Man vs. Machine Distributed Capacitance

[David Schwab]

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

Right, so the point is you can't use that analogy because the difference has nothing to do with handy work, it has to do with the electrical construction.

If someone came up with a CNC robot arm that could do point-to-point wiring, and soldering at the same time, than that would be analogous to an automated pickup winder. And I bet the hand wired amp, and the robot wired amp would sound identical as long as the construction were identical.

And believe it or not my DR's last way longer and sound better for longer than D'addario's do

That's not been my experience with DR's. All the D'Addario bass strings are wound at slow speed now, like the Slowounds were, and that's about the only advantage that hand winding strings would have. DR have to throw away half of the strings they wind.

I easily get four months out of D'Addario XL's, and I think they sound better than DR's. They went dead way too fast for me. Both are WAY better than GHS though... they are dead out of the bag! I've used just about every bass string made. The other string I like is Ken Smith's strings.

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 ,

Ok, but "more toneful" is highly subjective. It's a matter of personal taste. How can you even define "more toneful"?

Before we can really say that it has to be validated. After someone does a double blind test, than we can really make that statement. Right now all we can say is we don't like the tone of some machine wound pickups. But some sound great. I've never heard a Duncan that I didn't like, except the Quarter Pounder bass pickups, but that's just the tone I don't care for.. a lot of people love them. I have had the opportunity to have installed pickups hand wound by Seymour himself (in Billy Gibbons AS 57 Tailfin... hey I got to get to drop names sometimes! ) . I don't think it sounded all that different from his production pickups.

There's always this debate that op amps don't sound as good as transistors. You hear this all the time. So a bass maker did a double blind test, where he had a bass with two buffer preamps of similar design, except one was an op amp and one was a FET. He had a switch on the bass labeled A/B, and no one, including him, knew which was which. He had people play the bass, and switch the switch, and decide if one sounded different from the other, and if they preferred one over the other.

He finished the article with this:

Results
The experiment was unblinded and the questionnaires tabulated with the following results. Two (2) subjects found the tone of the discrete FET preamp preferable. Two (2) subjects found the tone of the opamp preamp preferable. Five (5) subjects found the sound identical in both preamps. Five (5) subjects found the two preamps sounded different but that neither one was superior in tone. As the data are so obviously distributed normally about the mean no additional statistical evaluations were performed. Subjects that indicated a preference also indicated that perceived differences were very subtle.
Conclusions
The majority of subjects (8) found no preference between the two circuits and preference was evenly divided among the remainder. As a result it is reasonable to conclude that it is unlikely that either the discrete component circuit or the opamp circuit tested would result in any sonic advantage in a bass guitar preamp intended to appeal to a large user base.

[Originally published in: Journal of Musical Instrument Technology #23, 2003]

Now I will say anything done in small quantities and with a lot of care will usually have higher quality. But we are still talking about skill and talent too. I think we can all agree that there's probably some bad sounding hand wound pickups on the market, right? So what makes them bad, while other's are good? And why are some machine wound pickups great, while some suck?

I say it's the design of the pickup (which includes the winding pattern).

[David Schwab]

Gibson was a factory and it would make no sense for them to hand wind if they had any experience with machine winders.

Right... we have to remember that it's a factory, not a hand builder. I once read that it took Gibson 24 hours to make a Les Paul, start to finish! If I remember correctly, they also said their profit for one was under $100. So you need to mass produce things at that profit point. This was obviously before they used CNC carving machines. There was a factory tour in Guitar Player (in the 70's) once, and it showed the various machines they used, some of which had been used since the introduction of the guitar. For example, the shape at the top of the headstock was done with a large diameter shaper bit, and would do three necks at once.

All one needs to do is see sales figures for guitars with humbuckers at the time, and also for when they started selling them as after market parts (patent decal models, since they weren't all that much different) and figure out how long it would take hand winders, and how many winders they needed. Could they afford to have a room full of winders? Would that make economical sense? It's a lot different for a large company like Gibson with many employees than the hand winder working alone.

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.

Exactly. Tone is subjective. Everyone has their own tastes, and everyone's ears are different too!

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.

We know that some PAF's, and likely early patent decal pickups, are all over the place sound wise, so I think it's safe to assume the machines they used were still at the mercy of the operator. I don't doubt that they loaded up a bobbin and started the machine, and maybe some of those machines had to be stopped manually. The only difference here is did they guide the wire by hand? So do inconsistencies in tone mean they were hand wound, or does it just point to poor quality control? Also the early production runs of the pickups might have been made differently.. it's not uncommon for a factory to change how they do things after they start production. Sometimes things don't work as planned, and you try and find a better way to do things. After all the very first humbucker was totally made by hand, and it looked it like too!

And that leads up to another obvious question. If the human factor makes such a difference, why exactly? One thought would be that by hand guiding the wire, and using a random scatter pattern, you are imparting a certain tone lost in a methodically wound coil, where the wraps are all neat and tidy. So if randomness is the key, then why aren't hand wound pickups all different from one winder? You can't repeat randomness. If the winding pattern is important, than two random scatters should sound different in a random way. But do they?

I can wind three pickups to the same specs, and they will sound the same. I have proven this to myself without a shadow of doubt. So in my obviously not consistent hand winding pattern, and probably tension, I can make consistent sounding pickups.

So that seem to lessen the importance of random scatter patterns. Maybe any scatter is better than none.

Now if someone's pickups are inconsistent, that can't be a good thing if you want to sell pickups! In the beginning, when you are learning to wind, you will wind clunkers. Or will you? I wound some awful looking PAF style pickups... lose bulging coils, etc., and they sound just fine. I'd never sell them to anyone, but I put them in one of my guitars, and everyone who heard them thinks they sound great. So what's the story here?

Ah, the mystery deepens!

[madialex]

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.

Hi Possum, as a matter of fact he does do the guiding himself. He has 1 machine he uses for himself which is a neat machine, it uses a doorknob type thing he turns back and forth for the scatter, he does have a cam fixed on it someway but it is still done by his hand. He told me it was a machine he got from PRS, PRS said it wasn't automated enough for him. Really a cool machine. He has another room where he does the tele and humbucker stuff at. He has a couple people trained to wind those. Honestly I didn't look at the other machines to see if they were fully automated or not. The machine he uses is for single coils, he does all them himself. His shop is probably no more than a few hundred square feet in size, he has about 5 people working for him in an upstairs loft type space. The bottom is some coast gaurd reserve thing or something. I visited him about a month or so ago. Cool guy...

[mick]

" right, so the point is you can't use that analogy because the difference has nothing to do with handy work, it has to do with the electrical construction."

Well yes , because the point being made was that man made is better sounding than machine made ,

duncans are pretty much regarded by everybody ( rightly or wrongly )as the industry standard with regards to sounding good ( Hmmm I know )but it's very very easy to sound better , you reckon seymour doesn't know how to set up his machines ? course he does , you reckon his handwound pickups when he first started sounded worse than his machine wounds ? I don't think so

" Ok, but "more toneful" is highly subjective. It's a matter of personal taste. How can you even define "more toneful"?

Well it's not really that subjective , and personal taste is more to do with which " star " plays what usually , but how come when people have exhausted all the other avenues, you know on the tone search , going through a good few pickups a year , they get a set of hand wounds they are finally happy and don't want to change them ? Can't all be differences in hearing , but they are hearing something different no doubt TONE

"Now if someone's pickups are inconsistent, that can't be a good thing if you want to sell pickups! In the beginning, when you are learning to wind, you will wind clunkers. Or will you? I wound some awful looking PAF style pickups... lose bulging coils, etc., and they sound just fine. I'd never sell them to anyone, but I put them in one of my guitars, and everyone who heard them thinks they sound great. So what's the story here?

Ah, the mystery deepens! "

Must be that must be that subjective personal taste thing again I suppose ?

The reason most people buy from small makers is because they are hand wound , and they expect them to be for the price...tell me guys , now that you are going to be more efficient at producing pickups.. you will be dropping your prices ?


You can say what you want to about it , bring on any argument you want , once you go to machine wound it's not about the tone its about churning out more pickups , it's about the moolah...you may as well make tables.....

Mick

[jason lollar]

I think before we all proclaim handwinding an end all be all method that we should get a comercial machine and do some real testing and comparisons and then maybe we can get dogmatic.

[mick]

"I think before we all proclaim handwinding an end all be all method that we should get a comercial machine and do some real testing and comparisons and then maybe we can get dogmatic."

I prefer hand wounds , some have their way and I have mine and I still say a good hand wound will sound better than a good machine wound... I wouldn't personally waste my time machine winding just to get rid of the dogmatics .... thanks for chiming in though...good to have your opinion as always.

Mick

[Possum]

end all be all :-)

I betcha if I wound two P90s one with a constant traverse rate and one hand wound you would pick the machine wind. Also, I bet I could hand wind a strat pickup and wind the same number of turns on my machine and you couldnt tell them apart, I'm not kidding.....its all in how its done, what you DO with the machine...

[mick]

Send them over Dave...I'll give it a try... but all that tells me is your machine wounds are better sounding than your hand wounds were...

Mick

### sorry Dave that was a cheap shot at your hand wounds....###

[Sweetfinger]

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

FWIW I think DR makes a fine string, but they are not consistent from set to set, you have to adjust the intonation a bit after each restring, whereas the D'Addarios are very consistent set to set. There is one 'budget' brand of string that I had to throw out every 'A' string on for about 20 packs. I don't carry those anymore. There literally wasn't enough travel on a Tuneomatic or in some cases, a Strat to intonate the one funky string!

[David Schwab]

I think before we all proclaim handwinding an end all be all method that we should get a comercial machine and do some real testing and comparisons and then maybe we can get dogmatic.

Thanks Jason, that was my point. I know hand wound pickups can sound great. I also know machine wound pickups can too. I'd love to hear a comparison by someone.

I'd love to get a commercial machine and test things out...

Hey Carey Nordstrand, are you lurking about? You machine wind some fine sounding pickups... I'd like to hear your view?

[JGundry]

I think there are advantages to making your own winder rather than buying a commercial one. With a commercial winder you are usually stuck with whatever wire guide system that comes with the machine. If you make your own you con decide for yourself things like how far the guide will be from the bobbin etc...

[David Schwab]

FWIW I think DR makes a fine string, but they are not consistent from set to set, you have to adjust the intonation a bit after each restring, whereas the D'Addarios are very consistent set to set.

That was my point. I used DR strings for a while, and one set was good, and the next was so-so. They are good strings, but the inconsistency wasn't worth the added price.

D'Addarios are the same every time, and I can pick up the twin pack for slightly more than one set!

[Spence]

DR's are good but Newtone Strings are the ultimate;

http://www.newtonestrings.com/electric_page.htm

I had some small part in the nickelmasters product line.

[soundmasterg]

I prefer hand wounds , some have their way and I have mine and I still say a good hand wound will sound better than a good machine wound... I wouldn't personally waste my time machine winding just to get rid of the dogmatics .... thanks for chiming in though...good to have your opinion as always.

Mick

You know Mick, I used to think hand-winding was the answer too. I met Wolfe when he was first starting out and had him hand wind and hand tension some pickups for me including the second one he ever did. They sounded great of course and were done on his first sewing machine winder. Then a couple years later, I had him wind some more pickups for me using hand scatter and hand tension. These were done on his drill press winder, which was his second one. I was nervous that they wouldn't sound as good because the winding setup was different, but they sounded great too. Then I had him duplicate the second pickup he ever did (a Tele bridge pickup), but this was done on his current machine winder, and I had him do two different clones of that Tele pickup. For one pickup he did totally on the machine, using a machine scatter, and using a tension device that he since has sold. For the other he hand tensioned and hand scattered and wound it. Both pickups sound great.

I think one of the keys is that the coil is scatter-wound vs a machine layer wind, and the other key is who is winding the pickup and how they do it. The machine allows repeatability, and if you are repeating a good pattern that sounds good, it is much more consistant than trying to repeat it all by hand.

Machine wind or hand wind is fine by me, as long as it is a scatter wind, and the operator knows what they are doing.....

Greg

[SkinnyWire]

IMO, if you can't get consistent, repeatable tone winding by hand then you need to more practice. It's not hard to do. If I couldn't do that, then I couldn't in good conscience advise potential customers or sell to them. The only real challenge is the tedious nature of hand guiding which can be relieved by these machines. The rest of the bluster about better/worse, best PAF clone has to come from a machine or not smacks of attempts to stake a claim over the dead bodies of others who don't "do it like I do" which has absolutely nothing to do with the end goal of good tone. Good work will stand on its own merit. The rest is BS.