PAF style Humbucker - a few questions

[Todd Hepler]

Howdy all -

I wound my first couple of coils over the weekend after finishing my homebrew winder.

I used the Butyrate bobbins from Mojo and the remaining parts from an old set of (I think) 57 classics.

Wire was 42 PE(BAE), magnet is unknown, but I'm guessing A5. Resistance of completed PU was around 7.45K. Coils were offset by a couple hundred ohms with the slug side hotter.

Here's the awesome part - it works! And not just in the "hey cool, it makes a noise" kind of works, but the "hey cool, this sounds pretty damn good!" kind of works.

I have a few 'boutique' pickups from winders like WCR, Motor City, and Scatterbrane. Each of these pu's, while all excellent sounding with different flavors of PAF-ness, exhibit a quality which I don't have a word for. Let's call it splat.

To me splat is sort of compression of the mid and high frequencies, and is super apparent with clean settings. The harder you pick, the more the PU's tend to splatter/compress/whatever. This phenomenon is somewhat masked by any sort of drive, and, I think, ads to the PU's overdriven character. Each of the above mentioned PU's does this splat to varying degrees, the WCR exhibits the least splat (crossroads neck) and the MC is the splattiest (AFWAYU). Each seems to respond well to volume roll back to attenuate this characteristic for clean passages.

BTW - the PU I wound splats quite nicely.

Now on to my questions:

- Does the collective have a name for this characteristic?

- Having never owned or even played a real PAF, I can only assume this is part of the original's character?

- What determines the amount of splatter?
- magnet Gauss/type?
- Wind pattern/TPL?
- Materials
- All of it?

Thanks for you thoughtful commentary,

Todd

[madialex]

All of the above, i'd say tension and gauss would have something to do with it. Not sure what splatter is but giving a guess

[salvarsan]

Hiya,

The compression, in my hand-waving unsubstantiated opinion, comes from the magnets.

Weaker magnets means more compression.
Lower coercivity magnets means more compression.
More steel in the pickups means more compression.

Try partially demagnetizing A5 or A2 magnets with a quick swipe from a Neodymium N40+ type.
You can always remagnetize them with a longer swipe.

[copperheadroads]

Howdy all -

I wound my first couple of coils over the weekend after finishing my homebrew winder.

I used the Butyrate bobbins from Mojo and the remaining parts from an old set of (I think) 57 classics.

Wire was 42 PE(BAE), magnet is unknown, but I'm guessing A5. Resistance of completed PU was around 7.45K. Coils were offset by a couple hundred ohms with the slug side hotter.

Here's the awesome part - it works! And not just in the "hey cool, it makes a noise" kind of works, but the "hey cool, this sounds pretty damn good!" kind of works.

I have a few 'boutique' pickups from winders like WCR, Motor City, and Scatterbrane. Each of these pu's, while all excellent sounding with different flavors of PAF-ness, exhibit a quality which I don't have a word for. Let's call it splat.

To me splat is sort of compression of the mid and high frequencies, and is super apparent with clean settings. The harder you pick, the more the PU's tend to splatter/compress/whatever. This phenomenon is somewhat masked by any sort of drive, and, I think, ads to the PU's overdriven character. Each of the above mentioned PU's does this splat to varying degrees, the WCR exhibits the least splat (crossroads neck) and the MC is the splattiest (AFWAYU). Each seems to respond well to volume roll back to attenuate this characteristic for clean passages.

BTW - the PU I wound splats quite nicely.

Now on to my questions:

- Does the collective have a name for this characteristic?

- Having never owned or even played a real PAF, I can only assume this is part of the original's character?

- What determines the amount of splatter?
- magnet Gauss/type?
- Wind pattern/TPL?
- Materials
- All of it?

Thanks for you thoughtful commentary,

Todd

I don't know what "Splat" is really describing .do you hear it on all strings ?
Could it be your using an A2 magnet & your hearing the honky tone & flubby bass on the wound strings

[Todd Hepler]

Hmm ... the mags are unknown. I have some A2 and A5 on the way - I'll try swapping 'em out to see the difference. The keeper, slugs, and screws are unknown alloys as well.

With regards to the demagnetizing: will an old-school weller soldering gun -the kind with the huge coil- work? I ask because I used to use one of these to remove magnet spots from the TV screen when my kids would stick a magnet on one.

Thanks for your thoughts!

Todd

Hiya,

The compression, in my hand-waving unsubstantiated opinion, comes from the magnets.

Weaker magnets means more compression.
Lower coercivity magnets means more compression.
More steel in the pickups means more compression.

Try partially demagnetizing A5 or A2 magnets with a quick swipe from a Neodymium N40+ type.
You can always remagnetize them with a longer swipe.

[Todd Hepler]

The 'splat' is a way to describe the compression I hear.

On all of the PU's I mentioned above, the compression is noticeable on the D string through the high E string. Not so much on the A, and nearly non existent on the low E.

The pickup I wound is very similar. The bass is pretty tight - I can't say I hear any sort of flub.

As to honky tone - I definitely hear some nasal quality. The middle position is super nasal. I have no idea which magent is in there now - I'm going to try an A2 and A5 when they arrive.

I appreciate your taking the time to offer some thoughts.

Todd

I don't know what "Splat" is really describing .do you hear it on all strings ?
Could it be your using an A2 magnet & your hearing the honky tone & flubby bass on the wound strings

[Mike Sulzer]

The correlation with coercivity is interesting, and it might be useful to think about what it means physically.

Coercivity is defined this way:

Coercivity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In materials science, the coercivity, also called the coercive field or coercive force, of a ferromagnetic material is the intensity of the applied magnetic field required to reduce the magnetization of that material to zero after the magnetization of the sample has been driven to saturation.

---------
Obviously that has little to do directly with the pickup sound, but a lower coercivity could mean that it is also easier to change the field in the small region around where it is magnetized. Thus, it could correlate with a higher permeability. Pickups with more steel would be expected to behave in a similar way since steel has a high permeability. So that seems consistent. Partially demagnetizing the magnet also would be expected to move it to a region on the hysteresis curve where the permeability is higher.

I think that the steel is a larger effect since it is inside the coil.

Hiya,

The compression, in my hand-waving unsubstantiated opinion, comes from the magnets.

Weaker magnets means more compression.
Lower coercivity magnets means more compression.
More steel in the pickups means more compression.

Try partially demagnetizing A5 or A2 magnets with a quick swipe from a Neodymium N40+ type.
You can always remagnetize them with a longer swipe.

[David Schwab]

Hiya,

The compression, in my hand-waving unsubstantiated opinion, comes from the magnets.

Weaker magnets means more compression.
Lower coercivity magnets means more compression.
More steel in the pickups means more compression.

Try partially demagnetizing A5 or A2 magnets with a quick swipe from a Neodymium N40+ type.
You can always remagnetize them with a longer swipe.

I'll wave my hand at that also.

To demonstrate this, replace an Alnico with a ceramic magnet and listen how much "harder" the attack is. Weaker magnets like an A2 have that squashed kind of tone.

[foonting]

The 'splat' is a way to describe the compression I hear.

On all of the PU's I mentioned above, the compression is noticeable on the D string through the high E string. Not so much on the A, and nearly non existent on the low E.

The pickup I wound is very similar. The bass is pretty tight - I can't say I hear any sort of flub.



As to honky tone - I definitely hear some nasal quality. The middle position is super nasal. I have no idea which magent is in there now - I'm going to try an A2 and A5 when they arrive.

I appreciate your taking the time to offer some thoughts.

Todd

I use onomatopoeic words all the time to describe pickup sounds to customers
One of my favorite is poingy: the sound of a vintage or underwound Tele bridge pickup ... sort of springy and elastic.
To me 'flub' would be slightly boxy and loose bottom end without a lot of definition.
I use squeep too: the sound of a cheap ceramic strat bridge pickup ... the combination of squeal and asthmatic peep

[StarryNight]

The middle position is super nasal.

Todd

if the middle position is SUPER nasal you may have the pickups out of phase with each other ala P. Green

[FunkyKikuchiyo]

I use onomatopoeic words all the time to describe pickup sounds to customers
One of my favorite is poingy: the sound of a vintage or underwound Tele bridge pickup ... sort of springy and elastic.
To me 'flub' would be slightly boxy and loose bottom end without a lot of definition.
I use squeep too: the sound of a cheap ceramic strat bridge pickup ... the combination of squeal and asthmatic peep

It honestly is the best way to describe sounds. As with many things in life, we notice them more when we can put names to them.

The best criticism I've ever gotten was on a strat pickup when a player told me it "didn't have enough spank" and I realized I had serious tension issues.

[Todd Hepler]

You are 100% correct - I found my compass yesterday and the magnet in my PU is backwards compared to the WCR.

if the middle position is SUPER nasal you may have the pickups out of phase with each other ala P. Green

[Joe Gwinn]

To demonstrate this, replace an Alnico with a ceramic magnet and listen how much "harder" the attack is.

This isn't an apples-apples comparison, because alnico and ceramic have very different eddy-current loading effects.

Weaker magnets like an A2 have that squashed kind of tone.

If one uses A5 magnets but partially demagnetizes them, do you get the same squashed tone?