you shouldn't have to go round picking up guitar after guitar to see which sounds the better.

 

[bodia]

If I've understood all of this, TCI isn't a singular model of pickup such as the 85/15 but is instead a process applied to a pickup after manufacturing in order for it to meet a 'signature sound' when used in a particular model of guitar.

The next obvious question is, where the PRS website notes a guitar to have TCI (Paul's Guitar) or TCI-S pickups (SE Paul's Guitar & the 35th Anniversary SE Custom), we don't know which pickups they're based on, correct?

So does anyone know what the above mentioned TCI pickups use as their foundation model? Do we have a mole on the inside who can carry out a bit of light industrial espionage on our behalf?

(Good grief, and I thought their regular - regular vintage - pattern wide - wide regular - irregular regular necks were confusing enough.)

TCI is a process that can be applied to ANY pick-up. It doesn't require a foundation as such so an 85/15 is the base Pick-up in a Custom 24 or 22. Paul's guitar uses a 408 style pick-up but its been tweaked to sound the way Paul wants - much like a Signature pick-up would be. TCI pick-ups were named more after the process, not the actual pick-up - they could easily of been called 'Paul's' Pick-up and, if you bought at set and fitted them to any guitar yourself, they would be just like any other after market pick-up.

The TCI process, at least as I understand it, is taking a set of standard pick-ups and, by knowing exactly how they sound, their inductance for example, know exactly what electronics (pots, resistors etc) are needed for that specific instrument to get the exact sound coming out. Other manufacturers would simply take the same Pick-ups and wire them up with 'stock' parts that are supposedly all the same but everything is slightly different even if they are manufactured in exactly the same way with exactly the same materials. A Pick-up for example isn't exactly the same output despite being theoretically the same. A 500k pot may differ by +/-30k so its all about making sure that the individual values are known so they person picks the right pots, resistors etc when assembling the instrument.

I would be surprised if you couldn't take a set of 85/15's from a Custom 24 that's been through the TCI process and find you can't wire those into a different guitar or wiring them into an 'older' guitar giving exactly the same result. By the same token, opting to swap the stock pick-ups won't be an issue as far as the wiring goes but with the electronics fitted specifically for the stock pick-ups, the results may not be quite as expected. Even if you take 85/15's from one TCI Custom 24 and put those into another TCI Custom 24, the resulting sound could be different despite them both sounding alike before you tried swapping.

The point seems to be about compensating for the small differences to improve the consistency of the tone - tuned to sound a certain way across all guitars in that model meaning you shouldn't have to go round picking up guitar after guitar to see which sounds the better.

Mozzi's got it right. It isn't a particular pick up, it is a process that is applied to each pick up model.

 

[Sevenandaquarter]

The Silver Sky was the impetus for the TCI thing. Strats and single-coil pickups in general typically use 250k pots which are darker to complement the brighter single coils. For the SS, however, they ended up going with 300k pots with a capacitor that dropped them to 275k. It’s like fine tuning the pickups via the wiring. My understanding is that this affects single coils and split/tapped settings more than full humbucking.

In the SS, the pickups are louder and rounder than a traditional vintage output Strat pickup, but not necessarily because they are wound that much hotter. They don’t breakup easier - they’re just literally louder.

On Paul’s Guitar, the volume drop when going from hum to single is very negligible, but the single cool sounds are true single coil operation instead of being tapped or split.

 

[AP515]

Nostradamus says the cool instrument 400 years from now is not going to be my violin but a magic version of the Lute called a PRS, and the sound comes out of a box setting beside the musician. What a Bozo!