
Fluence, Fishman’s first line of electric guitar pickups, marks a radical departure from the traditional technology.
I highly recommend having a conversation with Ritchie Fliegler. Fliegler, a guitar industry vet boasting lengthy tenures at both Fender and Marshall, is psyched about his new collaboration with Larry Fishman. That project can—correction, will—change the way you think about electric guitar pickups.
My initial “pre-interview” with Fliegler lasted almost two hours. We discussed everything from aerospace technology to Lionel trains, from Hendrix’s association with Marshall to why no one considers the New York Philharmonic to be a cover band. And somehow it all seemed relevant. Within days I was on my way to Massachusetts to meet with the team at Fishman.
We’re accustomed to hearing about “the next new thing” in pickups every time NAMM season comes around. What the Fishman team has concocted is not a new sound. Quite the opposite: It’s a way to consistently and accurately recreate the sounds of the world’s best pickups.
Pickups: A Black Art?
Pickup winding can be something of a black art. No matter the manufacturer or the person doing the winding, one pickup can sound different from the next. Even with consistent production methods, there are such wild card factors as inconsistency in the raw materials used by the manufacturer.
Guitars, too, are also full of uncontrollable variables. For one thing, they’re made from trees, and trees vary. So do wood-drying conditions, shaping techniques, manufacturing and assembly methods, and the design of the metal and plastic parts we attach to that wood.
But for all of us electric guitar huggers, sound eventually comes down to that critical point where a vibrating string excites a pickup magnet. The invisible events that occur in that instant are responsible for all the things we love about pickups—and many of the things that frustrate us.
The sound coming from a vintage ’54 Stratocaster pickup or a ’57 PAF humbucker can be magical. But according to Larry Fishman, that “magic” is precisely why his company sidestepped electric guitar pickups for its first 34 years: “Too much voodoo,” he says. Fishman felt he could match the performance of existing electric guitar pickups, but not bring anything new to the party—until now.
About 18 months ago Fishman and his team started thinking about magnetic pickups in a bold unique new way. The result is a new pickup line: Fluence.
A New Path to Old Sounds
Understanding what’s unique about Fluence requires an understanding of how traditional pickups work—and don’t work. Like beloved family members, pickups have their faults. But as anyone associated with Fluence will tell you, this is not a story focused on bashing traditional pickups. Rather, it’s a love story about preserving the best qualities of great pickups without their associated problems, and at a reasonable cost.
Layers of printed coils awaiting magnets. The small rings are “vias” that electrically connect the layers.
A bit of pickup history: In the early 1930s, George Beauchamp applied for a patent on an odd looking guitar-like instrument that included a “pickup.” (The patent uses the variations “pickup,” “pick–up” and “pick up” interchangeably.) His invention was the now-famous Rickenbacker “Frying Pan,” which hosted the first guitar pickup. (To acquire the patent, Adolph Rickenbacker had to send Hawaiian guitarist Sol Hoopii to Washington to demonstrate Beauchamp’s invention, proving to U.S. Patent Office examiners that it worked.)
While there have been thousands of pickup variations and refinements over the last 80 years, most of today’s magnetic guitar pickups aren’t all that different from Beauchamp’s invention. In a conventional pickup, a continuous length of copper wire is wound thousands of times around a bobbin or coil former, surrounding the magnet or magnets. (The wire doesn’t short itself out because the copper strand is coated with a thin layer of insulating material.)
Fluence, however, is based on the notion that coils can be applied rather than wound. Like traces on a circuit board, concentric spirals of “coil” can be printed. Picture, for example, a racetrack- shaped printed circuit board the size of a Stratocaster pickup, with an opening in its center reserved for magnets. One board can hold one spiral, and because it’s printed, each copy is perfectly consistent. The next step involves stacking multiple layers of printed coils and interconnecting them until “pickup” ability is reached. It’s a technique used in the aerospace and telecommunications industries, though it’s never been applied to guitars.
Fishman uses a “shuttle” system to swap pickups instantly.
Perfect Copies
The team had many variables to experiment with: the thickness of each trace, the number of windings, the number and thickness of the layers. But the variables were all controllable—and perfectly reproducible.
Here’s what they came up with after untold iterations: Stack 48 layers on top of each other, add a spacer to provide a gap, and stack another 48 layers below, but with reversed coil direction to cancel hum. Perfectly matched halves perfectly cancel hum. The gap prevents unwanted communication between the upper and lower stacks.
A critical but elusive consideration was the flux properties of the magnets. That’s where Fishman’s Ching-Yu Lin, Ph.D., came in. Lin knew little about guitars before joining Fishman several years ago, but much about acoustic engineering. He set about measuring and visually mapping the magnetic properties of the best-sounding pickups.
Pickups, as you probably know, employ magnets of different materials (alnico 2, alnico 5, ceramic, etc.) and different shapes (bar magnets in humbuckers, magnetic pole pieces in most Fender pickups, and so forth). But the magnets themselves can vary from batch to batch, and sometimes the attractive qualities of a particular pickups result from environmental changes to the magnets after the pickups were manufactured.
Lin set about measuring and visually mapping the magnetic properties of the best-sounding pickups the team could find. The magnetic fields of different pickups produce distinct magnetic maps, so Lin created 3-D visualizations of the fields in order to study each pickup’s unique magnetic fingerprint and create a tangible “magnet goal.”
How to control the variations in the magnets’ properties? Supercharge the magnets, and then de-magnetize them in a controlled way.
From Notes to Voltage
A science class refresher on how a pickup turns guitar playing into voltage: The vibrating metal string excites the pickup’s magnetic field, which causes a matching vibrating current in the copper coil. To make this happen, of course, the string must be within the area of magnetic pull. But the fact that the string is within the magnetic field also affects the eddy currents causing the pull, as well as the vibration of the string itself. The interactions can become far more complex than you might suppose.From Flat to Flavorful
The magnetic properties of a pickup aren’t simply matters of tone and frequency. The interaction between the vibrating string and the magnetic field greatly affects the physical dynamics. The Fluence team’s goal was to also replicate the physical string-and-magnet interaction, informed by Lin’s magnet maps.
Simply positioning magnets in the center of those printed circuit racetracks yields a perfectly flat-sounding pickup. That’s not a tone most players seek, but it’s a perfect platform for replicating the character of different pickups.
With traditional pickups, changing one parameter alters others. For example, adding additional winds increases output and lows, but sacrifices highs. Take Strat pickups: A vintage ’54 pickup has more sparkle than a modern, overwound “Texas”-style pickup with its fatter, more bottom-heavy sound. The new technology permits designers to address those variables with less hard-to-control interactivity.
By starting with a perfectly flat pickup, and then filtering some frequencies while boosting others, the team can “image” the sound of various pickups, tweaking as they see fit. For instance, they can match a hot output of the overwound Strat pickup without sacrificing the high end of the vintage model.
Selectively altering a pickup’s frequency response is old news at Fishman—they’ve done it countless times with their under-saddle piezo pickups. But an exciting new wrinkle of Fluence technology is the possibility of combining multiple profiles in a single pickup. Instead of having to choose between vintage and modern Strat pickups, for example, players could access a switch allowing them to change profiles on the fly. The switch can reside on a standard push/pull pot, so both pickup and pot can be added as a completely reversible modification to most guitars.
Once the printed coils are assembled and the magnets matched, the preamp filters and boosts the signal
to match the curves shown here.
Fluence Benefits
Perfectly consistent and reproducible “printed” coils. A way to replicate the pull of the magnets based on ideal pickups. Accurate and consistent ways to control frequency response. The ability to choose between multiple pickup profiles. It’s impressive—but there’s more.
As mentioned, hum has been eliminated, even from single-coil pickups. The usual method of creating hum-free single-coil pickups—“stacking” two coils—inevitably causes high-end loss. But Fluence can eliminate hum while retaining the original single-coil sound, thanks to filtering and boosting within the preamp.
There are other advantages: A guitar’s volume control and the instrument cable can attenuate high-end frequencies. (In fact, draw a schematic showing a pickup, a volume control, and an instrument cable, and you have a perfect diagram of a tone control.) The instrument cable carries a capacitance—the longer the cable, the higher the capacitance and the greater the high-end loss. That’s not a problem with Fluence, because the pickup connects to a preamp, which acts as a buffer. Tone-wise, what you hear with the volume set to 10 is the same as what you hear when it’s dialed down to 2, only louder. A 10-foot cable sounds identical to a 100-foot cable. Want to use a 100-foot cable with your guitar volume set at 2? No problem.
Ching-Yu’s magnetic “fingerprint” of a particularly great-sounding hot Texas-style Strat pickup. The magnetic pull affects not the just the tone, but the physical dynamics of the string/magnet interaction.
Better Batteries
So it all sounds promising, right? Well, there’s one potential issue: To replicate the sounds of various pickups, Fluence requires a preamp for filtering and gain. And preamps require batteries.
The Fluence team was well aware that most guitarists prefer passive pickups (including all the team members). A battery can be a deal breaker for many players.
The team concluded that the things guitarists dislike most about batteries are their brief lifespans, the hassle and cost of changing them, and the need to carry spares. Their solution was to make the Fluence battery rechargeable via a standard mini-USB plug. The battery runs for 250 hours on a single two-and-a-half hour charge. Unplugging the instrument cable turns Fluence off, conserving juice. (The “off” feature means you may have to replace your existing output jack with a stereo jack.) With a 250-hour charge, you could forget to unplug your guitar, go away for a week, and still have three continuous days of non-stop playing before recharging.
This is what Ritchie Fliegler, Larry Fishman, and the rest of the team are especially excited about.
Fluence: The First Generation
Fluence pickups, single-coil and humbucker versions.
Fishman will unveil its Fluence pickup line at the 2014 Winter NAMM show. There are five initial models, each capable of two contrasting sound images:
· Strat-sized (single width): Voice 1 = vintage single-coil. Voice 2 = hot “Texas” single-coil.· Classic Humbucker (neck position): Voice 1 = vintage PAF. Voice 2 = clean, airy chime.
· Classic Humbucker (bridge position): Voice 1 = vintage PAF. Voice 2 = classic hot rod.
· Modern Humbucker Alnico (neck position): Voice 1 = modern active metal. Voice 2 = crisp, clean, and fluid.
· Modern Humbucker Ceramic (bridge position): Voice 1 = modern active metal. Voice 2 = classic hot rod.
A Fluence Test-Drive
I spent an afternoon auditioning the Fluence system. The Fishman team created modified guitars that allowed us to plug in different pickups from the back. (Using the same guitar means that tonal differences are strictly attributable to the pickups—a super-fun experiment in itself.)
We played single-coil and humbucker versions of the Fluence pickups using a Stratocaster and Les Paul, respectively, switching between classic Marshall and Fender amps. Rob Ketch at Fishman took charge first, putting the pickups through their paces. The guitars sounded absolutely great, and consistent at every volume setting.
My turn came next. I had a difficult time putting the guitars down, gushing over every note. Within minutes I was completely caught up in the enthusiasm. It was a tonal love-fest.
However, as Martin Mull once said, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” The next step will be for guitarists to audition Fluence pickups themselves. I’m looking forward to hearing their reactions, as is, of course, everyone on the Fishman team.
All members of the Fishman team emphasize that they are not rethinking the way pickups should sound, though they are reimagining the way pickups are manufactured in pursuit of that sound. “Our goal,” says Larry Fishman, “is to drive all amplifiers to happiness.”
Ritchie Fliegler admitted in our first conversation that he wouldn’t remove the original pickups from his ’54 Stratocaster anytime soon—that would be blasphemy! But he says he’s excited that many of us can get that sound in our guitars and reap additional sonic benefits—and then get back to making music.
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PG contributor Tom Butwin demos seven direct boxes — active and passive — showing off sound samples, features, and real-world advice. Options from Radial, Telefunken, Hosa, Grace Design, and Palmer offer solutions for any input, setting, and budget.
Grace Design m303 Active Truly Isolated Direct Box
The Grace Design m303 is an active, fully isolated DI box, delivering gorgeous audio performance for the stage and studio. Our advanced power supply design provides unbeatable headroom and dynamic range, while the premium Lundahl transformer delivers amazing low-end clarity and high frequency detail. True elegance, built to last.
Rupert Neve Designs RNDI-M Active Transformer Direct Interface
Compact design, giant tone. The RNDI-M brings the stunning tone & clarity of its award-winning counterparts to an even more compact and pedalboard-friendly format, with the exact same custom Rupert Neve Designs transformers and discrete FET input stage as the best-selling RNDI, RNDI-S and RNDI-8.
Telefunken TDA-1 1-channel Active Instrument Direct Box
The TDA-1 phantom powered direct box uses high-quality components and classic circuitry for rich, natural sound. With discrete Class-A FET, a European-made transformer, and a rugged metal enclosure, it delivers low distortion and a broad frequency response. Assembled and tested in Connecticut, USA, for reliable performance and superior sound.
Hosa SideKick Active Direct Box
The Hosa SideKick DIB-445 Active DI delivers clear, strong signals for live and studio use. Ideal for guitars, basses, and keyboards, it minimizes interference over long runs. Features include a pad switch, ground lift, and polarity flip. With a flat frequency response and low noise, it ensures pristine audio.
Radial JDI Jensen-equipped 1-channel Passive Instrument Direct Box
The Radial JDI preserves your instrument’s natural tone with absolute clarity and zero distortion. Its Jensen transformer delivers warm, vintage sound, while its passive design eliminates hum and buzz. With a ruler-flat response (10Hz–40kHz) and no phase shift, the JDI ensures pristine sound in any setup.
Radial J48 1-channel Active 48v Direct Box
The Radial J48 delivers exceptional clarity and dynamic range, making it the go-to active DI for professionals. Its 48V phantom-powered design ensures clean, powerful signal handling without distortion. With high headroom, low noise, and innovative power optimization, the J48 captures your instrument’s true tone—perfect for studio and stage.
Palmer River Series - Ilm
The Palmer ilm, an upgraded version of the legendary Palmer The Junction, delivers studio-quality, consistent guitar tones anywhere. This passive DI box features three analog speaker simulations, ensuring authentic sound reproduction. Its advanced filter switching mimics real guitar speaker behavior, making it perfect for stage, home, or studio recording sessions.
Learn more from these brands!
Delicious, dynamic fuzz tones that touch on classic themes without aping them. Excellent quality. Super-cool and useful octave effect.
Can’t mix and match gain modes.
$349
Great Eastern FX Co. Focus Fuzz Deluxe
Adding octave, drive, and boost functions to an extraordinary fuzz yields a sum greater than its already extraordinary parts.
One should never feel petty for being a musical-instrument aesthete. You can make great music with ugly stuff, but you’re more likely to get in the mood for creation when your tools look cool. Great Eastern FX’s Focus Fuzz Deluxe, an evolution of their très élégantFocus Fuzz, is the sort of kit you might conspicuously keep around a studio space just because it looks classy and at home among design treasures likeRoland Space Echoes, Teletronix LA-2As, andblonde Fender piggyback amps. But beneath the FFD’s warmly glowing Hammerite enclosure dwells a multifaceted fuzz and drive that is, at turns, beastly, composed, and unique. Pretty, it turns out, is merely a bonus.
Forks in the Road
Though the Cambridge, U.K.-built FFD outwardly projects luxuriousness, it derives its “deluxe” status from the addition of boost, overdrive, and octave functions that extend an already complex sound palette. Unfortunately, a significant part of that fuzzy heart is a Soviet-era germanium transistor that is tricky to source and limited the original Focus Fuzz production to just 250 units. For now, the Focus Fuzz Deluxe will remain a rare bird. Great Eastern founder David Greaves estimates that he has enough for 400 FFDs this time out. Hopefully, the same dogged approach to transistor sourcing that yielded this batch will lead to a second release of this gem, and on his behalf we issue this plea: “Transistor hoarders, yield your troves to David Greaves!”
The good news is that the rare components did not go to waste on compromised craft. The FFD’s circuit is executed with precision on through-hole board, with the sizable Soviet transistor in question hovering conspicuously above the works like a cross between a derby hat and B-movie flying saucer. If the guts of the FFD fail to allay doubts that you’re getting what you paid for, the lovingly designed enclosure and robust pots and switches—not to mention the pedal’s considerable heft—should take care of whatever reticence remains.
Hydra in Flight
Just as in the original Focus Fuzz, the fuzz section in the Deluxe deftly walks an ideal path between a germanium Fuzz Face’s weight and presence, a Tone Bender’s lacerating ferocity, and the focus of a Dallas Rangemaster. You don’t have to strain to hear that distillate of elements. But even if you can’t easily imagine that combination, what you will hear is a fuzz that brims with attitude without drowning in saturation. There’s lots of dynamic headroom, you’ll feel the touch responsiveness, and you’ll sense the extra air that makes way for individual string detail and chord overtones. It shines with many different types of guitars and amps, too. I was very surprised at the way it rounded off the sharp edges made by a Telecaster bridge pickup and AC15-style combo while adding mass and spunk. The same amp with a Gibson SG coaxed out the Tony Iommi-meets-Rangemaster side of the fuzz. In any combination, the fuzz control itself, which boosts gain while reducing bias voltage (both in very tasteful measure) enhances the vocabulary of the guitar/amp pairing. That range of color is made greater still by the fuzz’s sensitivity to guitar volume and tone attenuation and touch dynamics. Lively clean tones exist in many shades depending on your guitar volume, as do rich low-gain overdrive sounds.
The drive section is similarly dynamic, and also quite unique thanks to the always versatile focus control, which adds slight amounts of gain as well as high-mid presence. At advanced focus levels, the drive takes on a fuzzy edge with hints of Fender tweed breakup and more Black Sabbath/Rangemaster snarl. It’s delicious stuff with Fender single-coils and PAFs, and, just as with the fuzz, it’s easily rendered thick and clean with a reduction in guitar volume or picking intensity. The boost, meanwhile, often feels just as lively and responsive—just less filthy—lending sparkle and mass to otherwise thin and timid combo amp sounds.
Among this wealth of treats, the octave function is a star. It works with the fuzz, drive, or boost. But unlike a lot of octave-up effects, you needn’t approach it with caution. Though it adds plenty of the buzzing, fractured, and ringing overtones that make octave effects so wild and distinct, it doesn’t strip mine low end from the signal. The extra balance makes it feel more musical under the fingers and even makes many chords sound full and detailed—a trick few octave effects can manage. With the fuzz, the results are concise, burly, and articulate single notes that lend themselves to lyrical, melodic leads and power chords. In drive-plus-octave mode, there are many hues of exploding practice-amp trash to explore. The boost and the octave may be my favorite little gem among the FFD’s many jewels, though. Adding the octave to boosted signals with a generous heap of focus input yields funky, eccentric electric-sitar tones that pack a punch and are charged with character in their fleeting, flowering state.
The Verdict
It’s hard to imagine adding extra footswitches to the Focus Fuzz Deluxe without sacrificing its basic elegance and proportions, and without elevating its already considerable price. Certainly, there would be real utility in the ability to mix and match all three excellent gain modes. On the other hand, the output level differences between fuzz, drive, and boost are pretty uniform, meaning quick switches on the fly will shift texture and attitude dramatically without delivering an ear-frying 30 dB boost. And though it’s hard not be tantalized by sounds that might have been, from combining the fuzz and/or boost and drive circuits, the myriad tones that can be sourced by blending any one of them with the superbly executed octave effect and the varied, rangeful focus and output controls will keep any curious tone spelunker busy for ages. For most of them, I would venture, real treasure awaits.
Why is Tommy’s take on “Day Tripper” so hard? And what song would Adam Miller never play with him? Plus, we get Adam’s list of favorite Tommy Emmanuel records.
We call guitarist Adam Miller in the middle of the night in Newcastle, Australia, to find out what it’s like to play with Certified Guitar Player, Tommy Emmanuel. Miller tells us just how famous Tommy is in Australia, and what it was like hearing him play from a formative age. Eventually, Adam got to open for Emmanuel, and they’ve since shared the stage, so we get the firsthand scoop: Why is Tommy’s take on “Day Tripper” so hard? And what song would Miller never play with him? Plus, we get Adam’s list of favorite Tommy Emmanuel records.
Adam’s newly released trio album, Timing, is out now.
Plus, we’re talking about new recordings from Billy Strings and Bryan Sutton, as well as Brooklyn Mediterranean surf party band Habbina Habbina.
Peavey Electronics announces the Decade preamp pedal. The internet and social media have been abounding with chatter about the current recording secret of the modern-day guitar gods – the Peavey Decade practice amp.
The discontinued amp has reached unimaginable demands on the secondary markets. So much so that small pedal builders have made attempts to capitalize and duplicate the proprietary designs themselves. Tone chasers can now rejoice as the Decade preamp pedal now brings those highly sought after tones back to market in a small, compact footprint.
Guitar players will find a single input, single output preamp pedal straight forward and easy to navigate. Faithful to the original Decade circuitry (circa 1980), the control layout will be identical to the original amplifier. The GAIN section features PRE and POST controls. PREGAIN sets the gain of the input circuitry. POST GAIN sets the gain before the out. Built off the legendary Peavey Saturation patent, the new, switchable SATURATION allows tube-like sustain and overload at all volume levels, suitable for bedrooms, rehearsals, stadiums and apparently, those very expensive recording studios. The traditional BASS, MID, and HIGH equalization controls provide the tone shaping enhancements any guitar should require. Upgraded pedal features include an internal 24v supply from the standard 9v supply/battery and worldwide EMC/FCC compliance approval.
To learn more, visit online at www.Peavey.com
Street $199.99 USD