"High Output" humbuckers

[David Schwab]

Seymour Duncan denies the Jeff Beck relationship.
SD calls it a Jazz Blues Pickup.
IME Most high output pickups get darker sounding if you put too much wire on them.
T

This is because Jeff does not endorse the pickup, so that's not the official name. Seymour does not deny the relationship, he denies that "JB" stands for Jeff Beck, when clearly it does.



Caption reads: "A young Seymour Duncan with the "Tele-Gib" he built for Jeff Beck."

If this is not proof, I don't know what is!



Seymour made two pickups for artists., the JB and the Jazz model.


From the Duncan site:


"After sending his favorite Les Paul® to a shady repairman who switched out the P.A.F.’s for newer, squealing, pickups, Jeff came to Seymour for help and advice. Seymour repaired Jeff’s Les Paul, and then set about creating a special guitar for Jeff with a pair of pickups that would capture Jeff’s amazing ability to coax a wide range of tones out of his axe.


The result was a guitar that Seymour gave to Jeff as a gift. The body and neck were clearly Telecaster®. But the pickups were two re-wound humbuckers made from broken P.A.F.s Seymour rescued from Lonnie Mack’s Flying V®. Seymour called the guitar a “Tele-Gib,” and nicknamed the bridge pickup “JB” and the neck pickup “JM,” after the hot rod racer, “John Milner,” in the classic film, American Graffiti. (Eventually, “JM” would change to “Jazz Model,” which is what it’s called today.) Jeff used the Tele-Gib on his amazing 1975 release, Blow By Blow, where it gained notoriety for the haunting volume swells heard on “Cause We Ended As Lovers,” which Jeff dedicated to Roy Buchanon. Interestingly, it was Seymour who introduced Jeff to Roy a few months prior.


The JB bridge pickup became very popular, very quick. Soon, many of England’s top guitarists, including more than a few legendary names, sought out Seymour’s “JB Mod” for their guitars. They found that the JB gave increased output (16.4K Ohms) without sounding harsh or dark, like other high-output pickups of the mid-‘70s. When Seymour returned to the USA the next year, his reputation as a pickup designer and the JB’s reputation as a great pickup preceded him. And the rest was history."

[big_teee]

Exactly, It is the name royalty deal Thing!
Personally I never did like the pickup that well.
To each his own.
Matter of fact I just sold a JB, and a Jazz that had been in a drawer since I've been winding.
I like all my pickups better, so no reason to keep them.
My JB didn't sound muddy per say, more on the line of thin and generic sounding.
It was OK, but nothing to write home about.
T

[David Schwab]

I just remembered that Seymour also had the "EVH" pickup... which of course stood for "Evenly Voiced Harmonics." Sure it did!
On the Duncan site you can find:

"There is no "EVH" pickup. There is, however, a custom shop pickup called the 78 Model, which some people abbreviate as "E.V.H.," because it offers evenly-voiced harmonics. The 78 Model pickup is a faithful recreation of the legendary low-output, Alnico 2, P.A.F.-style humbucker that Seymour designed in 1978 for various high-profile artists he was working with at the time. This pickup should not be associated with any specific artist."

This USED to say "...that Seymour designed in 1978 for a high-profile artist he was working with at the time." But then that artist got pissy about it! Funny since Duncan was making the pickup for his Frankenstein reproduction when it first came out.

Seymour has made and rewound pickups for lots of big names. I don't blame him for wanting to get recognition for that, but I guess he's not allowed to use their names unless they have an endorsement deal for a signature model.

[chad h]

I successfully made my first high output humbucker. I put 10,000 turns of 44awg on one coil and 9,500 of 44awg on the other, added an AlNiCo 5 bar magnet and had a 25k humbucker. It had its first listening test this morning. Much to my surprise, it sounded surprisingly good. And that was without resorting to any kind of multi-gainstage amp, or triple rectification, or anything crazy. It just sounded good.

[Sinster]

So I shouldn't make a high output with 42?

[copperheadroads]

So I shouldn't make a high output with 42?

Why not ,It's a great learning experience & if you using 42 gauge wire & hand winding .I wouldn't aim for much over 6000 turns per bobbin .

[David Schwab]

I successfully made my first high output humbucker. I put 10,000 turns of 44awg on one coil and 9,500 of 44awg on the other, added an AlNiCo 5 bar magnet and had a 25k humbucker. It had its first listening test this morning. Much to my surprise, it sounded surprisingly good. And that was without resorting to any kind of multi-gainstage amp, or triple rectification, or anything crazy. It just sounded good.

That's probably way more than most high output pickups have wound on them. Generally they are 6-7,000 turns per coil.

[David Schwab]

So I shouldn't make a high output with 42?

Pickup makers go to thiner wire because you can fit more wire on the bobbin. You won't get too much 42 on a humbucker bobbin unless it's taller.

It can also start to get bass heavy, so the thinner wire helps tighten up the low end, since it tends to sound a little thinner.

[chad h]

That's probably way more than most high output pickups have wound on them. Generally they are 6-7,000 turns per coil.

It depends who is winding, and what gauge wire they wind with.

If I used 42 awg wire, I'd have a hard time putting more than 6000 turns on the coil. But I'm a hand-winder. I expect you'd get 7000 with a machine. At 6000 turns, you'd get a humbucker with DCR of almost 10k ohms. This is about as hot as a humbucker can get with 42 awg wire.

If I used 43 awg wire, I could get 8000 turns on the coil. And such a coil would give me higher output than a mere 6000 turns. A Humbucker like this would give me DCR around 16k ohms - just like Seymour Duncan's JB humbucker. This is about as hot as a humbucker can get with 43 awg wire.

If I used 44 awg wire, I can get 10,000 turns per coil, and that offers much higher output than just 6000 turns. It gives me DCR of 25k ohms - just like Bare Knuckle's Warpig humbucker. This is about as hot as a humbucker can get with 44 awg wire.

I suspect that if I used 46 awg wire, I could get 15,000 turns per coil, and that would give me much higher output than using only 6,000 turns. In fact, 6,000 turns of 46 awg wire would give me a teeny-weeny coil, and would probably give a really low output. With 15,000 turns per coil with 46 awg wire, I bet I'd get DCR about 48k ohms - which is precisely what Seymour Duncan's Slug humbucker offers. I'm guessing this is about as hot as a humbucker can get with 46 awg wire.

If output increases with turns, then a "high output humbucker" must require you to wind pretty full bobbins. And that requires a different number of turns depending on your wire.

Going back to my original question, posed in a slightly different way...

Suppose we have the following 4 humbuckers, all using the same magnet:

1. 6000 turns of 42 awg wire per coil; DCR = 10k ohms
2. 8000 turns of 43 awg wire per coil; DCR = 16k ohms
3. 10,000 turns of 44 awg wire per coil; DCR = 25k ohms
4. 15,000 turns of 46 awg wire per coil, DCR = 48k ohms

Which one do we expect to generate higher voltage output, and why?

[David Schwab]

It depends who is winding, and what gauge wire they wind with.

If I used 42 awg wire, I'd have a hard time putting more than 6000 turns on the coil. But I'm a hand-winder. I expect you'd get 7000 with a machine. At 6000 turns, you'd get a humbucker with DCR of almost 10k ohms. This is about as hot as a humbucker can get with 42 awg wire.

If I used 43 awg wire, I could get 8000 turns on the coil. And such a coil would give me higher output than a mere 6000 turns. A Humbucker like this would give me DCR around 16k ohms - just like Seymour Duncan's JB humbucker. This is about as hot as a humbucker can get with 43 awg wire.

A Duncan JB is 6,800 turns of 44 AWG wire. A DiMarzio SDHB has 6,500 turns of 44 AWG, and uses a ceramic magnet. They are both high output pickups, but the SDHB is brighter sounding. 8,000 turns of wire will give you a dark sounding pickup. I make some bass pickups like that (8k turns of 42 on each coil) for people that want lots of low end and not much high end.

If I used 44 awg wire, I can get 10,000 turns per coil, and that offers much higher output than just 6000 turns. It gives me DCR of 25k ohms - just like Bare Knuckle's Warpig humbucker. This is about as hot as a humbucker can get with 44 awg wire.

I suspect that if I used 46 awg wire, I could get 15,000 turns per coil, and that would give me much higher output than using only 6,000 turns. In fact, 6,000 turns of 46 awg wire would give me a teeny-weeny coil, and would probably give a really low output. With 15,000 turns per coil with 46 awg wire, I bet I'd get DCR about 48k ohms - which is precisely what Seymour Duncan's Slug humbucker offers. I'm guessing this is about as hot as a humbucker can get with 46 awg wire.

If output increases with turns, then a "high output humbucker" must require you to wind pretty full bobbins. And that requires a different number of turns depending on your wire.

Going back to my original question, posed in a slightly different way...

Suppose we have the following 4 humbuckers, all using the same magnet:

1. 6000 turns of 42 awg wire per coil; DCR = 10k ohms
2. 8000 turns of 43 awg wire per coil; DCR = 16k ohms
3. 10,000 turns of 44 awg wire per coil; DCR = 25k ohms
4. 15,000 turns of 46 awg wire per coil, DCR = 48k ohms

Which one do we expect to generate higher voltage output, and why?

The point you are missing is what is the pickup going to sound like? After a certain point you reach diminishing returns. The pickup will NOT get louder, just muddier and with stronger mids and low end.

As an example; a Gibson EB-0 "mudbucker" has about 23,000 turns of 42 on each coil. It reads about 30k. Is it "louder" than a P bass pickup with 10,000 turns (each) that reads about 11k? Not really. But it sounds way different. It also doesn't cut through the mix as well.

I recently made a Strat SC sized dual rail humbucker for the guitarist I play with in a band. He has Duncan Hotrails in one guitar, but wanted something "Stratier." I didn't wind it as hot as the Duncan, but I made it much brighter. Because of that it's louder, and even pushed his amp into over drive faster. He had to change his amp presets for that guitar.

Try doing some test winds and see what you like. Don't pay attention to DC resistance number unless you are just trying to copy another pickup. And don't forget the magnets; a ceramic 8 will give you more output and high end than an alnico 5 in a over wound pickup. But you should be winding for tone, not output.

[bbsailor]

Chad and David

Here is another point to consider. The 500K ohm volume pot loading along with the 1M ohm input resistance of the typical amplifier creates a load of 400K ohms in parallel with 300pf capacitance of a typical good 10 ft. guitar cable. This load tends to help create the point of "diminishing returns" that David mentioned. If you want to hear the real output comparison of various pickups build the Tillman active buffer with about 3M input impedance located in the guitar cable plug to isolate the pickup from the some of the input loading and cable capacitance loading. It would be better to place the 3M ohm buffer right after the pickup selector switch so the 500K pot value is not loading down the pickup.

Pickups, in addition to being transducers, are also passive filters that create a self resonance based on coil inductance, coil capacitance and the interaction with the resistive circuit loading and coax capacitance resonance shifting (lower). Most fundamental frequencies on a guitar are near or below 1KHz. The resonance frequency range of pickups typically, 2KHz to 4KHz affects our perception of the harmonics and the balance of these harmonics to the fundamental frequency levels also known as masking.

The original Fender pickups with 6000 to 7000 turns on a single coil were a practical design given the input sensitivity of the high impedance guitar amps of that time. The rest is what we have become acoustomed to hearing as good or balanced. In the end, the ear is the final judge. However, knowing how all these things interact allows us to push the common turns limits and compensate in a variety of ways.

Joseph Rogowski

[big_teee]

Aprreciate all the Pro help.
However lets please Keep it Simple Here.
Just wind several and try them.
Wind one with 42, 43, & 44.
Test them and see what you like.
You have to wind and cut off lots of wire to come up with those special recipes!
I agree, that you get to the point of diminishing returns, and they get dark sounding with too many turns.
T

[chad h]

A Duncan JB is 6,800 turns of 44 AWG wire. A DiMarzio SDHB has 6,500 turns of 44 AWG, and uses a ceramic magnet. They are both high output pickups, but the SDHB is brighter sounding. 8,000 turns of wire will give you a dark sounding pickup. I make some bass pickups like that (8k turns of 42 on each coil) for people that want lots of low end and not much high end.

The point you are missing is what is the pickup going to sound like? After a certain point you reach diminishing returns. The pickup will NOT get louder, just muddier and with stronger mids and low end.

David, you've obviously wound more pickups than I have, and I'm certain that everything you're saying is consistent with your own experiences. But the thing you're missing is that the ONLY thing I care about is what the pickup sounds like. And given my recent experience winding a 25k ohm humbucker with around 10k turns of 44awg on each coil, I'm just not hearing the things you tell me will happen.

Honestly, the whole exercise was simply an experiment to see how I could get 25k ohm on a humbucker, because (like it or not) I know that some people WANT pickups with ridiculously high DCR. I totally expected it to sound awful. I even came up with a name for it - the Super High Impedance Transducer - as I thought the acronym would accurately describe the sound. But I was shocked at how good the thing sounded. Now, you and I might have different interpretations of what "muddy" means, but that would be about the last adjective I'd use to describe the sound. I don't notice excessive low frequencies, but it's certainly full in the mids. And it's as clear and focused as any pickup I've ever heard. There is absolutely no question that this thing will "cut through the mix." If anybody asks me to wind a 25k ohm humbucker, I will not hesitate to put 10,000 turns of 44 awg wire on each coil. And I won't be worried about having embarrassed myself.

As an example; a Gibson EB-0 "mudbucker" has about 23,000 turns of 42 on each coil. It reads about 30k. Is it "louder" than a P bass pickup with 10,000 turns (each) that reads about 11k? Not really. But it sounds way different. It also doesn't cut through the mix as well.

I recently made a Strat SC sized dual rail humbucker for the guitarist I play with in a band. He has Duncan Hotrails in one guitar, but wanted something "Stratier." I didn't wind it as hot as the Duncan, but I made it much brighter. Because of that it's louder, and even pushed his amp into over drive faster. He had to change his amp presets for that guitar.

I understand that increasing a pickup's inductance will attenuate high frequency information. As soon as electrical current starts flowing through the coil, it creates a second magnetic field which induces a current opposite to the first. The strength of that self-induced current is proportional to frequency, so consequently attenuates high frequencies to a greater extent than low frequencies.

The important observation is that attenuation of high frequencies is a result of high inductance. So once again, putting more turns of a given gauge wire will certainly increase inductance. It will attenuate all frequencies, but will disproportionately attenuate the high frequencies. This is why the "mudbucker" (wound with 42 awg wire) will not sound significantly louder than the P-bass (wound with 42 awg wire) and sounds so muddy.

But a turn of a higher gauge wire produces lower inductance than a turn of higher gauge wire. If I were to produce two coils, one with 42 awg and one with 44 awg, and they both had the same inductance (and consequently attenuate the signal in the same way, due to self-inductance), I guarantee the 44 awg coil would have more turns on it. It means that moving to a skinnier wire gives you freedom to put more turns on a coil without leading to your muddy outcome.

Try doing some test winds and see what you like. Don't pay attention to DC resistance number unless you are just trying to copy another pickup. And don't forget the magnets; a ceramic 8 will give you more output and high end than an alnico 5 in a over wound pickup. But you should be winding for tone, not output.

I totally agree that the sort of pickups I make should (and will) be motivated by tone, and that the magic formulas will only be determined by experimentation. But rather than ignore numbers like DC resistance, I think it's more useful to learn what that DCR actually means. By itself, it obviously doesn't communicate very much about the tone of the pickup. But paired with information about the gauge of the wire or the number of turns or the inductance of the coil, I think it probably tells us quite a lot. For example, almost everybody would guess that a 30k ohms worth of 42 awg would sound muddy. And apparently this is true. It also leads many to believe that 25k ohms worth of 44awg would sound muddy. I disagree with that. So, what this experiment does for me is to help me flesh out the sorts of tradeoff I make when changing parameters of my pickups.

[big_teee]

Sounds like you already had the answers to your own questions.
We try not to argue here in this category, we leave the heated debates to the regular pickup forum.
One thing that you said that may or may not be correct,
The Gibson EB-0 Sidewinder (mudbucker), may not be 42 gauge wire.
I worked on one recently, I didn't rewind it, but had it partly disassembled, I was not able to measure the wire diameter.
The coils are about the size of strat coils, and the pickup measured 30k, 15k for each bobbin.
The wire IMO would have to be 43 or smaller to fit on that sized bobbin.
I presume it may be 43, David, Jonson, or J. Lollar, can better answer this because they have rewound them.
Also the main reason for the Mudbucker being muddy is pickup body rout location, all the way forward near the neck.
I recently made one similar in a soapbar but in a lower body rout location and it was not muddy.
So it sounds like you have it figured out and know what you want to wind, so go for it.
There doesn't have to be right or wrong way, or right or wrong parameters for pickups.
Do and use what works for you, that is what most of us do.
T

[copperheadroads]

I suspect that if I used 46 awg wire, I could get 15,000 turns per coil, and that would give me much higher output than using only 6,000 turns. In fact, 6,000 turns of 46 awg wire would give me a teeny-weeny coil, and would probably give a really low output. With 15,000 turns per coil with 46 awg wire, I bet I'd get DCR about 48k ohms - which is precisely what Seymour Duncan's Slug humbucker offers. I'm guessing this is about as hot as a humbucker can get with 46 awg wire.

I wonder if one could actually handwind successfully with 46 gauge wire without stretching it or breaking it .