Coil offset for neck pickups?

[Zhangliqun]

I don't need all these tests. I know the mismatched coil thing (one coil with significantly more turns than the other) works, and works well. So well I have yet to sell a humbucker without this feature.

[Possum]

....

Well, there are positive things about equal wound coils as well, its not something that should just be ignored. Both my early patent pickups '62 and '63 are equal winds as well as a '60 PAF I repaired. After all it was INTENDED that these pickups be equal winds, they were just too lazy and sloppy to get it right until those years. My Patents sound just like the real PAFs they are, they have some differences in tone but not bad differences, just different. The unequal winds thing gets a little too mythic for me sometimes, you should really explore both and use each for certain applications. If you take apart all the top selling big ticket PAFs that are sold the unequal winds are minimal if at all. My Holmes are equal winds. Too much offset doesn't sound that good to me, but then it depends on what metallurgy you're using too.

[David Schwab]

I agree with Dave. Sometimes you want equal winds, sometimes you don't.

Equal winds are good for a neck pickup when it's a bright guitar, or something with a floyd, but mixed coils is good for things like basswood bodies where you don't want something too boomy, and bridge pickups sound good as equal winds for more mids.

[Mike Sulzer]

you know, traditional humbuckers actually AREN'T humbucking. Seth Lover knew that. You will only get true humbucking if you make both coils slug poles or screws poles, with slugs and poles together the pickup isn't getting equal extraneous noise coming into both coils. I read a more recent Lover interview and he realized that and though the sales guys who wanted adjustable pole screws were a buncha dummies :-)

Better to make the cores for both coils the same, of course. But the standard humbucker is pretty good. This is easy to show. Set up a humbucker with an amp and put it near a source of magnetic hum. Take out the screws one at a time. The hum gets louder as you remove each screw. Now put them back in, one at a time. If the humbucker is good, the last screw makes a big difference. This means that the screws and slugs are pretty well matched. There are a lot of stories going around, but the reality is that humbuckers do work well, and one should be careful about doing anything that would screw them up.

[DrStrangelove]

Brad, we were just being helpful, not attacking you!

This is The Internet:
Share what you know; Flame what you don't.

-drh

[kevinT]

I don't need all these tests. I know the mismatched coil thing (one coil with significantly more turns than the other) works, and works well. So well I have yet to sell a humbucker without this feature.

yep. And you would bias a particular coil based on what you want to achieve with the tone....i.e., fatten it up vs. adding sizzle/enhancing the high end.

I just wanted to hear some opinions and reasons why folks do what they do.

[voodoochild]

yep. And you would bias a particular coil based on what you want to achieve with the tone....i.e., fatten it up vs. adding sizzle/enhancing the high end.

I just wanted to hear some opinions and reasons why folks do what they do.

I just do it on the neck because I can't stand that woofy neck tone that gives the illusion of higher output on the neck. Knocking the bass down and increasing the mid range is key for me on the neck. Like I said before I offset the slug side hotter and use an A3 magnet on the neck buckers. Sounds great to me.

[Zhangliqun]

And you would bias a particular coil based on what you want to achieve with the tone....i.e., fatten it up vs. adding sizzle/enhancing the high end.

I freely admit to being a pretty intuitive, seat-of-the-pants kind of winder, but yes you do want to put some thought into what you're trying to get tonewise, not just mismatch for the sake of a mismatch and marketing gimmick. So there's been no small amount of experimentation at Zhangbucker Labs with the amount of coil bias. If done right, it can both fatten up AND add sizzle and presence to the same pickup. Like a humbucker with P90 top end...