Whatever might have happened off the pitch this year, Fender has a tunnel-vision agenda for its product lines. “Our goal is to always look at our instruments and listening to players, and work with them to offer features that help them express their art better,” says the Big F’s Director of Product Management Allan Abassi.
The Silent System is indicative of that approach: rolled out on the American Professional Classic, it offers a fresh take on solving the single-coil 60-cycle hum problem. Fender is no stranger to hum-cancelling gadgets, of course – its Noiseless pickups have been a mainstay since 1998.
But this marks a change of direction: the Silent System isn’t a new pickup. Instead, it uses a passive magnetless dummy coil positioned under the pickguard to remove 60-cycle hum, promising to retain authentic single-coil tone while removing the pesky noise.
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Dummy coil tech isn’t new; Suhr, Ilitch and others have experimented with it in the past. But Fender’s promises to be different in terms of size, shape and, Abassi says, efficiency. “There are a number of ways to approach the challenge,” he says. “And the form our system takes is unique.
“Protecting the natural frequency response of Fender pickups was at the heart of this project, and the Silent System does it better than all the others we tested.”
What inspired Fender to create the Silent System when you’ve made Noiseless pickups for so many years?
At the heart of this is an age-old problem with single-coil pickups, which is 60-cycle hum. If you’re playing in an environment with a lot of fluorescent lights, or you have a big pedalboard, or if you just have dirty power in general, it can introduce a lot of ancillary hum into your tone. People have wanted to get rid of it for a long time.
The way we’ve done it in the past is using our Noiseless pickup design, and it works very very well. But you lose some of the organic, transparent feel and tone of a real single-coil. It’s subtle, but it’s there.
We wanted to get rid of all the last percentage of difference between a real single-coil pickup and a single-coil pickup with no hum. The dummy coil is a tried and trusted method. We wanted to take the noise cancellation away from the pickup itself, because we wanted to use regular, real single-coil pickups.
So this system is compatible with any pickups? You don’t need a special set to get the benefits?
Exactly. It’s passive, so it works with any Fender pickups. The only concern you would have ever is that it works by phasing out the hum. The dummy coil is wound in reverse to whatever pickup is selected. Occasionally, if you have a reverse-wound pickup, you might have to flip the phasing in comparison to the dummy coil.
That can easily be accomplished with a switch or changing the wiring, so it does work with any single-coil pickup set.
What are the core mechanics behind how the Silent System works?
A dummy coil, or the Silent System, is a bobbin that’s wrapped with wire. It’s wired in series with whatever pickup is selected on the guitar, and it’s wired in reverse. It senses the phase of the pickup it’s wired in with, and cancels out the hum of that pickup.
What makes this use of the technology different from, say, the Ilitch or Suhr applications?
We wanted to make sure you could tell that more noise was gone, and we’d retained all the beautiful tone
Ours is unique because it’s a very large coil – it’s very wide and deep with very thick wire, and that’s the recipe that cancels most hum and retains more of the single coil tone. Think about a bucket catching rain: the wider the bucket is, the more rain it’ll catch. So the wider the coil, the more hum it will get rid of.
One of the popular methods of using a dummy coil is to just use another Strat pickup and wire it out of phase. This is different – it’s a magnetless pickup, so it’s not really sensing the strings. While it does fit in the dummy coil category, it’s been optimized well beyond just throwing a plastic Strat bobbin inside the guitar, like the old days.
This coil is wider and deeper than any other noise-reducing pickguard/backplate solutions, which allows for the use of a larger gauge magnet wire. That’s key to preserving high-end response. The final coil is shaped to be as wide as it can be; a wider coil is more efficient at sensing noise.
What were the main design challenges?
We wanted to make sure it wasn’t too heavy. The system we have now, including the pickups in the guitar and the coil, is just a couple ounces more than a Noiseless pickup set would be. It had to fit under all the pickguards – the bigger the pickup, the better the result.
It also had to be better than all the hum-canceling systems we’ve tried in the past. We wanted to make sure you could tell that more noise was gone, and make sure that we were retaining all the beautiful transparent tone of a normal single-coil.
Are there plans to make these more widely available across the Fender line?
We’re definitely thinking of it. Exactly where and when is still under development, but I think the system works so well, and it fits in all the guitars that we make so well, that we’ll use it in the future. For now it’s reserved for the limited run on the American Pro Classic.
Can it be retrofitted into guitars?
You could route any guitar to fit it in somewhere. Our goal was to fit it under the pickguard, so you don’t need extra cavity covers or trap doors. It’s probably a bit beyond the average user, but if you can route the body yourself, you can mount the system in any guitar that we make.
