You should all enjoy such a dumb question: when is a winding not a winding?

[devnull]

I've been thinking about pickup winding lately (imagine that, on this forum), and have come to wonder how some windings are better than others. For instance, you take some cheap strat pickup that sounds crappy. You measure it, at say 5.2K ohms, which is perhaps where it ought to be. Now, you could go out and get your formvar, or enamel, or whatever insulation you think you like (I think Cu is Cu last time I checked), unwind all that 42 gauge wire and put on another 5.2K worth of 42 gauge wire with hand scattered windings. Would that really matter to most ears, or would your first tactic be to replace/recharge/discharge the magnets (assuming you can get them out)?

Thoughts appreciated...

[devnull]

To mitigate the palpable stupidity of the question, I am thinking in terms of what would make the largest first-order difference to the ears of a below average guitar player (me), not a pickup black belt...

[Possum]

...

copper is copper but insulations are all different, heavy build is low capacitance, single builds all have different dielectric effects, none of them sound the same. Different manufacturers use different kinds of magnets from diff manufacturers and same alnicos from diff companies don't sound the same. Hand scatter is good for single coils, not for humuckers, you need a machine winder for buckers and P90s. throw in different gauge wire, potting methods, tension of winding, how many winds, how hot a charge you use on the magnets, and voila...near infinite possibilities :-)

[Mike Sulzer]

copper is copper but insulations are all different, heavy build is low capacitance, single builds all have different dielectric effects, none of them sound the same. Different manufacturers use different kinds of magnets from diff manufacturers and same alnicos from diff companies don't sound the same. Hand scatter is good for single coils, not for humuckers, you need a machine winder for buckers and P90s. throw in different gauge wire, potting methods, tension of winding, how many winds, how hot a charge you use on the magnets, and voila...near infinite possibilities :-)

So you alter the capacitance a bit by one means or another. The pickup capacitance is less than the cable cap; so you can modify the circuit just as much or more by using a short, longer, or just plain different cable. So why rewind it?

As for magnetization, Alnico has a hysteresis curve; you have to apply a field strong enough to get the domains to flip; then it drops back to saturation when you remove the applied field.

Different materials have different permeability and conductivity. The former results in different inductance, thus affecting the high frequencies similar to changing the capacitance. The latter changes the losses, and so is like using a somewhat different pot value.

Sometimes a difference is not better or worse, just different. But I suppose if your customer wants a pickup just like one somebody made fifty years, ago, it is your business to find out how to do it, and then wind it.

[devnull]

copper is copper but insulations are all different, heavy build is low capacitance, single builds all have different dielectric effects, none of them sound the same. Different manufacturers use different kinds of magnets from diff manufacturers and same alnicos from diff companies don't sound the same. Hand scatter is good for single coils, not for humuckers, you need a machine winder for buckers and P90s. throw in different gauge wire, potting methods, tension of winding, how many winds, how hot a charge you use on the magnets, and voila...near infinite possibilities :-)

Merci, Possum, this is pretty much what I expected, infinite possibilities, which is of course true.

I am thinking Q-tips here (sorry). You can buy brand name Q tips and you can buy cheapo Q-tips (note I am not discussing gilded-shaft Q-tips made of the finest virgin merino wool, versus endangered hardwood-shaft Q-tips made of the finest Dutch eider down). There is actually a noticeable difference in quality, although I would have thought that people would have figured out decades ago the one and only cost effective way to make decent Q-tips, and that consequently there would be only one way to make them, especially given the cost of a Q-tip making machine. Evidently not...there are shortcuts. Not a particularly good analogy to pickups but perhaps relevant in the commodity industry...

Of Possum's infinite combinations, some sound incredibly good, some sound incredibly bad, and most sound somewhere in the middle, typically towards the crappy end. Again, outside of the plus six-sigma regime, what are the first order differences between a crappy pickup and an average to good pickup?

More to my problem, why does this cheapo strat pickup sound so shrill, glassy, and brittle, assuming the same resistance and number of windings as a good one? Are there glaring manufacturing shortcuts that cause this? What are they? Somehow, I don't think it's the diff in wire (assuming same gauge), insulation, machine versus scatter winding, wire tension, potting, genealogy of the duck, etc., as I think those factors are more relevant to the sophisticated considerations of an average to high quality sound discussion typically held on this forum, not the crappy to good sound discussion I am suggesting and for which I expect to be thoroughly chastised.

It seems to me that, just looking at the physics (of which I am thankfully unencumbered of any actual understanding ), the shortcuts are in the magnets and/or slugs. That's pretty much the only other first order subsystem we have, or is it?

Just thinking out loud....

[Mike Sulzer]

If you are a cheap pickup maker and want to avoid the cost of alnico magnets, you can use something cheaper. If you design it right, the resonant frequency and Q should be similar to a real pickup, so it might not sound bad at all, but if you are really making a cheapo, why even both to design it? It just has to make noise.

[devnull]

If you are a cheap pickup maker and want to avoid the cost of alnico magnets, you can use something cheaper. If you design it right, the resonant frequency and Q should be similar to a real pickup, so it might not sound bad at all, but if you are really making a cheapo, why even both to design it? It just has to make noise.

Right. "Go out and get me some wires, and some magnets, and some of those little metal sticks."

I think we are at the level where little if any design (other than on how to procure and manufacture it cheaply) has been done.

[devnull]

Right. "Go out and get me some wires, and some magnets, and some of those little metal sticks."

I think we are at the level where little if any design (other than on how to procure and manufacture it cheaply) has been done.

And, being designed like a Detroit car to be really quick to put together, I would think it would be impossible to replace the magnets anyhow since I could assume the bobbin/slugs weren't lacquered prior to winding.

[David Schwab]

If you are a cheap pickup maker and want to avoid the cost of alnico magnets, you can use something cheaper. If you design it right, the resonant frequency and Q should be similar to a real pickup, so it might not sound bad at all, but if you are really making a cheapo, why even both to design it? It just has to make noise.

But that's saying only Alnico sounds good. For a lot of pickup designs Alnico is too soft and dark sounding. You can make very nice sounding pickups with ceramics if you design the pickup around them.

Take bass pickups for example. Unless you are making vintage Fender designs, I much prefer ceramics. I like neos even better now.

To me it's not about how much the magnet costs, but what you can do with them. They all have their place.

I think initially pickup makers used ceramics because they were new and cheaper. But some great pickups have been made with ceramics, like the Burns Trisonics.

[David Schwab]

And, being designed like a Detroit car to be really quick to put together, I would think it would be impossible to replace the magnets anyhow since I could assume the bobbin/slugs weren't lacquered prior to winding.

Yeah, but Fender designed his guitars to be easy and cheap to make, including the pickups. Think about it, Gibson did all this tooling and had injection molded parts. Fender used fiberboard from drum cases, had the magnets hold them together, and wrapped them with string!

It's brilliant in its simplicity. Same goes with the slab bodies and bolt on necks with no headstock angle or separate fingerboards.

[devnull]

Yeah, but Fender designed his guitars to be easy and cheap to make, including the pickups. Think about it, Gibson did all this tooling and had injection molded parts. Fender used fiberboard from drum cases, had the magnets hold them together, and wrapped them with string!

It's brilliant in its simplicity. Same goes with the slab bodies and bolt on necks with no headstock angle or separate fingerboards.

Definitely true dat, and now we revere it.

And some have found even cheaper ways to do it. We don't revere that.

[David Schwab]

Leo was a very smart man. He knew when to do things simple and when not to. He didn't like things subpar though. That's why he didn't use his office when CBS took over! He had an office up the road.

George Fullerton said Leo would scrutinize everything... if he went to buy a car he'd ask to have it put on a lift and look it over, and then ask them to change parts! he had bought a number of boats, and then had them totally redesigned to his specs... screws and all.

Fullerton also said Leo's favorite thing was designing and making pickups.

leo was one of a kind for sure (and of course he had smart people around him, like Fullerton, "Doc" Kauffman, Freddie Tavares, Don Randall, et al.)

[Mike Sulzer]

But that's saying only Alnico sounds good.

No, it is not. Just that there is some work involved in getting something right, and even then you might not get it exactly the same.

[David Schwab]

No, it is not. Just that there is some work involved in getting something right, and even then you might not get it exactly the same.

Do you mean if you are trying to copy an existing pickup? (like a vintage Fender or PAF or something)

[Mike Sulzer]

Do you mean if you are trying to copy an existing pickup? (like a vintage Fender or PAF or something)

Yes, I think that is tough to do exactly without getting the same magnetic material because it is so hard to get a material that has the same magnetic properties and the same eddy currents (conductivity).

If you are trying to make something new that sounds good, I think you can do that with a lot of different materials, especially if you are willing to load the pickup with an R and/or a C.

But remember, there is something potentially special about eddy current losses: they are frequency dependent. So even though they matter most right around the peak, the shape of the frequency response in the neighborhood of the peak might not be the same if you have a lower conductivity material and load the pickup with an R. Close, for sure, but close enough?

As an engineer and scientist, I do not invoke magic and mysticism, but nonetheless there are some very subtle things in guitar pickup design.