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Why Mag pickups are not the best for IR?

Monday 2 March 2020

A magnetic pickup senses the vibration of the strings in its direct vicinity. Because it "listens" at the strings at a specific position, it also acts as a spatial filter. One immediate consequence is that the frequency response of a magnetic pickup depends on its position. (That’s why you get 3 different tone with the 3 pickup positions of the stratocaster).

The problem is that the filter response also depends on the string!!

J. Donald Tillman explains it better than I would ever do
Link to the explanation

He also made a simulator to see what is happening:
Link to Till page

Here I used this simulator to show the freqeuncy response of the pickup for the E and D strings.

You can see how different both responses are.

An IR could correct one of the two frequency response but not both at the same time... because there is no way for the pedal to guess if your note was played on the E or D string.

I know James May from Audiosprockets likes to say that magnetic pickups are nonlinear but it is in my opinion not true. They are linear as their output is proportional to the input (the movement of the string). In this case it is a problem of dimensionality and space and not of linarity.

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