吉他论坛上有关于Alnico V与Alnico II的话题，纯味与formvar涂层的曲目，以及阅读Strat Pickup或PAF的阻力是什么to achieve ‘authentic vintage tone’。不过，请新墨西哥州的制造商Curtis Novak为您的时尚规格清单构建一个拾音器，并且您可能会听到另一端的“点击”，因为他回到了更重要的问题上。
诺瓦克（Novak）了解了他20多年的专业品尝拾音器（在此之前有15年的好15年之后），保证客户满意度的唯一方法就是用耳朵玩耍。
结果产生了备受赞誉的皮卡，以适合任何吉他或弹奏需求。诺瓦克（Novak）和他的五人船员在一系列爵士乐拾音器中的长期专业知名度尤其闻名，同时介绍了一些早期的金箔式替代品，从任何地方以及从Strat到Tele到Tele到PAF风格的Humbucker, to stealth Melody Maker replacements and beyond, he’s got a coil to suit virtually every need.
规格，Schmecks
诺瓦克告诉我们：“在早期，我有点像一个短期的厨师。”“我会和所有的东西站在那儿，人们会告诉我他们想要什么，我会鞭打它。随着时间的流逝，我了解到那些真正非常挑剔的人永远不会感到高兴。我会做所有这些事情，有些人真的很沮丧。‘They say you’re the best, and this doesn’t sound at all like I expected it.’ And I would say: ‘Well, what were you expecting it to sound like?’ They’d tell me what they wanted to hear, and I’d say: ‘God, if you’d have told me that I never would have wound what you asked for!’
他补充说：“所以我大概在大约15年前就切换了，而且我不会说规格。我不会说话规格。我想听听您希望它听起来像什么。The way I break it to a musician is: ‘If I catch you playing in a bar or a venue, I may request you to play a song, but I’m not going to tell you what key to play it in, because you’re the professional. Or if I’m going to go to a dentist, I’m not going to tell them how to fix my tooth.’ When people tell me they have to deal with specs, I say: ‘No, there’s plenty of other people you can go to with a punch list.’ I offer a full refund, and very rarely do I ever get pickups back.”
Stripped finishes and busted coils
Novak was born in 1965 and grew up in New Mexico, where his early ogling of the instruments in the Sears and Montgomery Ward catalogues segued into hands-on messing with guitars and electronics. The youngest child in a large family, his siblings had all been provided school-band instruments and the like by Novak’s parents… until he came along. Following wreckage and carnage and the expense of years of hire-for-purchase woodwinds and battered percussion, they weren’t falling for that one again, so young Curtis had to fend for himself once the bug bit.
“在初中，”那一年。在那时，我很喜欢玩更多的演奏，但是我意识到的是，我一直对事情的运作方式和它的机制以及使事物的听起来有所不同而感到更加感兴趣。我小时候很快最终买了几吉他，只是因为那个会分开，而且我没有一个可以玩的吉他，所以我总是在发现这些有趣的乐器：‘这有什么不同？为什么听起来与那个不同？’等等。”
不过，受诺瓦克早期吉他解构的启发的第一支手工艺品正在修补 - 他在那个舞台上赢得了声誉，这等于他目前作为世界一流替代品的制造商的地位。在当地的当地典当行中清理老式挡泥板的实践并将其修整成准确的老式颜色，这使诺瓦克在80年代中后期使诺瓦克上大学，很快他就让顾客来找他进行老式规格修复。
“I was right in the area where Buddy Holly lived and recorded,” he says, “so there was always a good amount of vintage guitars you could get real cheap. I did a lot of research to get the actual Fender colours from DuPont Duco, and there was an old auto-body shop there that still had the old paint book, so I resurrected the old colours and got that going. Fender used to refer people to me for vintage restoration, but I just didn’t want to be around those chemicals all the time. And by doing all that [finishing] research, I ended up doing a lot of pickup research on the side, and eventually, I got enough where I thought I could figure this out.”
在此之前，他第一次深入研究了绕线绕组的复杂性。诺瓦克（Novak）仍在初中，他决定了他的第一把电吉他 - 廉价的日本策略副本 - 听起来不那么好，他开始怀疑皮卡的罪魁祸首。
他回忆说：“我说服我的父母为我带来了一套西摩·邓肯·斯特拉特（Seymour Duncan Strat）的皮卡，”他回忆道，“我把它们安装在吉他中。就像黑夜一样。它们很棒，但是我没有盖上掩护，我便宜的吉他上的盖子不合适，所以它们只是在那里有生卷线圈。我的一个朋友借了吉他，在演奏并打破皮卡时将绳子弯曲在线圈上。一个星期或两个星期，我的皮卡真棒，然后它们被打破了。
“So my parents were like: ‘See, that’s why we don’t buy stuff for the kids – they break ’em!’ [laughs]. I would stare at these coils, remembering how good they sounded and it was one of those things that I was set to figure out. This was well before the internet and there wasn’t a lot of information on how to do it, or where to get wire and so forth. While I was doing other work, it sat on my bench and eventually, I was able to figure it out and do something that worked.”
Windup merchant
诺瓦克说，他从他的朋友杰森·洛拉尔（Jason Lollar）那里学到了一些东西，他利用了实验室研发经验 - 以及美国当地政府盈余商店提供的丰富硬件 - 建造自己的灯具……就像狮子座的老绕线机一样。他坚持认为，他的拾音器（意思是将电线引导到由电动绕线机转动的线圈上）是其由此产生的声音的主要钥匙之一。
As he tells it: “I swore that if I ever grew this bigger than just me, no matter how big it gets, everything is going to be hand-wound. I try not to spend too much time on the science and wondering why that is, but… with the cam-wound, machine-wound pickup, every wrap lies next to every previous wrap and it goes back and forth and it’s totally uniform. My theory – and I have zero desire to take it anywhere past a theory – is that what you’ve done is maximised wire-to-wire contact so the signal’s not as rich. Whereas with a random, hand-wound pickup you have really minimised the contact from each wrap.”
To many pickup enthusiasts, this practice will be known as ‘scatter winding,’ the technique of layering wrap upon wrap in a semi-random fashion. Alongside this, Novak also tends to dismiss the notion that there are any ‘magic ingredients’ that must be included to get a pickup to turn out a certain way. Which is not to say that materials don’t matter, but the specifics of components don’t matter as much to the overall results as does construction technique – something belied by today’s guitarists’ obsessions with the minutiae of ‘vintage correct’ ingredients.
“I used to do a lot more car restorations when I had more time,” says Novak, “and the parallel I use is that when people wonder what it is that makes a Camaro so fast, they’re wasting their time measuring the thickness of the vinyl on the seats.”
复古伤口比老式的年龄
Although he feels he’s thoroughly debunked the notion that the ‘ageing process’ itself somehow imparts mystical characteristics to guitars or pickups, Novak does believe a vintage-like approach to manufacturing can make a significant difference, particularly in the extent to which any pickup’s coil is wrapped with wire.
“When I was restoring [vintage guitars] and repairing them and going through a lot of them, I just naturally catalogued all of this information. Looking at one thing to the next, it came to me that, you know, Buddy Holly’s Strat sounded really good when it was brand new, and Eric Clapton’s Blackie and Brownie, when he did the莱拉… sessions, were just 10-year-old guitars and they really sounded good. And if it is just a factor of age, the 80s Strats would be sounding really good now, and they just不。
“我认为当有人在做某事时说是一个方便的论点：‘哦，这些听起来根本不像老式的人，’看起来同样，你说：“天哪，那一定是年龄。’”
Instead, Novak discovered long ago that what are now often called ‘vintage wound’ pickups – those made with fewer wraps of coil wire, therefore exhibiting relatively lower resistance readings – offer the key to greater dynamics, tonal complexity and overall versatility in use, particularly when coupled with other vintage-style manufacturing techniques.
“There are things that I’ve noticed that vintage pickups have that weren’t there later,” he says, “so I’ve instituted a lot of those, and I think that’s had a lot to do with the sound of the pickups I make. I just didn’t follow the typical approach of everyone else.”
关于更热，陷入困境的皮卡，诺瓦克指出，有些球员确实可能希望全力以赴，但是当您试图退缩时，您确实无处可去。“当天，您知道，乔·斯特鲁默（Joe Strummer）演奏了梅尔·哈格德（Merle Haggard）演奏的电视，里奇·布莱克莫尔（Ritchie Blackmore）演奏了与埃里克·克拉普顿（Eric Clapton）和巴迪·霍莉（Buddy Holly）扮演的同一阶级。您所接受的是重要的。如今，他们拥有了所有这些陷入困境的皮卡，所有这些都有一百万不同的艺术家的弦乐，但是那个艺术家只玩过其他所有人最初都玩过的艺术家。他们没有所有这些特殊的东西。
“But when you start tailoring things to that degree of ‘custom’ and getting out of that vintage realm… a vintage pickup, you could take it in so many directions, but an over-wound pickup, you can’t go that far with them.”