"High Output" humbuckers

[David Schwab]

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.

More than likely, we each have differing opinions on what we like in pickups. So for an example, let's take a Duncan JB. I think they sound fine dirty, but I really dislike them clean. This is true of most very hot pickups, like a JB, DiMarzio X2N, Duncan Invader, etc. With a lot of gain, they sound and feel really good. Clean, they are muddy and too bottom heavy for me. I require a pickup to go from sparkly clean, to distorted well. Too bright and the distorted tone can sound "blatty" (a word Bill Bartolini coined), but I like that crunchy bright bite.

But, everyone like something. So you might love that pickup, and I might not. Also, 10,000 turns with 44 sounds very different from that many turns of something heavier. 42 gauge would be really bassy. I had a guy that wanted a dark sounding bridge pickup on a P bass. So I made a dual J looking pickup, and wound it like two regular J coils. He loved it. For his Yamaha six string bass, he wanted something even darker. I did 10,000 turns of 44 on each coil. At first he liked it, but then said he needed more top end, and they were sensitive to noise. Now guitarist don't use such hi-fi pickups or amps, but it demonstrated the lack of top end when used with a clean bass amp.

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.

The DC R is the wrong way to look at pickups. 25k on a pickup wound with 42 wound sound very different from one wound with 44 or even 50 or some really thin wire. It tells you nothing. And certainly very little about the output. 25k of 50 gauge wire wouldn't be as many turns as with 42. All things equal, more turns = more output. Up to a point. So a 10k pickup wound with 44 won't have as many turns as one wound with 42. 10k sounds like it will be hotter than an 8k pickup, but not really.

So try to make an efficient pickup. That can be louder at lower winds than other designs. Bill Lawrence avoided eddy currents but eliminating metal parts, with the exception of the blades, on his pickups. He ended up with powerful, but very bright pickups. And there are other shades of tone/power between the two designs. DiMarzio uses eddy currents as a tone shaping device, by having a thin sheet of brass on top of the coils on their Model One bass pickup. They also manipulate inductance with metal slugs on some of their guitar pickups.

So try different ideas, and don't worry about what they did 50 years ago. You might discover something new.

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.

By all means try out different ideas. I do it all the time. Sometimes I get something I like, sometimes I don't. But I always learn something.

[buddha0709]

I do 8000 turns of 44 on a pickup I make. Not too-too much wire to where you lose all the good stuff, but still enough to get pretty mid heavy.
Doing 10000 turns of 44 scares me. I never break 42 or 43 anymore, but I still occasionally break 44 and doing 20,000 turns for a humbucker may scare me off from trying. One day though I wouldn't mind hearing what it sounds like, I have about 4lbs of 44 that will take me years to get through otherwise.

[chad h]

Thanks David for your insights, and your encouragement. You've been very patient with me, and I appreciate it.

I thought my questions about output were motivated by a pretty sensible concern. Since we put multiple pickups in a guitar, we want to make sure they balance appropriately. This is pretty simple if they're all wound with the same gauge wire. It's less obvious how to balance output when the pickups are wound with different gauge wire. I might like the 25k ohm humbucker I wound, but it's of really limited use if it's output is way too high to balance with anything other than its twin. I think it's worthwhile to get a feeling for how decreasing wire diameter while increasing # of turns impacts output level.

[chad h]

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

Yeah - fair enough. I've never actually seen 46 awg wire. I'm certainly not about to volunteer to wind with it.

[chad h]

I do 8000 turns of 44 on a pickup I make. Not too-too much wire to where you lose all the good stuff, but still enough to get pretty mid heavy.

8000ish turns of 44 might be my next experiment.

A guy has asked me to wind a humbucker for him after he was disappointed with his Duncan JB. As has been fortuitously pointed out to me, the JB uses 6800 turns of 44awg. The guy wasn't happy with it as he felt it was really scooped in the midrange, and he wanted something with more midrange heft. Now, I don't know the JB, so I don't know if this scooped midrange description is one that makes a lot of sense. But if he wants more midrange, the 8000 turns of 44awg might be what he's looking for.

[copperheadroads]

8000ish turns of 44 might be my next experiment.

A guy has asked me to wind a humbucker for him after he was disappointed with his Duncan JB. As has been fortuitously pointed out to me, the JB uses 6800 turns of 44awg. The guy wasn't happy with it as he felt it was really scooped in the midrange, and he wanted something with more midrange heft. Now, I don't know the JB, so I don't know if this scooped midrange description is one that makes a lot of sense. But if he wants more midrange, the 8000 turns of 44awg might be what he's looking for.

There are more ways of adding Mids to a pickup without adding turns ...

[David Schwab]

8000ish turns of 44 might be my next experiment.

A guy has asked me to wind a humbucker for him after he was disappointed with his Duncan JB. As has been fortuitously pointed out to me, the JB uses 6800 turns of 44awg. The guy wasn't happy with it as he felt it was really scooped in the midrange, and he wanted something with more midrange heft. Now, I don't know the JB, so I don't know if this scooped midrange description is one that makes a lot of sense. But if he wants more midrange, the 8000 turns of 44awg might be what he's looking for.

I'd say you are going in the wrong direction. If the Duncan sounds that way, it's because there's too much wire for the Alnico magnet being used.

Also, what are you calling midrange? Midrange is usually classified as; 600 Hz - 1.2 kHz. I think what we normally call midrange for guitars is upper midrange; 1.2 kHz - 2.4 kHz. Tht's probably what he's hearing as "scooped" (and it's not scooped).

Winding more wire will push you in the darker range with less upper mids, but it will lower the resonant peak.