Pickup building - tone talk

[juanmotta]

Hi, my name is Juan Motta this is my first post, and i´m from Uruguay.
  I´m starting building pickups and like other pickup builders, is dificult to start, because there are a lot of  information that we don´t know about that is important to know. I was writing with other pickup builders and they don´t say much about the "winding tension" , "layering of the wire", "method of winding". i know that there is no clue for this, but i think is important to devolop a clear method for doing this, because this is the sound of a  pickup. I have some information but less experience, here is a program "coil estimatior", with this we can "estimate" the winding of a pickup (for humbuckers only one coil) of course is not exact but near the real pickup:

http://www.salvarsan.org/pickups/Coil_Estimator.html

Also have some tip for the winding (this is from Steve Kersting experience):

"Just know that the tighter and straighter the winding the more "hi-fi" (sterile) the sound will be. But winding too loose or scattered will also cause problems."

Here is another topic about this from this forum:

http://www.unofficialwarmoth.com/index.php?topic=1204.0


Well i hope we can help between ourselves, also i have more information to offer.

Regards

Juan Motta

 

[Cagey]

Welcome to the forum, Juan!

I don't have a whole lot to offer as far as winding pickups goes - my experience has been mostly confined to unwinding them. Many, many moons ago, before we had all the aftermarket pickup manufacturers we do today, we used to take apart old humbuckers and "balance" them. What you did was measure each coil and start unwinding the one that measured a higher resistance until it matched the lower resistance coil. Made them sound better, or at least that's what we told ourselves.

But, that was 35 years ago. You either ate what Gibson fed you or starved. Of course, things are different now. So, since then, I've pretty much left all that artwork to those with more patience than I have <grin>

 

[juanmotta]

Thanks Cagey, unwindig pickups is a good referece for knowing how was builded. do you have the number of winding per layer of some specific pickup?

About the old humbuckers, the "unbalance" of this pickups is the most distinguished of the sound of old paf. In the old day, Gibson wound this pickups by machine winding (lesona 101 or 102 y guess) but this machine did´t have the "auto stop" when they arrived the 5000 turn per coil so this is why this pickup have a mismached coils. Of course there is no Paf pickup identical to the other so this is why the early 60 gibson sound so different to the other.
If you have some information about this pickup like the winding per layer and the number of winding, it good by nice to share.

Thanks

Juan

 

[TonyFlyingSquirrel]

Mojotone has parts, and I think some reference video's.

Getting Dan Erlewine's weekly Stewmac tips are helpful too.  I keep them in a separate folder to reference, but they have them arechived on their site also. 

 

[Cagey]

Thanks Cagey, unwindig pickups is a good referece for knowing how was builded. do you have the number of winding per layer of some specific pickup?

About the old humbuckers, the "unbalance" of this pickups is the most distinguished of the sound of old paf. In the old day, Gibson wound this pickups by machine winding (lesona 101 or 102 y guess) but this machine did´t have the "auto stop" when they arrived the 5000 turn per coil so this is why this pickup have a mismached coils. Of course there is no Paf pickup identical to the other so this is why the early 60 gibson sound so different to the other.
If you have some information about this pickup like the winding per layer and the number of winding, it good by nice to share.

I'm afraid we weren't as organized as all that in those days.

I'm aware of the construction techniques used back then, which is why we did what we did. See, we thought PAFs didn't sound that great, which is why we did what we did. We probably wrecked a bunch of pickups that people would give their left nut for now. We knew the theory behind what we were doing, but thought we were righting a wrong, so it was never documented. I do remember it took a lot of wire off some of those things. You'd end up with a ball of copper hair on the floor that would make a mangy dog look innocent. I mean, it was usually hundreds of winds that came off.

I do remember being happy with the results, though. I suspect it was more that they were "different" than anything else. I doubt they were better. But, maybe they were. Pickup tone happiness is very subjective, and what with the labor investment we were probably biased to think we did a Good Thing.

It wasn't too long after that we started seeing aftermarket pickups show up from upstarts such as DiMarzio, generally wound much hotter than we'd ever seen. Those were fun, as master volume amps were pretty thin on the ground. You needed a good way to beat up on the preamps to get some decent dirt, and a hot pickup fit that bill pretty well. Those, and little power boosters. Punch one of those babies into an old Fender or Marshall, and you had something going on.

Thing was, even back then we were looking for ways to sound as though we had a wall of Marshalls cranked up to 11 while actually playing fairly quiet. And by "fairly quiet", I mean below the level where the neighbors called the cops. It was still loud. So, anything you could do to get there was fair game. Had to practice our Black Sabbath and Deep Purple tunes, after all <grin>

 

[Smpl9]

i ended up putting a nail bomb in bridge on my HH strat. i like it very much. i play through a gdec-3. for a few of the presets it can be a bit bright but tone controls adjust it well. and that's only a few of the presets. all the others sound good to my ears.

the wcr godwood is a good pup but didn't balance well with the rebel yell in the neck and it "quacked" a bit more than my ears liked for this strat setup. but, i will get another HH strat body and put the godwood in with a neck pup that balances well with it.

i was cautious if this was going to work since many folks said it would be too bright, for the most part i haven't found that the case for me.

thanks all
hats off to BN again.