matsickma said:
However the vast majority of the world are not into Guilds so the Franz PUP reputation is only prized at LTG.
Yep.
This thread is making me want to pick up a second guitar with Franz pickups. The sound of my older T100 has gotten so essential for me that I'd feel better with some sort of backup or alternate flavor.
I'm sure I remember seeing a picture of a pickup on ebay that had an old sticker on the back that said Fransch Electronics and an address in NY (meaning that "Franz" is a misspelling that has made it enough into the lore to be persistent).
One thing I've been wondering about for a while is whether "Franz" was the maker of the old "Tone Spectrum" pickups that were used on some Epiphones in the late 40s. They look similar to a type of pickups that were used on Premier guitars for a while which have a thin plated metal case and have been identified as being made by Franz (I have a dead bass pickup like that, and I'm pretty sure it is a Franz because the guts are so similar to those in the Guild versions).
Regarding Walter's comments above, while I'm not a pickup guru, I think the magnets must be pretty strong in the Franz pickups since the output is perceived as strong despite the coils having relatively little resistance compared to other pickups. The EQ curve, being brighter due to the low coil resistance and possibly the type of alnico magnet, would also be part of why they seem loud; they cut through real good, which is generally true of low output pickups. As you add wire to a coil, you concentrate the sound toward the mids and away from the highs and lows, and a brighter tone with less mids will always cut through better than a tone with a lot of boxey sounding 400 hz-ish signal. Also, coils wound on an old, kind of chaotic winding machine, such as a converted sewing machine, result in less capacitance than a more evenly wound coil, which is another way to get more highs.
I don't really think there's anything magical about the Franzes either, it's just that pickups with less wire on the coil have become less common and we notice and like the contrast. In my experience any old single coil that measures between 2 and 7 Kohms DC across the coil sounds good in the same kind of way. Old Teisco pickups are a fairly common and cheap way to get that sound, if you guys have some project guitars. Some old Magnatone pickups and 50s German single coil pickups are like that too, but those can be tough to find and expensive.
I'm thinking that a P90 bobbin with the same type and gauss alnico magnet that you find on Franz, wound to a similar resistance on a crude, old school winding machine, should be right on the money. I probably wouldn't bother trying to match the wire gauge so long as the coil resistance was in the right range; I suspect the winding pattern is much more critical.
I believe all of these are exactly the same differences that account for the distinct tones between a Rickenbacker high gain pickup compared to their reissue scatterwound Toaster. One of those Toasters with a little stronger magnet and somewhat less wire should be very hard to distinguish from a Franz by ear. This theory could be tested by transplanting a Franz magnet to a Toaster and partly unwinding the Toaster, if anybody is into stuff like that and has a dead Franz they don't mind messing with.