Low output vs. High output

[Chris Klein]

Hey guys let me know how you feel about high output vs. low output. What is the markets saturated for? What do you guys personally use (high/low)?

[corduroyew]

This is kind of a big topic and I think that scares a lot of us away from answering.

When you ask “what is the markets saturated for?” I’m going to assume what you mean is what is the market saturated with. Truth is, the market is saturated with all of them. There are too many people making pickups of all outputs. Luckily the biggest companies are producing poor sounding pickups so us little guys can still sell to the people that are serious about sounding good.

The question “how do you feel about…” Is a bit vague perhaps rewording it will help get more responces.

What do I use? In my main guitar I have a the neck humbucker wound to 8K with formvar wire and an alnico 5 magnet. The middle is a single coil made to 1962 specs and the bridge humbuckers is wound to 25K and uses Neodymium magnets. So my guitar has some lower output pickups and a super high output pickup. I wouldn't want to live with only one type of pickup so it's a good thing I don't need to.

[Spence]

The short answer is that I use whatever is appropriate for the task in hand.
As regards the market, I'm not sure it's saturated as all the existing big pickup makers are still making huge profits. You would think they'd all go bust overnight as everyone is making their own pickups now.....

[NightWinder]

Well, consider the tasks at hand, to each their own. I've been in the Paf click for awile. Bridge is 8.4k, neck is 7.2k- A4 slightly degaussed. I'm a metal head, and finding out, yeah, you work harder for the notes in this type of application, but the rewards are great. I also make a 24k pickups "blasphemous", which is geared towards metal. The pafs grab every area I may need, and is becoming an allrounder....Blasphemous cannot grab the vintage things.....so there is a tradeoff, and the pafs demand a tight playing technic in the metal application. So ease of play comes to mind with higher ohms...

[Chris Klein]

It's the current chatter going around about how many of the greats are not using hugely overwound pickups but rather using low output pickups. I'm primarily talking about single coil players.

[Possum]

historically very few guitar heroes ever used really hot pickups, Peter Green, Jimmy Page, Duane Allman, Hendrix, Michael Bloomfield, Clapton, Beck, none of them did. Even Van Halen...

[Spence]

My feeling is that DiMarzio and Duncan offered higher output pickups as a marketing gimmick in the early days which made players think. 'wow, these are so much more powerful than that old vintage crap...' etc.
I bought pickups like that but I could never get sweet vibes out of them. So I rapidly came to the conclusion that it's better to get a good distortion pedal than sacrifice tone.

[NightWinder]

There is something to be said about the ease of play too. Hotter seems to have more harmonics....well, I guess that can be a raging debate too, but generally I notice faster legato playing, and pinch harmonics really rip with the higher stuff, and like stated before, with a paf based you work harder for the note, but I think the overall reward is better....
Note also what Possum mentioned- I know all the guys I grew up listening to (Deadly Tedly, VH, Tom petty, Clapton,etc) did'nt use high ohmers. But the opposite side in the Earlie 80's with RRhodes Ratt, did. Spence also mentioned its really a matter of application....Boils down to personal taste, and what works for you, or in this case maybe your customer.

[Zhangliqun]

I got started winding because I got sick of having to choose between a vintage output pu with emaciated mids or a high output monster with no clarity or dynamics.

A while back on the Duncan Forum there was a big hubbub about this sort of thing, the lack of "tweener" humbuckers -- everything Duncan and all the other mid to big names makes for bridge is either 8k or 14k+. Everyone wanted something that combined the best features of each, at least to the extent such a thing was possible. Give kudos to Duncan for their responsiveness as they came out with a forum special humbucker called the "Brobucker", 10k/A5, that by all accounts is quite good, though I never tried one. And of course they have a Custom Shop that though pricey, will make you anything you want.

But not having the kind of money to experiment with such pricey pu's, I just decided one rainy afternoon when I was home with a cold to add some turns to my Strat bridge pu, a Fat 50's. It was a pain in the butt, took all day and looked ridiculous, the cover barely fit over the ball of yarn coil (I winced at the scraping sound as I put it back on) but it worked. I had cranked it up from 6.5k to about 7.5k and it sounded great. I was hooked...

Long story short, I prefer the combination of vintage clarity and dynamics with overwound warmth and sensitivity, which is the basis for my slogan "Vintage tone with testosterone". My Strat has a 10.5k/A2 bridge (though with 43 wire), and 8k/A5 neck (42) and a 6.3k/A5 middle (42).

[SkinnyWire]

95% of what I sell fall into the "vintage" category, but I have a 9.5k-ish model that has met with almost universal approval. Folks that ask for that though go into it looking for something with just a little extra "push" than a typical PAF type. In terms of saturation, I think there's always an over abundance of "I've just made the best PAF copy ever in the history of mankind" discussions followed closely by "can you make me sound like EVH".

I agree with the statements on ease of play though. In general, you don't need as refined skills or technique with a "high output" wind. Not that they can't sound tight or good, but it takes a bit more to coax the mojo out of a PAF type (at least in my opinion). I'm always sure to discuss these kinds of things with guys asking for high output winds. I also make it a point to discuss the opposite when I get the "I want to switch from my JB at the bridge to an 8.3k/A2 pickup". That's going "cold turkey" if you're not ready for it.

Overall, I really dislike winding medium and high output pickups and only do it when a customer insists. I just shipped 4 today to a guy in Australia - a 14.4k/16.1k C5 ceramic pair and a 14.4k/16.1k A8 pair. We'll see how that goes.

[Possum]

Thats such a good point. I got into making pickups because the F*****S I bought (five of them....) were all too bright and just dead sterile sounding. I had them wound hotter but they were just a little louder sterile tone, kinda like stock Fender pickups, some of them. But yeah, big company pickups are purposefully wound probably on the lean side to work with modern gainy amps, that or hot output, nothing in between. Maybe they stay away from the inbetween stuff because those are harder to make sound good when you wind 5,000 in a day on a robot. the first pickup I ever wound was to rewind a Texas Special ice pick bridge from 6 something K to 9K and man that thing suddenly sounded great I was stoked.......

[Zhangliqun]

To be fair to Duncan on the tweeners, they do make the 10k Screamin Demon, and they have a Parallel Axis bucker in the mid-9 range. Plus they have the Antiquity Custom Bridge A2 Strat single at 9.7k that of all the Duncans of any kind I've ever tried (Strat/P90/Tele/bucker/whatever), to me that is their finest pickup.

Bare Knuckle is the only "big" name I know of that has tweeners as a regular part of their line-up, but there's no reason the other big names couldn't make stuff like that. The only thing stopping them is they must believe, rightly or wrongly, that there just isn't much of a market for them. They may be right. But "hybrids" are another big thing over at the Duncan Forum -- mating a PAF-clone coil with a high output coil, so I'm still convinced there's a market niche for these babies.

[NightWinder]

+1 for that ala' Zhang! I sell quite a bit of the "tweeners". I'll fight the arguement that sg's, and v's are a bit hard to find tweeners that fit. The hybrids however are killer. I actually have a few pickups that take 2 different wire gauges per coil. I know your talking about taking a JB, and say a C5 coil and mixing them up, and whatnot.......Nice topic to bring up BTW

[David Schwab]

You probably don't see too many "hybrid" pickups, with different wire gauges on each coil, because DiMarzio has a patent on that!

Tone Zone anyone? (there must be better uses for that idea)

[kevinT]

Originally Posted by David Schwab

You probably don't see too many "hybrid" pickups, with different wire gauges on each coil, because DiMarzio has a patent on that!

Tone Zone anyone? (there must be better uses for that idea)

Are you serious? DiMarzio has a patent on using different wire gauges on each coil of a pickup?

So i couldn't use 44 and 42 on the same pickup?

[NightWinder]

Kinda hard.....5 turns more is'nt their patent. They can suck it!!!!

[NightWinder]

I also sell double vintage Ivory Bobbins : )

[David Schwab]

Originally Posted by kevinT

Are you serious? DiMarzio has a patent on using different wire gauges on each coil of a pickup?

So i couldn't use 44 and 42 on the same pickup?

You can if you don't tell anyone!

Tone Zone
Have you ever heard a bridge pickup that made a guitar sound like a giant mosquito attack? If you've run into this problem, The Tone Zone® is the solution. The Tone Zone® is hot enough to qualify as a high-output pickup, but it has a wider dynamic range-hard picking will produce a lot of power, and softer picking will be much cleaner and quieter. It's got tremendous bass and low-mid response to reinforce the bottom end and make the overall sound bigger. The highest single notes have depth, and chords sound huge. Patented dual-resonance coils reproduce more overtones than you’d expect from such a fat-sounding pickup. It makes a great match with an Air Norton™, PAF Joe™ or PAF Pro®, and split-coil mode produces an excellent single-coil sound as well.

Patent: (1985) 4501185 (PDF)

[David Schwab]

Originally Posted by NightWinder

Kinda hard.....5 turns more is'nt their patent. They can suck it!!!!

Well they say "substantially the same number of turns" ... "and the wires constituting the coils are of different gauges"

The key word here is "substantially"

substantially
adverb
1 to a great or significant extent
2 for the most part; essentially

So they give an example where one coil is wound with 5,400 turns of 42 gauge, while the other may be would with the same number of turns of 44. They then say the gauges and number of turns constituting the coils can be varied to emphasize certain frequencies.

They go on to say that using the exact same number of turns will result in less hum, but that can be changed to get a certain sound.

So as vague as it is, I think they have that covered. I doubt they would go after a small pickup maker though.

But yeah, change something and you are safe. I think EMG uses something like this in some pickups, but who would know? It's hard to tell what they are doing. They have no patents, but their "secrets" are locked in epoxy...

[Dave Kerr]

Change something, as in having one coil wound around a bobbin larger than the other? Fewer turns of a larger circumference in coil 1 vs coil 2 could provide effective noise cancellation and get around the language of the patent.

[David Schwab]

Originally Posted by Dave Kerr

Change something, as in having one coil wound around a bobbin larger than the other?

I was going to say that. Of course that requires a new bobbin...

[Dave Kerr]

Or just wrap a few layers of tape around one bobbin before winding. Or use a thin blade in one bobbin, thick slugs in the other. Or...

[David Schwab]

Originally Posted by Dave Kerr

Or just wrap a few layers of tape around one bobbin before winding.

I was going to say that too! lol It was too much to type! I was supposed to be doing other things, and trying to get off the computer! Lots of good ideas bouncing around here lately.

I see we think alike anyway. Must be a Dave thing. How many Daves are here? I know Possum's a Dave too.

[NightWinder]

Sorry, I mistaked you. I was thinking of two wires on the same bobbin. I refer to them as "fusionWinding", which I do . Totally different. They can still SUK IT though....: )