Magnet Swap Experiments

[BrotherJack]

So, I have some cheap pickups laying around, and I read some interesting things about magnet swaps, so I figured for $25 or so with addiction-fx, I could have some fun and see what I got.  Here's my results.

Duncan Designed HB102B (supposedly more/less a made-in-korea JB).    17.2K says my ohmmeter (HOT - OUCH!).

Stock - near useless with the gain south of about 7 or 8.  With the gain up, it develops some interesting harmonics and overtones and I actually liked it a lot for high gain playing - especially high gain leads, smoking for that kind of thing.  But with the gain turned down into just-slightly-breaking up territory and plying rhythm like I prefer, it looses those sharp overtones that make it interesting and the thickness of it that makes leads sound hot on hi gain makes the chords sound like you threw a blanket over the amp; very dark and muddy.  Meh.

Tried the following swaps:
Alnico II - Like dialing the EQ around a bit, made it muddier on low gain, and softened the sharp harmonic overtones on high gain.  Not really an improvement to my ears.
Alnico II with the "Air mod" (keeping the mag from touching the poles by applying electrical tape down the sides) - like the A2 alone, but seemed to dial the output back a bit to make it more articulate and cleaner (but it still didn't make it sound good clean). 
Alnico 3 - Again, like dialing the EQ around a bit, nice flute-ish mid range tones that it didn't have before, sounded overall a bit weaker.  It was an improvement on low gain, but still pretty muddy, and lacked some balls on high gain that it used to have.  Meh.
Alnico 4 - Frankly, wasn't entirely sure how to describe what this one did.  Sterilized it a bit (but not a whole lot) is as close as I could say.
Un-Oriented Alnico 5 (rough cast).  I had high hopes for this one, but again, the change wasn't really anything more than I think I could get with a good EQ rig and some fiddling.  Smoother tones on high gain, a little less heavy metal and a little more blues-y, and still (IMHO) overly muddy for low to mid-ish chording.

HB102N - supposedly a made-in-korea Duncan Jazz neck model (7.5k says my ohmmeter).  Tried the following swaps:

Stock - not bad, but not as nice as my APH-I neck pickup by any means.  Good enough to leave a guitar that wasn't my main axe, but not good enough to be my main squeeze.  Fairly musical, not too thick or muddy, and actually has borderline killer single coil split tones.

Alnico II - made it sound thinner and less presence and attack.  Kind of felt like if I turned the trim down on the preamp a touch too far.  Given that it's 7.5k of (I think?) 42 gauge wire, I was expecting it to sound fairly APH-1'ish, but it didn't (I A/B'd it with an APH1 in the neck of another guitar to confirm that).
Alnico III - now this was relatively likeable.  Almost a single-coil-esque quality to the tone, and unexpectedly less thin than the AII.  I did find that I needed to take the gain up about 2 clicks more than normal to get it to break up, otherwise it was clean as a whistle with a fairly thick attack.  Single coil tones still nice, and enough treble dialed out of the EQ overall that chording sounded vaguely acoustic guitar ish.  I might just leave this one in there, I think it's an improvement over stock.
Alnico 4 - ummm... as with the bridge, I am not totally clear how to explain it.  Sounded fine, not that much off of stock, but more sterlized.
Un Oriented Alnico 5 (rough cast) - same as with the bridge, a touch smoother and less bite, but otherwise about the same as stock.


My other experiments involved an Ibanez INF4 (16.2K says my ohmmeter).  This one had a total monster of a ceramic magnet in it - double the thickness of any of the other other magnets I had, and felt like at least twice the strength when sticking things to it and pulling them free.  Wow.    I pulled the spacers out of the pickup (they were too thick to accommodate the thinner/standard magnet), and installed an Alnico II with the air mod.    This was a distinct improvement, actually.  It retained that snarly growling thing that it had to start with, but the output was backed way down from stock (and stock it was so hot I'd have to adjust the input trim on my pre-amp to keep the pickup from overdriving it, as compared to any of my other pickups).    Seems to have lost some treble and gained some mids, as well as it feels like it has less presence, but the underlying character of the sound remains intact.  In other words, it's still a $10 pickup, but it's borderline tolerable now, where it was a one-trick-pony before (that trick being balls-out heavy metal type sounds).

So, there's my results for anyone interested.  For me, I'm ready to put a fork in this experiment and just keep on buying pickups that sound like I want them to from the factory.  I had some hopes that swapping magnets would do some fairly major mods to the underlying sound of the pickups, but to be honest, I think a good parametric EQ and some tweaking with the input trim on the pre-amp could accomplish about 95% or better of the difference I managed to get with swapping magnets.    It also most certainly did NOT make inexpensive pickups sound like high dollar pickups, they all retained that 'cheap pickup mud' (for lack of a better way to explain what I mean by that) that less expensive pickups all tend to come with (my Giovanni GVH-1's being a glaring exception to that cost vs mud experience).

Hopefully that will be useful info to someone(s) else.    I read so much stuff before I tried the experiment that I was expecting bigger things, and all I really got was on par with having my EQ settings and input trim dialed around a bit.

Cheers!

 

[Verne Bunsen]

Nice bit of experimentation. Thanks for sharing!

 

[Ace Flibble]

Swapping magnets makes less and less of a difference the heavier the coils are wound. The HB-102 is a purposefully-overwound version of the JB, using 44 AWG, so I'm not surprised that swapping magnets with that didn't lead you to anything great.

The regular JB can have the high-end and compression tweaked a little by making big changes, like going all the way down to an A2 magnet, but even then it's not as much of a change as you get with PAF-style humbuckers, and that's with the sharper-toned JB, rather than the thicker and hotter HB-102.

Same deal with the neck pickup. With the 'real' Jazz humbucker, swapping to an A2 will shave off some high-end but it doesn't do too much to the middle; it's still a more hollow and articulate pickup than the APH-1. The Duncan Designed version has a small increase in the number of turns and the two coils are closer matched, so putting an A2 in that just has even less of an effect than with the Jazz.

Bridge pickups from Seymour Duncan that are really good for trying different magnets are the Custom line—the Custom, Custom 5, Custom Custom and Full Shred are all the same wind, just with the magnets and pole pieces changed—and the '59/Custom Hybrid. For neck pickups, the Pearly Gates, '59, Seth Lover and Alnico II Pro seem to be the only ones that really go through a very noticable difference.
From other brands, the DiMarzio PAF Pro and Epiphone's standard Alnico Classics are really good candidates for magnet-swapping. The Epiphone pickups, in particular, can be completely transformed by changing the screw poles to hex poles (makes the coils unbalanced and improves clarity significantly) and then changing to either a ceramic or A3 magnet, depending on the output and bass compression you want.
Active pickups can also go through phenominal shifts in response with a magnet change, but changing the magnets is very hard as active pickups have to have their covers sealed with epoxy to compete the shielding, and once you take them apart it can be very hard to put them back together without introducing a hell of a lot of noise and hum. That said, it's fun to try if you ever have a spare active pickup around, and both EMG and Seymour Duncan ahve made occasional one-off pickups with different magnets, which turn up from time-to-time. (E.g. I've got a prototype pair of EMG 60AX pickups, which have A4s instead of the standard A5.)

Bear in mind, too, that with each magnet change you also need to treat the pickup differently. Different magnets tend to require different pickup heights, to get the strings right in the middle of the magnetic arc. So when you're swapping pickups or pickup magnets, it's important to experiment with the height of the pickups, and not just set everything to how it was previously.

Also, note on the 'air' modification: all that does is move the magnetic field lower, the same as simply lowering the pickup. It's just a piece of marketing used by DiMarzio to impress their mostly-metal customers, who are used to keeping pickups quite high and are perhaps less inclined to modify a pickup or change their set up.


All that said, good on you for giving it a go. I've found magnet swaps can be very useful with many types of pickup, but it's certainly not worthwhile with some models. Of course, tone is also so very subjective that what one person calls an improvement, another will say is a step backwards. I, for instance, have always swapped A5 magnets for A4s and always, without exception, preferred the sound I get; I now never even bother installing an A5 pickup until I've changed the magnet. Other people swear by the A5 and find the A4 very boring, of course. To each their own.

More people should give magnet/pole swapping a go, if for no other reason than because it's so much cheaper than buying a whole new pickup.