On 4 Jun 2011, at 21:08, Les Hall wrote:
All this celebration of Ajay Kapur and the amazing work that he and his students are doing reminded me of a sort of reinvention that my Swedish friend Are and I created together some time ago. It's a type of stringed instrument pickup that has unique properties making it very suitable for creating one's own stringed instruments. I know that part of the ChucK world involves creating unique instruments including stringed ones, so I thought I'd post here.
I say reinvented because after we created it, we found prior art in the patent record going back to the 1930's if I recall correctly, and we never did patent out little twist on the theme that made it practical today, so it's yours to use freely. It works by putting neodymium magnets under the strings and then amplifying the tiny currents created in the strings themselves as they vibrate in the magnetic field. Since there are no coils of wire, there is no second-order filter to distort all those beautiful harmonics, and the sound is more "clean" or harp-like than a conventional wound pickup. There are quirks to these pickups, but they are minor to most listeners. You can read all about this new-old pickup system here:
Have you measured the partials? When playing in E12, one wants the partials without the 5-limit suppressed, as they are poorly approximated, but otherwise a rich spectrum as to produce harmony. In your sample, the factory pickup has that, but yours really does not have much partials at all. For some reason, the fundamental seemed suppressed on both - it may have to do how it is picked. It would be good if one could control the spectrum in ChucK. Hans