Q&A: Larry Fishman

MMR: One of the new products to make a big splash back at Winter NAMM was Fishman’s Fluence pickup. Can you talk about the origins of the project – what was the process, what was the goal?

Larry Fishman: Well, we’ve been in the acoustic instrument application business for, I guess, 33 years now.  I hadn’t gone in the direction of electric guitar pickups because I felt that the existing companies out there – you know, the DiMarzios, and [Seymour] Duncans, and EMGs and so forth – were doing a really good job and I didn’t have a lot to add.  So rather than going in there to have some market share without offering anything new, we just totally avoided it.  But two years ago, I was made aware of a patent that a colleague had applied for involving stacked printed coils, based on printed circuit boards.  It was his thought, because he was a guitar player as well, that maybe somebody could take this and turn it into something useful for electric guitar.

I immediately saw tremendous benefits to consistency if you could use optical and modern printed circuit board techniques to print. I figured “Well, these solid stacks of very precise coils are going to make very, very matched coils and be very, very quiet. “

What happened next?

We went ahead and invested some money in building prototype coils, and started playing around with the different magnetic field circuits and, lo and behold, we got something that worked pretty well right out of the gate.

What had been your opinion of “traditional” electric guitar pickups prior to this whole project?

We loved the sounds of the traditional pickups. That’s what’s behind the music I’ve listened to my whole life. But I knew that there were a lot of issues in consistency, noise, interactions with cable lengths, and so forth for the traditional approach.  And I suspected that we could, more or less, reproduce the sounds of the classic pickups in a very consistent manner that didn’t have all the baggage of the traditional pickups.

To what extent did you and your team analyze existing pickups and pickup technology before going forward with the Fluence project?

The big part of the picture or the puzzle that was sort of missing for us, and that we didn’t have the 20 years of experience with, was understanding and manipulating that magnetic field. So taking our analysis tools and things of that nature, we basically started measuring these really great sounding vintage pickups. We actually ended up building a three-dimensional magnetic field mapping machine. We calculated three-dimensional, colored graphical representations of the magnetic fields set or the magnetic circuit, that were present in those classic pickups that we really loved. That was an eye-opener. I am not going to name names, but one of the best-selling humbuckers in the marketplace today – I bought two of them, decided to measure them, and my God, I thought one was broken because it measured so differently than the other one. Then I went and bought another 10 and suddenly realized that out of that 10, three of them were reasonably close to one another and the others were just all over the map. These are good companies making these pickups. They’re not doing shoddy work, but the difficulty of maintaining accuracy in a wire-wound coil with thousands of turns on it was really evident to me at that point. That just will not do, as far as I’m concerned. If you can’t count on the pickup doing what it’s supposed to do… it must drive guitarists crazy!

That must’ve validated the notion that Fluence was worth pursuing.

At that point I said, “All right – we are going for this” and we started building prototypes, and the product just started getting better and better and better. The results were really coming out just as we predicted.  We could steer the response around, and at that point I made a critical decision for us to go with active pickups, and I did it for some really, really good engineering reasons. I knew that I would get some kickback from the market because active pickups seem to have been pigeonholed into a certain genre of music.  But there was just too much benefit there to ignore.

We built a very powerful real-time, digital filtering prototyping setup that allowed us to take a pickup, get the magnetic field right, the electrical circuit correct, which for us starts off as a dead flat response, and then with our electronics we introduce the filtering characteristics that you find in a classic pickup which are high-pass, low-pass, and resonant type filters.  Since our development system operates in real-time, we would target a response, put it on a guitar, do a lot of listening, and you can actually turn dials and hit the absolute sweet-spot in real time. It allowed us to do maybe 15 years worth of development work in a matter of two years.

Going back to the fact that these are active pickups – active pickups are a turnoff to some because they often require some modification to the guitar. How did you manage to have the Fluence line be active, but still fit into standard pickup cavities?

We knew that we needed to come up with a retrofit-able power pack that could integrate into a standard guitar without having to drill a hole or put a cavity in the guitar. We came up with what I think are some pretty innovative approaches to that. We used very, very thin lithium-ion battery that, in the case of a Strat, is built into a thin, rectangular cover that’s identical in size to the spring-cover on a Strat. In the case of Les Pauls and other guitars, they’re control-cavity based modules. These are rechargeable with any standard cell phone, mini-USB type charger, which everyone has today, so it’s very, very convenient and with each full charge you in the neighborhood of 200 hours of playing.

Electric guitarists are notoriously “traditionalist” and often reluctant to embrace new technologies. What’s been the early reaction to Fluence from players?

It’s been universally positive. We’ve got pickups that reproduce the best sounds on the planet and we have taken all the negatives away. We can hand these to a player and we get instant, instant positive reaction on how they play, feel, how they articulate, and how they perform, and then they are astonished by the low-noise performance, and the dynamic range and so forth. They don’t even ask about a battery. We bring it up afterwards, that Fluence pickups are active and that’s how we got there, and players say, “Oh… That’s cool. Why didn’t someone do this before?”

When will Fluence pickups be shipping to retailers?

 We are shipping single-coils already, and the humbucker sets are going to ship in mid-September.

Both the ease of use and installation, as well as the relatively low price point has made the TriplePlay controller another significant release for Fishman – can you talk about that unit’s development?

 We’ve worked with many companies that make MIDI converters. So I’ve seen or been involved in MIDI guitar for a long, long time and I’ve always seen the promise and also I’ve seen the broken hearts when the systems didn’t deliver. I always knew if we could get the damn thing to work, there was excitement there. A lot of things have happened over the past 20 years and with the advancement of modern digital signal processing, we decided to take on this challenge. The processor on TriplePlay is really in the same family as the processors that we used when we did our Aura digital acoustic imaging, so we were very well versed in the use of that particular DSP chip, we knew that it high performance enough that we could do an onboard mounted pitch detection system that could run off of a rechargeable battery, so the fundamentals of that system were there. We developed the on-board processing and it was working really well, but I still didn’t want to go to market. There’s always the problem with all of the systems out there they’re primarily used to trigger sounds that were in a separate piece of hardware and guitarists don’t have the ability to add sounds or change sounds and they’d get bored. So when we sat around and tried to refine this product, we suddenly hit on the notion of being able to stream MIDI wirelessly off of the guitar and we did the math and we knew that we absolutely could do it without any hint of latency. Then the idea for the product really came alive. The cost reduction, by going wireless and going without a companion hardware-based module with limited sounds, along with the ability to process onboard without all types of expensive cables really lit it up. The original idea was to transmit these signals to a receiver that would plug into a keyboard or a hardware-based, rack-mounted synth module.

But that’s not what ultimately happened.

These things take a long time to develop and during the two-year period that we were actually refining this into a product, we realized that the rack-mount MIDI synth module market was dying. It virtually fell off the planet. We realized that everybody in the keyboard world had gone to soft sounds in computers because they’re more affordable, more flexible, and you can do more artistic things with shaping the sounds and the samples. With that realization we said, “Ok, we’re now in the software business, as well.” So we spent a year developing a software interface that resides in a computer or a tablet that runs on iOS or Windows that would manage the MIDI information and signals and allow it to drive any VST sound on the planet in your computer. That was the thing that got us and the world really excited. The pitch detection is just killer; it’s the fastest MIDI system that I’ve seen to date. It allows guitarists to dive into that digital world in a much deeper way than ever before.

What’s been the reaction from dealers and players to TriplePlay since its introduction last year?

We have been very, very successful.  We really hit our targets and forecasts.  We have actually exceeded them for the first year. Right now, our challenge is getting it into the hands of more of the independents.  We are making it much, easier for them to have a demo set up in the store, and we’ve got specialists all over the country and they are doing training and so forth.

Sounds great. Thanks for taking the time to chat, Larry.

Thanks for your interest!