Are boutique pickps really different than others?

[tfarny]

You 'roll your own', Alfang? That's cool! And you're in Portland, right? Maybe when I get around to upgrading a cheap LP or ES-335 copy (my summer project? I'm about to start on W #2 here in a week or so) I'll give you a call re: custom pickups!
I'm in LA but originally from Canby and I go back all the time.

 

[Alfang]

I'm just up the Road in Tualatin, I have a good buddy in Canby, I go there all the time.

Can wind a pup for about $10.00 and it will sound great

 

[tfarny]

Wow, awesome. I'd definitely pay $10 and some beers for a custom Alfang humbucker! Seriously, I'll get in touch with you this summer and try to take you up on this.
I've already bought the pickups for my W #2 (Rio Grande Jazzbar neck, and the SD lil 59 I already have in the bridge of W#1), the lil 59 is being replaced by a $35 GFS tele pickup.  So in the end, I went half cheapo and half boutique.

 

[Shmoopie]

i was thinking about a high out put match for a ceramic bridge pickup (dimebucker)
alnico V mags and twelve stainless screws (6 a coil) in two over wound coils. i think it'll be the first pickup i try to diy. i can get the stuff from stewmac, so why not hotrod one of those.

 

[DiMitriR33]

i was thinking about a high out put match for a ceramic bridge pickup (dimebucker)
alnico V mags and twelve stainless screws (6 a coil) in two over wound coils. i think it'll be the first pickup i try to diy. i can get the stuff from stewmac, so why not hotrod one of those.

there are many types of "stainless steel" or corosion resistant steels most of which are non magnetic. if your worried about rust i'd go black oxide coated set screws. black is beautiful

 

[Shmoopie]

not worried about rust, i guess i should have just said steel. lots of pups have steel blades, i like the sound. id rather get steel screws for a neck pup.  think of a rg crunch box or punch box, but with alnico mags.

 

[WarmothRules]

reading this thread makes me glad I'm a bass player/builder ... where changing pickups does make a significant difference in tone

all the best,

R

Hand wound pickups have better dynamics when scatter wound for sure.

 

[DiMitriR33]

i think scatter wound is just another word for sloppy.

but really the theory is that wires parallel to each other will hold a miniscule charge. ie. it has capacitence. it looks like a tiny tone cap to the p/u.
the idea behind intensionally winding the pup sloppily  is to reduce this effect and and some presence to the p/u.  in pactice does it work? i bet it does. long cables cause the same effect thus why some complain about losing treble.
keep in mind that the diference is small. the diference is largest if the p/u windings are the largest sorce of capacitence in the circuit. if you roll off the tone control half way the scatter winding wont matter.

 

[Stage Fright]

I would like to draw some conclusions form this very interesting thread.

Using two old fender and four hand-built tube amps with an FX chain of: Guitar->Tube Amp, the tone of the guitar really stands out even with high-gain preamp settings.  The original neck pickup in my '80 LP Custom sounds pretty good.  The neck pickup of my Mexi strat sounds decent when using a "tubey" speaker.  I've an old Dimarzio Dual-sound from the 80s that sounds "generic."

Will buying a vintage style PAF from Dimarzio or Seymour Duncan  at $70 a pop do or would it be necessary to shell $120+ to get good "vintage tone"?

  ---Russ

 

[-CB-]

This is why the term scatter winding is the hot keyword in pups, it allows space for the potting wax to help secure the windings

Oh then it has nothing to do with interwinding capacitance?

Scatter wound vs level wound or straight wound.  If the windings are tight, you wont need potting.  Its very hard to achieve tight windings in a production environment, and keep high volume going. 

Scatter winding does lower the way each winding interacts with the ones next to it, leaving less interaction (less coupling through capacitance), thus making a brighter pickup.  There ARE good level wound non-potted pickups out there too, from big names and from small builders - and most are very low in microphonics.

 

[confederatewk]

just so u know botique pickups often have a engineered charcteristic in it

rio grande for instance, winds them maticulously os precise winders...and in random places creates a uneven wind, this has characteristics...and only the designer and builder knows this

and yes, even some people uses different pole peices and screw wich all change the sound

what u are also paying for is the billions of hours of research and developemtn, its not a xfile

ur paying someone else to engineer and make ur pickup

fudge build it in china sell it for less

have some white guy spend 4 times the time working on a pilkcup, pay his rent, and enough for him to invest in 2 thousand pickup variations to make u the next

boutique pickups arent about just what used, but how it used

and im some casex better wire
better magnets or sets

i mean its not rocket science, but theres a reson why lace drop d are said to be some of the most articulate pickups for detuned guitars....but on the other hand some dont like em, but they spent hours and months before tey were released

or even the bill lawrence xl-500  the porigional.....think about how long he spent making that, and then had his patent stolen by a pickup company to ripp of dimbucker.....well still bills version is he real version and sounds ten times better than the leading dimebag manufactured

ive heard dimebuckers, and iver head a xl-500  and its a differnet world, even tho they are comprimised by the same basic components, but theres more to it hen winding, more of a secret mis wind maybe???

hmmm ponder this young jedi

 

[ldelo]

i think scatter wound is just another word for sloppy.

but really the theory is that wires parallel to each other will hold a miniscule charge. ie. it has capacitence. it looks like a tiny tone cap to the p/u.
the idea behind intensionally winding the pup sloppily  is to reduce this effect and and some presence to the p/u.  in pactice does it work? i bet it does. long cables cause the same effect thus why some complain about losing treble.
keep in mind that the diference is small. the diference is largest if the p/u windings are the largest sorce of capacitence in the circuit. if you roll off the tone control half way the scatter winding wont matter.

That capacitance argument doesn't hold water. By definition (Maxwells laws, E & M) AND UNLESS the two strands of wire are electrically isolated from each other (they're not and in fact are simply different points long the same piece of wire), then by definition the electric field and space charge or current flow through them is identical. Which means there's no difference in charge and ergo no capacitance (because capacitance is simply a measure of the ability to store dissimilar charges.)

If that were not the case conductors would not be conductors as we know them and the universe would be a much different place.

Now that statement I just made ignores skin depth and considerations having to do with the same, but at audio frequencies the skin depth is hugely small and considerations surrounding skin depth effects are likewise vanishingly small. Well below the ability to be resolved via listening to an amplified (hugely distorted) version of the signal (the distortions in even the cleanest audio amps and speakers would swamp such effects by many, many orders of magnitude.)

What DOES make a difference is the inductance.

If you put more windings into the same form factor (coil cross section) then you have a higher inductance. The higher the inductance the more it will attenuate at any given frequency and the lower the frequency at which the coil starts to have significant electrical effect will be.

At some point one could at least in principle wind a pickup that was essentially a choke (first order low pass filter) with it's "knee" in any given audio-band frequency.

Which is exactly what they do when they wind coils of specific inductances for use in audio speakers.

 

[confederatewk]

that is complete horse shit when i was a kid i used to take seymore duncans and take out the origional poles and place s.s. poles in them, that right there made a high sonic difference....or when i had a invader i remoed the ellen poles and screwed a stainless steel bar across and used measure bolts to hold them in place made of s.s.


wam after i had potted them again, i then tore it up

everything you use in a pickup matter, down to material, and types or winding teq.....im sure everyone in the foum laughed at ur responce, yes it is true about magnetic fields, but it is not true about the actual characteristics some materials have

ive tinkered enough to know that when i mnoddified origiuonal pickups it was easy as 1 2 3, thus was a reason why i continued to do it.....

wich is why pickupo companies offer different magnets, types of wrapping, coils, epoxy holds wax holds, chryogenic tempering vrs. magnetic tempering.....all kinds of different things, and assured you should be that they have secrets that give ther pickups charachter versus the same material used  and unskill winding, or not proprietary instalation

i used to take old bobs and use a turn table asn rewire them with thin/soldered joint/thick wire/then soldered joint thin wires......and so the coils were off in thickness throughout i had myself a self phasing pickup that alowed me to shred all the dynamics i wanted in c tuning

now, well thats the drop d model that lace makes and let me tell you, they have better machines than i did(turntable)

point made

material serves a dynamic purpose and makes a big fifference

 

[ldelo]

I made no claims that materials don't matter, nothing of the sort. Of course materials matter.

Please do not put words in my mouth or set up strawman arguments to justify making ad hominem attacks.

That is such a simpleminded, schoolboyish brand of rhetorical nonsense. At least make some intelligible arguments.

And again, of course materials matter.

That was not my point.

The statement was made (though the poster did not necessarily claim it as fact) that windings can set up capacitance between each other, and that's just not possible.

Again, that is ignoring incredibly small, undetetable at sonic frequencies, and virtually immeasurable skin effects etc that would have no bulk effect on the overall behavior of the pickup in the sense of how it sounds or output and so on.

Your rant only proves my point, because every single thing you describe changes a MAGNETIC field and/or the inductive properties of the pickup, and have nothing to do with any capacitive effect because there isn't one.

It is particularly interesting that you refer to adding SS or replacing parts with SS parts... Many SS alloys have substantially different magnetic properties and in fact some SS alloys are amagnetic.

Which again just makes my point, because all those changes have to do with changing the inductance and/or static magnetic fields and having precisely nothing to do with any claimed capacitive effects.

 

[confederatewk]

hmm i think were clashing, bring out the horses and the swordsh

 

[DiMitriR33]

people who think they are smart because they have an education realy piss me off!!!

the fact is that the experts have tested it and found that it does reduce capacitence. not that that really matters much when a guitar cable has more than any pickup out there, never mind the cap in the tone control. but there is a diference, small and incremental but still a diference. and if you make enough incremental changes to something you'll eventually notice it.

theories are great but unless you can sit there with the proper test equipment and prove that there isn't a diference you can't say it doesn't hold water. if you don't like the explaination i chalenge you to find a better one.

seymour duncan test all sorts of things to find what effects the sound of a pickup. inductence, capacitence, Q, dc resistence, magnetic properties that i know little about, even the dielectric properties of diferent bobin materials. if he says it reduces capacitence i'll beleive the guy with the test equipment and years of research. he knows of Q and of inductence but has determined that the capacitence makes the diference in a scatter wound pickup.

and now to actually trump you, a hb has a good 8.5k dc resistence correct? if you place an 8.5k resistor across a 150 pico farrad capacitor (typical winding capacitence as it does exist and if it exists it can be changed) does it not now have capacitence?
now they aren't isolated they're conected right? so what's the diference?
remember the capacitence isn't necicerily only to an ajacent wire on the same layer with only an ohm or so between them. it can be between layers with 100 ohmsbetween them, it can be from the start layer to the finish layer with a few thousand ohms between.

 

[confederatewk]

out of all hte pickups i wound, and moddified, i found that improper wiring patersn can result in a crisper sound, eliminating responce of frequencies that sometimes are unwanted...for instance if  start winding a pikcup regular, and then uneven and messy paterns, then i would wrap the last 400 winds even and strait, along with a ordinary magnet, that i charged heavily anf then ss pins....made a big difference

all im saying is that improper winding, material and proprietary desing are what make botique pickups reall boutique and the value based on what u are looking for certainaly makes it nice


look at the lace drop d...theres alot to those winding wich make the drop d NOT MUDDY in C tunning

anyways
this got too far, if someone wants to buy a enginner pickup for alot more money and if it give them what normal pickups dont give em, go for it i say

i buy botique bartolini just for my 7 strings, and i have em done how i like it, and it makes me feel and play better

i lke it

 

[boogie2]

I don't know.  Whatever your ears like is the
right thing to buy.  There are several of the
stock Seymour Duncan's I ike a lot.  I've been
have with everything from Tom Anderson (and
they're pretty reasonably priced.  I also
have an old set of overwound VanZandt tele
pup's that just knock people out. 

I'm sure you can pay a bunch of cash and get
something good.  You can probably get something
cheaper that sounds just as good.  You just gave to
dig a bit more.

  Boogie2

 

[dbw]

All inductors have capacitance...

 

[confederatewk]

well ive tried some boutique models, compared to others....like the lace drop and gain or drop d set is really nice, and the bill lawrence origonal dime is the best ive heard...but for the production part id have to agree for all my main guitars ive modified or built, and or used in my studio or stage...ive found that production pickups do it better than botique......

i have to admit there is a quality on my dc400 neck through that only the lace drop and gain can acheive
and there is also a quality that a dimarzio x2n can acheive on my warmoth v-2

all in all, ive made nice pups, but took em all out after time or sold the guitar...  not i use dimarzio or sd only becasue ive grown fond of thier products

but i still have a botique torres singles in my american strat, and a lace in my dc400


but everything else, well

i stick with the
jb
jazz
evo
d. distortion
invader
x2n
hotrails
x500xl

these are the only pickups i will ever use from now on, only becasue they can trully let me hear what i wana hear in my guitars

maybe something new will come out