Dan Armstrong - Man & Guitars

While virtually every aspect of the Dan Armstrong guitar is totally innovative, there was nothing more ingenious than the concept of the interchangeable pickup design. There has never been anything like it before or since. It is a unique design that ironically tops off an already very unique instrument.

When it came time to produce a pickup for his acrylic guitar, Dan contracted one of the best pickup makers known, Mr. Bill Lawrence who was originally from Germany and had just arrived in America. Dan hired Bill to teach him everything he knew about pickups. Bill Lawrence states "I had just come to America and was flat broke. I showed Dan one of my pickups and he asked me to help him make pickups for a new guitar he was designing. I shared Dan's shop from that time until the time he closed up."

According to Steve Kubica it was one of Dan's employees that would bring them together. "There was a Vietnamese guy working for Dan who could barely speak english, if at all. On payday, Dan would often clip his check to a post, or beam and said to 'make sure he gets his check when he comes in'. He was doing repair work for Dan for awhile, and Dan liked him alot. We had a nickname for him as we really couldn't pronounce his name, so we all called him 'Dedee' for some reason. Anyway, Dedee was the guy who brought Bill in to meet Dan."

Steve continues, stating "although Dan was already a very accomplished pickup maker & rewinder, his experience to date had been rewinding P-90 type pickups and such. But the P-90 type design wasn't really going to work well due to string spacing vs. pole spacing, and Dan wanted something new & different anyway. Bill Lawrence took Dan in a whole new direction as he migrated Dan away from the P-90 design to the bar type magnet that the instruments would eventually use."

Steve finishes, adding "even then, if you look at the earliest prototype pickups that Dan made for these instruments, you will notice how they they greatly resemble a P-90, even though it had a bar magnet. These early pickups were molded in a white resin which had problems, as the resin wouldn't harden properly. So it was dropped altogether for the brown resin that Dan liked better anyway as it blended in better with its surroundings.." Bill Lawrence states that "We just wound the coils & I made it so that the pickup would hook up to the guitar, the resin process was all done at Ampeg and I had no part in that."

Bill talked of his days with Dan, stating "We experimented a lot with different things and although we always seemed to arrive at the same conclusions, we went about it differently. My method was more scientific, with notes, and theories and it always worked out correctly. Dan just used his ear, and he knew precisely how a given instrument should sound - so we would always arrive at the same conclusions, and answers, but differently. The only problem with using your ear, like Dan did, was as you get older you lose some of that."

Bill continues, stating "For example, one time while playing a Precision Bass Dan noticed it had a dead spot on the 5^th or 6^th fret area. We tried everything to fix it and while I was using mathematics to figure out the problem, Dan was using his hands and ears. We both agreed on the solution - to drill a small hole in the headstock and put in something solid that had some weight. While it didn't totally eliminate the problem, it shifted the resonant frequency of the instrument which in turn moved the dead spot way up high in the upper registers of the neck - which do not get played as often as the 5^th & 6^th fret areas."

Lastly Bill states "One problem that, for awhile eluded us was a Les Paul that Dan had in his shop that also had a dead spot. After trying many things Dan adjusted the truss rod and we noticed that here too, the dead area shifted, though we couldn't get it as much out of the way as the P-Bass mentioned earlier. We did what we could, and it was better but not perfect. I found the solution to the problem in a whole new way. Approximately a year & a half later I was at Gibson when and I saw their production process and noticed that they were putting a plastic, or nylon type of jacket around the truss rod. Dan & I both agreed, that had to be the problem."

Dan had once stated "Bill and I worked closely together and eventually came up with a prototype pickup. Later on I realized that in order to get the wide variety of sounds I wanted to eminate from this guitar, that a series of pickups was going to be needed."

Thus the concept of the interchangeable pickup was born. If it weren't enough that these new guitars were going to look radically different, they were also going to achieve subtle, but different sounds by using different styles of pickups. Like everything else on the Dan Armstrong guitar, the pickup design was a product of a whole new trend. Gone was the concept of two or three pickups mounted on the guitar body with a switch and tone knob to differentiate between the pickups, and in it's place an entirely new thought process. Six pickups, each with their own unique sound that are capable of being swapped out in seconds on the guitar.

Together, Dan and Bill designed a total of six pickups that were called 1 through 6 with each one having it's own sound characteristics. Although the differences in sound are subtle to many, the pickups were nevertheless, split into pairs in the following configurations:

1 - ( rock treble )
3- ( country treble )
5 - ( jazz treble )

2 - ( rock bass )
4 - ( country bass )
6 - ( jazz bass )

The pickups differed in coil arrangement as well as magnet construction and placement. According to Dan "the only differences between, the treble pickups and their bass counterparts are the type of wire, and amount of windings on the coil." Dan went on to talk about the construction of the pickups, saying "the Rock pickups use a steel metal plate which allows the magnet to conduct throughout the entire plate. The Country pickups use a brass plate and have the magnets placed on the outside of the coil - and closer to the strings, making the field eminate from outside the coil toward the center - which is just the opposite of most other pickups." Lastly, he talked about the Jazz pickups saying "the Jazz pickups also uses a brass plate for the pickup coils to rest on which does not allow any conducting through the plate, but unlike the Country pickups, there is only one magnet which gives them their lower output and a flatter, more jazzy sound."

According to literature, the Rock Treble and Rock Bass both are ultra hot with maximum power output with a flatter response in the Rock Bass pickup. Each of the Jazz pickups has medium power output and the 'flattest' most even response of all the Dan Armstrong pickups, with more bass response in the Jazz Bass pickup. The Country pickups each have a medium output and the 'out of phase two pickup sound' with a flatter response in the Country Bass pickup.

Kent Armstrong is a renown pickup maker who had been contracted by Ampeg to reproduce his fathers pickups for both the 1998-2001 reissue instruments, as well as the 2006-2009 models. As a result, Ampeg had given him virtually every technical document that ever existed about the original models, and he seemed to have at his fingertips every conceivable scrap of information known about these pickups, not the least of which was a chart of the various pickups, as well as the coil wire guages that were used on those pickups when I called.

Kent began reading the wire guages to me taken from the original manufacturer literature in regard to wire guages which is listed as follows - all of these wires adhere to the standards of the American Wire Guage (AWG).

RT = 39 Guage
CT = 39 Guage
JT = 39 Guage
ST = 42 Guage

RB = 43 Guage
CB = 43 Guage
JB = 43 Guage

According to literature (and even Dan himself) the six original pickups were designed "to snap, or clip into place." Unfortunately, Dan never went into any detail on how they were originally designed to "snap" or "clip-in" - despite my repeated questions about it, and I can only assume that he really hadn't planned all that out before a new design change had made it all moot.

The design change was, of course, the addition of the sweeping scoop in the body that would allow one to change pickups instantly. The acrylic body was redesigned to feature this channel, or 'well' that would allow the pickups to be changed quickly and easily by sliding it through the channel, under the strings, and onto a pair of banana plugs on the instrument which were situated at the end of the channel, or 'well' and which in turn allowed the pickup to make an electrical connection to the rest of the guitar's circuitry. To change a pickup, all one needed to do was loosen a small thumbscrew on the back of the body, slide out the pickup, then slide in a different pickup and re-tighten the thumbscrew.

About this time, Dan was also making minor changes to his current line of pickups. Gone was the 1 thru 6 numbering scheme and were now being referred to only by their respective names. The pickups were unchanged internally, but as can be seen at left they now sported 'stamped-in' letters to identify one pickup from another. The pickups were still in pairs, and in the same configurations as seen below.

RT - ( rock treble )
JT - ( jazz treble )
CT - ( country treble )

RB - ( rock bass )
JB - ( jazz bass )
CB - ( country bass )

At left, with the resin stripped away, one can see the internal structure of the Dan Armstrong pickup and get a much better understanding of how they were constructed. Depending on the type of pickup being made, either a metal or a brass plate was produced, or otherwise given an 'L' type of shape by upturning a small portion of the plate at one end. Next, a full length bar type pole piece was inserted through the plate. Then, a pair of female banana jacks are mounted on the up-bent portion of the plate that will allow the pickup to slide onto the male banana plugs of the guitar.

From the outside view the female jacks appear as 5/16" nuts threaded onto something and tightened into place. However, these 'nuts' are not really nuts in the conventional sense, but rather the actual start of the female banana style input jack where the male banana plug on the guitar gets inserted. As can been seen better in the photo above, these jacks feature a sleeve that virtually covers the entire length of the male banana plug (when inserted), and are threaded on the outer walls. photos courtesy of Bill Richardson.

Bill Lawrence states "The electrical hookup for the slide in type pickups was my idea. While Dan & I worked together to make the pickups, when it came time to figuring out how to hook them into the guitar circuit he pretty much left those details to me. I decided to have male type banana plugs mounted on the guitar, while the female type banana plug recepticles would be mounted on the pickups."

The female banana jacks are carefully held in place so as to not touch (and thus short to the plate) while on the other side of the plate - the 'inner' side - plastic washers are slid on (again to electrically isolate the jacks from the metal plate) and finally, a set of real 'nuts' are spun on to the threads of the sleeve on the female jacks and tightened securly.

Once the bobbin was wound with the proper amount of wire, it was slipped over the bar styled pole piece and glued down to secure it to the metal plate. With both jacks now electrically isolated from the plate, the ends of the coil wires are routed toward, and attached to the female banana jacks. Finally, and depending on the type of pickup being made, a magnet, (or magnets), are stragically placed around the coil and the pickup is ready for the next step.

At left, the pickup was then placed into a mold which was then slowly filled with a brown colored resin that nicely matches the instruments' scratchplate and other surroundings. Once the resin hardened, it not only gave these pickups their physical dimensions (92mm x 51mm x 23mm) but also gave them the unique distinction of being the first potted pickups ever produced on the market as the resin had seeped its way into virtually everything within. The final step was a check for continuity by using a volt/ohm meter to make certain the pickup coil read properly.

As seen left and right, some pickups feature the output banana jacks mounted on a strip of rosewood which is used to secure as well as isolate the female banana jacks from the pickup plate. This was likely before the 'L' type shape of metal shown above was used, as on the right you can see that the metal plate does not bend up on one side. On the contrary, the plate can be seen running the entire length of the pickup. I can only speculate that these and other pickups like them are likely very early made pickups. Photos courtesy of Bill Richardson.