When you play an electric guitar with a single-coil pickup, it is a fact of life – an iron law of physics – that sometimes you will plug in, crank up your amp and there is a whole lot of hum in your sound.
This 60-cycle hum could be from the lights. It could be from the AC power. And oftentimes whatever is engaged on your pedalboard only makes it worse.
Over the years, Fender has tried to find a solution, and with each successive generation of Noiseless pickups it has got closer to the acme of hum-free single-coil tone. But even so, it was receiving feedback from players who said that there was still some compromise – the Noiseless pickups lost something from the high-end. And so the Fender R&D team kept at it.
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In 2021, it started work on a fully passive solution that it says has solved this 80-year-old problem. The Fender Silent System has been trialled on a limited run of American Classic Professional Telecasters and Stratocasters, and features a large dummy coil fitted under the pickguard.
MusicRadar caught up with Fender’s director of product management, Allen Abbassi, who shares the story behind the development of the Silent System, and explains how it works.
Tell us a little bit about the history behind this, because it’s nothing new. The press release even says the Silent System is the solution to a 80-year-old problem.
“Everybody knows that Fender is the forerunner in single-coil pickup design. One of the challenges, of course, is the 60-cycle hum, and we’ve tried many, many different ways to get rid of that hum.
“The main design that we’ve been using for the past X amount of years is the Noiseless pickup – and we have actually used dummy coils as well in the past, but to us, the form factor and the development of the Noiseless pickup achieved really, really good results for us.
“We’ve been doing this for a couple of decades plus, and that stacked-coil design we’ve evolved over the years – I think we’re on our fifth iteration of the Noiseless pickup right now – and we’ve done everything from adjusting the size of the stack coils, removing magnets out of the dummy coil that bucks the hum, trying different wire, different plates that separate the two coils of our stacked design, all these different things. And we’ve gotten ever closer to achieving no noise with true single-coil tone.”
There’s a ‘but’ coming here.
“There’s always a compromise. A stacked-coil design, or even using a dummy coil, often cuts a lot of high-end off, and it kind of sucks a little bit of the organic, transparent nature of the pickup. You can tell when you’re playing.
“The response, the feel, and even the tone, you can tell that you’re not using a true single-coil with all these different methods of noise cancelling. So, we’ve been working at this issue for decades, literally. And up to now, the single-coil Noiseless pickup was our answer to that question of how to get rid of the noise.”
And then you came to the conclusion it was time to look beyond the pickup itself for the answer?
“In 2021, we started experimenting with other ways of doing that. One of the goals with this new Silent System was to be able to use true single-coil pickups and not have to rely on the pickups itself to get rid of the noise. And the dummy coil was the natural progression of that thought.
“Again, dummy coals have been used in the past. I think what’s unique about ours is the size and shape and the type of wire. All those different elements are key to making this system as successful as possible. This noise cancelling has been something that we’ve been working on for decades. This Silent System has been in development since probably 2021.”
This noise cancelling has been something that we’ve been working on for decades. This Silent System has been in development since probably 2021
The Noiseless pickups do a pretty good job though. If they were good enough for Clapton, then they’re good enough for the rest of us hacks. Did you consult with artists when developing the Silent System?
“Yeah, I mean, I agree with you that the Noiseless pickups do sound fantastic. We did get feedback from people that they noticed that that the design of our Noiseless pickup sometimes isn’t as sparkly and doesn’t retain as much high-end as a true single-coil. Also, the response to your pick attack and the transparency of the tone is affected a little bit.
“We work with a lot of different artists that have very fine-tuned ears, and they all say these pickups are great – and like you, a lot of artists are completely happy with the Noiseless pickups that we make – but we did get a lot of feedback from a lot of people that thought we could do better, that we could reduce more noise and retain more of the single-coil tone – and we believe that ourselves.”
A lot of these artists, like you say, have a great ear for this, and they are also listening to them in a studio environment, through hi-fidelity monitors.
“I think there are a lot of people whose feel that Noiseless pickups are a compromise. They recognise that they don’t feel as organic and transparent. There’s a little bit of high-end loss. The response is a little cloaked with the noiseless design. Subtle for sure, but a lot of people do notice this.
And so, just like Leo, we’re always talking to artists, and people that we work with, and always trying to evolve our designs and make them better, and respond to what the artists and players are asking for. This is a perfect example of that.
If we think of hum-free pickups, we immediately might think of what a brand like EMG does with active designs featuring a preamp to kill the hum.
“An active system requires a battery, and it is very effective at cancelling hum. But one of our goals was we didn’t want to saddle the guitars or the players with having to worry about a battery. We wanted something completely passive so that it works forever. You don’t ever need to worry about opening the guard and changing a battery. We didn’t have to rout an extra cavity with a little battery box. We didn’t want to deal with anything related to active systems.
“That was one of the absolute requirements of this project. We want to reduce as much noise as possible, retain as much single-coiled tone as possible. We wanted it to work with any Fender model and any Fender set of pickups, and we didn’t want to use a battery.”
How should se talk about it? For all intents and purposes, this is a large dummy coil secreted under the pickguard, adjacent to the pickups. It’s about the size of a Wide Range Humbucker. What makes it so different to dummy coils we’ve seen before?
“Yeah, it’s very different than the average dummy coil. A lot of systems just use another pickup, like a Strat pickup wired in series and reverse-wound to cancel the hum. In all our development, we discovered that the key to cancelling the noise is the size of the bobbin. It’s the shape of it. It’s very wide, and there are a lot of turns of very thick gauge wire. So all these elements are part of the recipe.
“We use very thick wire, and it’s a very wide coil. It’s kind of like a bucket in the rain, the wider the bucket, the more rain you can catch. Similarly, with the pickup, the wider it is, the more cancellation you get. So our pickup is much wider than an average single-coil pickup, it’s much deeper, and it uses much thicker wire.”
“Otherwise, the functionality of the coil is similar to what people understand. It’s wired, wound in reverse to the pickup that’s selected, and then phase cancels the hum. So it’s working just like a normal dummy coil would work.
“The key to our development was it had to fit under all the different pickguards of fender instruments, and it had to reduce as much hum as possible, retain as much single-coil tone as possible. And the size and thickness of the pickup was very important to that end result, as well as the thickness of the gauge of the wire.”
You raise a good point. The size matters if you’ve got to route the body and hide it under the pickguard.
“Also, another element was weight. You know, with all the experimenting we did, the bigger the pickup is, the more hum you get rid of. But once it gets really, really large, now all of a sudden, the route doesn’t fit under the pickguard, and all of a sudden it’s very heavy. Depending on how much wire you’re using, pickups can get very heavy. And that was also important to us to not burden the guitar with too much extra weight.”
That’s the next question – how heavy is this system?
“Only two, three ounces heavier than a set of our Noiseless pickups. I think we did really well in that respect.”
You have rolled out it in these limited edition American Professional Classic Telecasters and Stratocasters. But you mentioned it is compatible with all Fender models.
“We route an extra cavity right next to the pickups. Some guitars, it’ll be in between the pickups. I think if you mounted it on a Jazzmaster, you’d probably have to mount it in between the pickups. But again, we wanted to make sure that, whatever we arrived at, the size and shape of this bobbin has to fit under the pickguards of all our models.”
That’s interesting, so so if I were grab my Telecaster, scoop out a tangerine-sized bit of ash, then stuck this system in, then theoretically, it should work just the same?
“Yeah, absolutely. It’s passive and it works with all different fender pickups. The only thing you might have to concern yourself with is the phasing, because the phasing is really what accomplishes the noise cancelling. The pickup that it’s paired with has to be wound in reverse.
“If a pickup is reverse wound or not, sometimes you might have to mess with the wiring a little bit to get the phasing properly. But it works with any pickup set that we sell right now, and we’ve tested it with a lot of different pickups.”
How did you test it? I could imagine you recreating Ritchie Blackmore’s rig or something like that, and going at it.
“The guy who really developed this system, his name is Steven Casado. He’s one of our best engineers, and he started in 2021 at the beginning of the project. We literally would have him build us a guitar with different versions of this system. We’d load in the current version of the coil into a guitar, and then we’d plug it in and compare it to the noise level of other guitars that we make.
All the different guitars, and we would just plug them in and see how much noise was reduced, and how much of the single-coil tone was maintained, compared to other guitars that we make. We were obviously plugging into vintage-style amps, like Deluxe Reverbs and Twins.
We tried all different shapes and sizes, so many different iterations. Probably 23-plus different versions. We build a guitar and throw the pickup into it, and then test it at the factory. There are a lot of areas in the factory that have fluorescent lights and a lot of noise, so it was a great environment to plug into and test.”
