What Is TCI?

Paul Reed Smith admits that part of his latest pickup and the concepts behind it came from an illustrious artist: “John Mayer came after my ass…” We find out more

- Dave Burrluck

Paul Reed Smith inside the PRS factory pondering his next innovation TCI stands for Tuned Capacitance and Inductance. But what does that mean? The best way of getting a handle on these terms and their implications is to consider not just the pickup but the whole electric circuit, which ultimately includes your guitar lead and the input impedance of your amp and/or effects. As Paul Reed Smith tells us, while he “can’t control whether the player is using a long or a short lead, or the impedance of the input device”, there is plenty to consider onboard the guitar itself.

A pickup, of course, is basically an inductor. Inductance is measured in Henry units (H) and plenty of people believe it to be a lot more helpful in predicting the output of a pickup than the oft-used resistance (DCR), arguing it’s a better indicator of eventual sound. One reason for this is that while DCR measures the resistance of the coil wire, induction takes into account the whole pickup – the magnet, the baseplate, the polepiece material. Typically, the higher the inductance, as with a dual-coil humbucker, the bigger and darker the sound is compared with a single coil, which has a lower inductance.