Mixing wire diameters....

[Possum]

....

Yeah I'm not really into shred pickups, and David you said you lost the mids when you did that, none of this is what I was looking for. I had a theory that maybe the "swirly" effect on PAFs might be due to mismatch wire diameters but man, that was wrong. If I ever get into shred pickups I can see its uses, but I'm not really into those styles at all. I watched a YouTube video of Jason Becker playing his strat at lower volume, man those shred pickups sound really sterile without all that distortion behind them. I did a bunch of his album packages but never got to see him play unfortunately.

[ShannonH]

my two cents..

I tried this with 42 and 43, and slugs all around, because I wanted more bass response. I didn't care for it much. But i have since determined that the guitar I put it in is a bit bright. I suspect dimarzio uses 42 and 44. On a Tone zone, one coil is full, and the other has about 3/16 left. Also, are they futzing with the metal slugs on the FRED? they may have the "hidden" bar in the coil proper changing the tone. At any rate, it's not going to give you a vintage tone unless you start doing the dimarzio thing and really changing the metal content in the coils, and doing air spacers and whatnot.

[frankfalbo]

Also, are they futzing with the metal slugs on the FRED? they may have the "hidden" bar in the coil proper changing the tone.

No, its two straight-up screw coils with keepers. No air, no loading.

A huge chunk of Dimarzio's HB line-up utilizes this patent. Peavey's EVH pickups were wound with the first part of the coil one gauge, and then they transition mid-coil. They patented that, so none of us can do that either. But Seymour has been doing that forever, so I don't know how they got past prior and haven't been challenged.

What's fun with Dimarzio is that if you think about it a little, you can generally speculate the recipe. I could be wrong but my understanding is that they aren't really making different coils for each, but more just making hybrids. Like on the Fred, I think one of the coils is the PAF Pro coil. The old Megadrive was an X2N coil and a PAF Pro. So then the Steve's Special is like that wind with allen screws. Then the Norton is that Fred coil with one of the Tone Zone coils. There are some other pretty clear "cut-n-paste" ones but I can't remember right now. I'm not saying they don't write new recipes for coils all the time, I'm just saying I think they arrive at some pickups via a straight hybrid. They mostly jump one wire gauge at a time, but some of their pickups are 42/44.

Like any technique, there are plenty of ways to make it suck and less ways to make it good.

[David Schwab]

Peavey's EVH pickups were wound with the first part of the coil one gauge, and then they transition mid-coil. They patented that, so none of us can do that either. But Seymour has been doing that forever, so I don't know how they got past prior and haven't been challenged.

Well that's interesting. What pickups does Seymour use that in?

What's fun with Dimarzio is that if you think about it a little, you can generally speculate the recipe. I could be wrong but my understanding is that they aren't really making different coils for each, but more just making hybrids. Like on the Fred, I think one of the coils is the PAF Pro coil. The old Megadrive was an X2N coil and a PAF Pro. So then the Steve's Special is like that wind with allen screws. Then the Norton is that Fred coil with one of the Tone Zone coils. There are some other pretty clear "cut-n-paste" ones but I can't remember right now. I'm not saying they don't write new recipes for coils all the time, I'm just saying I think they arrive at some pickups via a straight hybrid. They mostly jump one wire gauge at a time, but some of their pickups are 42/44.

I had a whole bunch of different Dimarzios in my shop one month. They are a lot of variations on a theme. I was looking at an Evo set, and the neck pickup had a thin ceramic magnet, while the bridge had a thicker one.

One of the more interesting was one of the newer PAF models. They had "fake" slugs that were really shaped like the screws. They had extra metal loading in between all the poles, and the spacers on the magnets.

I made an Air Norton inspired neck pickup with 43/44.

[ShannonH]

I made an Air Norton inspired neck pickup with 43/44.

I should have tried mine as a neck pu. The highs were excellent. Alas, I wound it on 53mm bobbins.

[SJE]

Peavey's EVH pickups were wound with the first part of the coil one gauge, and then they transition mid-coil. They patented that, so none of us can do that either.

Hmmm that kind of puts me off - since I own a Peavey EVH (very early US build model) and although the Bridge pickup is good the neck is pure mud! Mind you I was kind of surprised that the Neck pickup read 20.5k when I checked it! Where as the Bridge is 22.5k. I haven't examined them further to see what gauge the use but since a full HB coil of 43awg is around 8k - it must be mainly 44awg. They ain't bright enough for 45awg.

Oh also - what is the 'Air' part of the Air Norton and the others - I've never used ain't DiMarzio pickups what is different about the Air series and standard humbuckers?

[Possum]

....

The "air" is that they use a brass strip inbetween the magnet and the poles, there is no direct contact. I've only seen this from the patents and don't know how its used in real life...

[Possum]

...

Any of you expert patent searchers find the patent for the EVH pickups? I searched Hartley Peavey but no pickup patents show up.....

[frankfalbo]

The "air" is that they use a brass strip inbetween the magnet and the poles, there is no direct contact. I've only seen this from the patents and don't know how its used in real life...

The early ones had a non-metallic fibrous "keeper bar". Then they migrated to just slipping a nylon "O-ring" around the A and B poles to keep the distance. It doesn't even fit tightly, it simply has the wall thickness they needed. Then, on pickups with slug coils, the slugs are cut down to the diameter of a screw pole right below the surface of the bobbin, and the O-rings are still used. So it's like the magnet is seeing the diameter of two screw coils.

Any of you expert patent searchers find the patent for the EVH pickups? I searched Hartley Peavey but no pickup patents show up.....

I don't know what it is, but someone from Peavey pulled it up on their i-phone and showed it to me, because we were talking about it, so its definitely out there but I don't know what to tell you to search. I am pretty sure Peavey's name showed up on there though.

[RedHouse]

The early ones had a non-metallic fibrous "keeper bar". Then they migrated to just slipping a nylon "O-ring" around the A and B poles to keep the distance. It doesn't even fit tightly, it simply has the wall thickness they needed. Then, on pickups with slug coils, the slugs are cut down to the diameter of a screw pole right below the surface of the bobbin, and the O-rings are still used. So it's like the magnet is seeing the diameter of two screw coils.
....

On the air pickups I've had on my bench I've only seen the "O" rings, never knew about the fiber keepers version. I've never seen an air with a brass shim in there though.

[frankfalbo]

I've never seen brass either, I just didn't want to call it out because anything's possible with those guys. I've seen double-tall Alnico magnets in early Tone Zones and Freds, and they sounded "better" to me, which makes sense because a lot of guys like Tone Zones with Alnico 8 and Ceramic.

I see a lot of "unification" when I look at Dimarzios. They don't buy any Alnico II bar magnets, and they don't buy any Alnico 7-string magnets either. So when they have an Alnico 6-string pickup, the 7-string version has a ceramic magnet.

[Possum]

...

The patent mentions brass as one possible "air" shim, I may be remembering that wrong, just goes to prove that patents tell very little about actual production pieces.

It seems to me that all the pickups that use mixed guages are only doing it with the finer gauge wire, if the EVH pickup is 20K pretty obvious whats in it. Doing one coil with 42 and the other with a slightly fatter diameter, for me, just drained all the soul out of the pickup in bridge position. MWS's nom-min 42 PE changed a couple months ago to a larger diameter and has made everything alot brighter, might be worth trying to mix 42 and 43 on the same bobbin to capture back some warmth. There's other things I can do less extreme, splicing magnet wire ends together isn't a favorite thing for a half blind guy to be doing :-)

[David Schwab]

The early ones had a non-metallic fibrous "keeper bar". Then they migrated to just slipping a nylon "O-ring" around the A and B poles to keep the distance. It doesn't even fit tightly, it simply has the wall thickness they needed. Then, on pickups with slug coils, the slugs are cut down to the diameter of a screw pole right below the surface of the bobbin, and the O-rings are still used. So it's like the magnet is seeing the diameter of two screw coils.

That's the way I saw it on the virtual PAF too. Then they glued the magnet to the bottom of the bobbins.

[Dave Kerr]

I think the Peavey patent mentioned upthread is this one:
Electromechanical musical instrument ... - Google Patent Search
Is it just me, or does much of this sound like buncombe?

The wire gauges used on a dual wind bobbin 40 can be of any pre-determined gauge. The desired tonality and output of the pickup device is achieved by the combination of any two gauges. For example, X number of first winds 90 and X+l for the secondary winds 100. Another example is for there to be X initial winds 90 and X-2 secondary winds 100. Using latter gauges as in the example, many turns of the X gauge will yield higher DC resistance and accentuate midrange frequencies. Such arrangement will also lower amplitude, increase capacitance and inductance due to the number of turns necessary to achieve the desired output level. When sufficient number of turns of X gauge wire are wound to achieve desired mid-range frequencies and high end frequencies, a plurality of larger gauge wire may be used to increase the output, yet retain high frequency reproduction due to reduced inductance and capacitance of larger gauge wire. Additionally, low end frequencies will be enhanced with use of larger gauge wire, but not affect the lower mid-range as additional turns of smaller gauge wire would due to the number of additional turns required for the desired output range.

[David Schwab]

They just patented a tapped pickup! That's way old, as Seymour and Schecter and probably a lot of others have been doing this!

Sheesh!