Man vs. Machine Distributed Capacitance

[mick]

" Your kidding yourself if you think that machine winding takes the human factor out of making pickups. I enjoy hand winding and I'm not knocking it. I can't speak for them but how many of the pickups that Lollar or Wolfe make do you think are hand wound? I don't hear people describing their pickups as too perfect or antiseptic. Dave is right it is just another tool. If you can get a handle on all of the parameters it is a tool like no other. "


Dunno , but I don't see them on here either telling everyone how much better machine wounds are either ,or why they are a better pickup because of it...and the fact that you mention their names , what are you trying to drag them in to support your argument ? I don't really give a toss who says otherwise machine wounds are not as good as handwounds.... so machine winding doesn't take the human factor out of winding pickups ? that's as ridiculous as saying that a warmoth is full of the human factor because someone has to program the router , cnc'd body and neck then yeah it's removed and put in a box by a human , it's all about profit and time guys , most of you have day jobs too so you can just get someone to load up the bobbins whilst you are at work and assemble them later , fine nothing wrong with that but to sit here and bollocks on about how great they are because you are now using that method is a shame really...

Mick
__________________

[kevinT]

Guys....its not about whether hand wound or machine wound is better....Please that is a no win issue. Its TOTALLY about the tone...PERIOD. And its about finding the right formula (whether using a machine or your hand) to capture the illusive tone that you seek. Through a lot of time, effort, and exspenive, someone with a machine can acheive the tone of a handwound pickup and someone winding by hand can achieve the tone of a pickup wound by a machine....its just wrapping wire around a bobbin.

Moreover, someone winding by hand can do what a machine can do and a machine can do (mimic) what the human hand can do.

FACT: We know handwounds sound good or folks wouldn't be flocking to boutique makers having custom pickups made.

FACT: We know that machine wound pickups sound good...or DM and SD would simply be out of business.

However, IMO there are a couple of things that a machine winder has an edge over handwinding....and they are:

Repeatibility: If you come up with a design that sounds great and you market specific models in your product line...i think its important to have the ability to repeat the same design as close as possible every time. Whether i buy a duncan JB on ebay or buy a JB halfway across the world ..a JB should sound pretty much the same. (yes i know that they can sound different in different guitars...but lets keep all things equal...i.e., same guitar)

Effeciency: obviously this is a crucial factor if your selling volumes of pickups. you will want to get them off the assembly line asap to fill your orders. A machine is one of the steps in the manufacturing process where you can save some time.

[mick]

Yep repeatability, thats why maccas tastes the same everywhere , pizza hut , BK's , same taste maybe but no flavour...they took the humble burger and mass produced it , and killed it sure it's more efficient and look how many they pump out , and yoiu can eat them , doesn't mean it tastes good yet you ask them about it and they will tell you till they are purple that it taste's great , sorry guys , to each their own as already pointed out , doesn't mean it has to be swallowed , and why if handwinding would you want to mimic a machine wound ?



Mick

[kevinT]

Yep repeatability, thats why maccas tastes the same everywhere , pizza hut , BK's , same taste maybe but no flavour...

what about repeating a pickup design that sounds great with a lot of flavour..... it is attainable with a machine.

they took the humble burger and mass produced it , and killed it sure it's more efficient and look how many they pump out , and yoiu can eat them , doesn't mean it tastes good yet you ask them about it and they will tell you till they are purple that it taste's great.

I agree. Many times that ends up being the situation in the business world...where they take a good product and ruin it.

sorry guys , to each their own as already pointed out , doesn't mean it has to be swallowed.

I agree.

and why if handwinding would you want to mimic a machine wound?

there may be a machine wound pickup with great tone that you may want to emulate in one of your designs.

There is one in particular, with tone that blows my mind, that i want to chase. Its a high output 16k Ohm, multi-ceramic design. Machine wound in asia, brass base plate, gloopy wax coming from the seams, magnetic steel bobbin mounting screws...everthing is wrong with this pickup...but it sounds fabulous to me.


One last question mick.....If someone gave you $10K to $15K to go out and buy the machine winder of your choice ..would you do it?

[mick]

" there may be a machine wound pickup with great tone that you may want to emulate in one of your designs."

No not really , I would much prefer to develop my own sound and think that handwinding is superior tonally so why would I copy a machine wound pickup?
why not just give a machine winder some specs , get them to wind the bobbins and then assemble them and drop your label on them ? it wouldn't matter because they are machine wound to your specs so what's the diff ? why bother at all , sort of like ghost built pickups , great idea

"One last question mick.....If someone gave you $10K to $15K to go out and buy the machine winder of your choice ..would you do it?"

Of course not , I would set up to do my own flatwork etc , but would likely buy myself a better drill to wind with , man this one is getting noisy...

Mick

[Possum]

good discussion....

This is a great thread, its really about time this machine/hand wind thing was discussed. Neither is better, its the person in control that determines the outcome. There really isn't any boutique winder out there of notable size hand winding every pickup, you think Fralin's guys sit around all day moving their hands back and forth, what a crock, thats why you never see shots of these guys' real work rooms. Abagail Ybarra handwinding pickups all day, horse shite, she signs pickups all day and supervises the machine operators is probably the real truth. Thank god that there's alot of you DOING hand winding, you can't really get it from the big guys. As far as machines go you have to have a talented guy/gal who has experience hand winding pickups to start with, the machine by itself isn't going to make "good" pickups. Its all good.....

[JGundry]

Just had a look at your website Jon. Really nice looking kit which I applaud you for. You do seem to emphasis the handwired aspect. Not too dissimilar to the 'handwound' aspect then.

Personally, I think handwound pickups are a different thing from machine wound pickups. Which is best? Personal preference is the only answer to that question. I can see however that in order to step up production you either have to employ a stack of people to hand wind or get in some machinery. If you can make a machine work for you like Jason Lollar and Possum feel they have done then you will have achieved something more than a straight robot with no feeling or understanding. The key thing is that Jason and Possum's machines ( which are quite different ) are not of the walk-away variety. You still need to make an input.

I could quite easily design a machine that will load it's own bobbins and start/stop winding on it's own all day long. Maybe I'll do that instead of making pickups.

Thanks Spence. I do hand wire my effects and hand select components but I also use a PCB. For me I use the best method for the application. Sometimes it's hand work, sometimes it's modern production methods, sometimes old production methods. For me right now I'm concentrating with only one new product and that is a PAF clone. A machine winder is a key part of that as far as I'm concerned. That it the right method for a PAF clone. For a early Fender pickup I think there is a real argument for hand winding. However I would work my ass off to get my winder to record every input I entered via a joystick in real time so it could be played back through my computerized winder if I ever decided to wind Fender style pickups in any quantity.

I'm familiar with the Lollar winder and no offense to Lollar the winder in the book offers a way too complicated solution to a simple problem. Possum's winder on the other hand is super cool and innovative and is as personal to him as his pickups. And if I do say so myself my winder is super cool and innovative and has my personal stamp on it. I made and designed it to do one thing and that is wind humbucker coils, 6 at one shot. It will wind them any way I want them wound. It has a graphical computerized wire guide and will not do a damn thing that I don't tell it to do. I assure you it will do things that I could never do hand winding. It allows for experimentation that I would never have been able to do with hand winding. But if I want to hand guide I can do it in real time via a joystick for 6 bobbins at a shot. I am a one man shop with hired help when I need it. My winder gives me quality control beyond what could be done by hand for this specific product, a PAF. This is nothing but a plus for me and my customers.

[David Schwab]

I finally got my camera back to take some pics...

Looking at the first picture... that Schatten winder looks so tiny! lol Pocket winder.

[mick]

Ok Dave , so how come you bagged them for it when you were hand winding ? and now that you are machine winding it's now makes a better pickup ? what makes you any different from fralin and abby ? if you go back to hand winding are they going to be better again? it's a similar argument to hand wired amps V's PCB's and we all know that hand wired amps are far superior , more time consuming yeas ...tell it any way you like guys , come up with any argument you can think of , machine wounds are not quite the same , maybe more productive but no way better....

Mick

[Spence]

Just a note to Jon regarding machinewound PAFs. Your information is based on an idea that Gibson had Leesona winders all over the place. Well they didn't and the hallowed Leesona was for winding yarn. It wasn't actually very suitable for winding pickups. They really could not keep up with production at Gibson with that one machine and that's a fact. most PAFs were handwound as a consequence. I'm more than happy to hear all this debate about handwound versus machinewound when it comes to PAFs because a simple a/b test will prove that a handwound PAF will give you a better PAF sonic clone than a machinewound one. And as possum keeps telling everyone here, the winding is just a percentage of the overall PAF tone. You have to get everything else right too.

[Possum]

outed....

Actually Andy C. and my own evolution brought me round to using a machine. Plus repetitive stress damage, I couldn't wind more than 4-5 pickups a day using hand guiding, without ending up in pain. I never actually planned to get into machine winding, I went on a year long research project to build or have built a recording winder that would record my hand movements and then play them back in an editable form. I also wanted to be able to do a machine wind if I desired it. I talked to a couple engineer/programmer types, CNC guys, controller board manufacturers, R/C hobbyist guys and retailers, etc. etc. The only progress I really made was talking to the programmer/engineer types who told me they could make what I wanted for around $6,000. Basically my idea predates Wolfe's prototype, alot of what I said was here on the forum, but I took it to pages of detailed information on exactly how the software should work, how user input should be set up, every little detail. Due to financial problems I was never able to have my machine built. IN the process though I discovered how to build my own machine, a very DIFFERENT machine than anyone manufactures. My machine has been through a bunch of evolutions already, and it won't do perfect winding and I don't want it to. Through a couple of simple adjustments I can make it do an automatic random scatter. I've used it for long enough to figure out how to get the tones I want out of it that are still way fucking better than Fralin's. (No disrespect but their pickups lack soul....). Basically my pickups don't sound any different than they did before, I've been able to improve my humbuckers and P90s by having more precise control, so to me there ARE better. The software I use I am still exploring and trying different things with, it wasn't written for coil winding. If you want something bad enough and keep at it you eventually will figure something out. I did.

[David Schwab]

it's a similar argument to hand wired amps V's PCB's

Not really, because hand wired, or more precisely, point-to-point wired amps don't use printed circuit boards. It's probably that the circuit board has higher trace to trace capacitance, and you have to be real careful when laying out your circuit in high gain situations, just as you do with wires in a point-to-point wired circuit.

You can still hand load and wire a circuit board. Or you can use a wave soldered surface mount circuit board. The later has the advantage of being smaller, which is good for effect pedals or onboard preamps, but it's almost impossible to do by hand!

How about hand wound strings? DR hand winds their strings, while a company like D’Addario uses machines. I don't hear any difference, and in fact I prefer the D’Addario strings. But strings aren't pickups...

So I think the real issue is how the machine wound pickups are wound, not that it's on a machine. Rickenbacker uses machines, and John Hall says they use a pattern that simulates hand scatter winding. Their new scatter wound toasters pretty much sound like the originals.

The only difference between totally machine wound and hand wound is the way the wire is guided, and maybe the tension, unless a tensioner is used. Find the right recipe and you are all set!

Let's not forget that some of the other factors of the old pickups are materials... and we know that Fender for instance has probably changed the wire they use, etc. And then we have those plastic bobbin, steel poled, ceramic magnet Strat pickups...

Having said all that, what if any two people here wound an identical pickup, say a Tele lead pickup, with identical parts and wire, same number of turns, but on their own winders (and using their own hands), would the pickups sound different?

Something like this was done once with classical guitars. They took a number of builders and had them make a guitar from a common set of plans and materials. Some of the builder's usual guitars were quite different from this guitar. The story goes that each builder's guitar sounded like all their other guitars, so each builder did indeed add something seemingly intangible to the instrument. And that's probably how hard they press down on certain tools, or the direction they sand, and so on.

When I worked at American Showster, we had a master hand carved body for the AS 57 Chevy tailfin guitars. All the other bodies were carved from that master using a duplicating router... kind of a hand controlled version of a CNC router. You used a stylus to follow the contours of the master as you carved six duplicates. After that rough carving, they were all shaped by hand using angle grinders and hand sanding. I can tell you that they all sounded the same as the original hand carved prototypes. Nothing was gained or lost in the process.

So I still think you can program a machine to match your winding style.

[mick]

" Not really, because hand wired, or more precisely, point-to-point wired amps don't use printed circuit boards."

Quite correct David , they don't...........

Mick

[mick]

How about hand wound strings? DR hand winds their strings, while a company like D’Addario uses machines. I don't hear any difference, and in fact I prefer the D’Addario strings. But strings aren't pickups...


And believe it or not my DR's last way longer and sound better for longer than D'addario's do , so it boils back down to pickups , which are more toneful ? sorry guys ' it's hand wound all the way, you can try to replicate the patterns all you like with a machine but it's not going to quite cut it... no way ,


Mick

[JGundry]

Just a note to Jon regarding machinewound PAFs. Your information is based on an idea that Gibson had Leesona winders all over the place. Well they didn't and the hallowed Leesona was for winding yarn. It wasn't actually very suitable for winding pickups. They really could not keep up with production at Gibson with that one machine and that's a fact. most PAFs were handwound as a consequence. I'm more than happy to hear all this debate about handwound versus machinewound when it comes to PAFs because a simple a/b test will prove that a handwound PAF will give you a better PAF sonic clone than a machinewound one. And as possum keeps telling everyone here, the winding is just a percentage of the overall PAF tone. You have to get everything else right too.

Gibson had at least 3 different winders that I have seen pictures of. The Leesona being one of them. Seth Lover himself states that the only hand wound PAF was his prototype and maybe any pickup that came in for repair. He goes on to say that Gibson had at least to machines doing PAF's and with one doing more bobbins than the other at one shot. The Leesona will do three bobbins at one shot at as much as 1200 RPM. I have the manual and know the specs.. Leesona made coil winders for the textile industry yes, but the Leesona 102 has specific instructions and tensioners for magnet wire as small as 42AWG. At only 3 bobbins the Leesona is still way more efficient than hand winding. I do think it is likely that Gibson used winders other than the Leesona 102 for PAF's that wound bobbins on the order of 8 to 10 at one shot. Gibson was a factory and it would make no sense for them to hand wind if they had any experience with machine winders. The only evidence I have seen points directly towards machine winding for PAF's. The reality is that Gibson was way ahead of it's production goals for pickups. That is why Gold cover PAF spec. pickups can be found in guitars as late as 1966. They simply stockpiled the pickups and used the gold covers at a slower rate.

A simple A/B test with identical parts and coil offsets would prove that the machine wound pickup sounds more like a PAF. Now if you asked which sounded better it would really depend on who you asked. People's preferences are all over the place. Yes I agree there are many other factors to making a PAF clone. This is a problem as some of the best available parts are not quite to the correct specifications. But if the manner in which the coil is wound matters. Then that is one important specification that can only be duplicated with a machine winder.