Hand wound pickups, they really matter?

[sven kalmar]

nice posts. Thanks. id be interested in a spacepickup..

[brorbjoern]

Yea ! give us a spacepickup xD that would be awesome ;3

[uOpt]

I went through a lot of trouble with guitar pickups. Some boutique makers have noticeably more sparkle in them, and it wasn't just the lack of potting. However, there also were boutique pickups that sounded totally ordinary to me.

[Davo-London]

Derailed post anyone?

Can we get back to the OP's question? Surely the key arbiter is sound.

I watched a Youtube video with Billy Gibbons (ZZTop) and was surprised to hear that most of his guitars featured custom made pups. Cream T pickups in fact. So he thinks they make a difference. I love Billy Gibbons tone BTW.

Did I just use the G word. Oh dear. I'll be in trouble : )

Davo

[funnyfingers]

I've ordered the SGD ND3 neck and SW4 bridge for my Thunderbird and have posted stock strings and la bella stainless clips. Once I get these installed, I will post clips of the various combinations, blends, tone knob. I listened to the clips on the SGD website and am quite impressed. I could be wrong, but I am not pinning the sound here to the fact that they are hand wound, but rather that the maker knows what they should sound like and has gone through many prototypes with different windings, magnets, steels, etc, to get it to where it is now.

[edwinhurwitz]

Originally Posted by MortallyWounded

Heh heh heh... I used to sell paint. I hated the automatic machines, because they were not as consistent as hand-mixed paints. The automatic mixer used long tubes to deliver the tint, which swelled under pressure and squeezed extra out as the pressure released. At that point, the mixer had no control over how much tint dropped in the paint. The hand mixer, on the other hand, did not use these tubes. Everything was hard material, and the valve was very close to the end of the nozzle, reducing the amount of leftover tint between the operator's control and the paint bucket. And when you're talking 1/48th of a fluid ounce of tint per gallon of base, you want control.

My wife does the equivalent with her nose. She's a professional perfumer and can copy a smell closer than a chemist with a gas chromatograph. However, it took years of practice on top of a lot of talent. It's not a casual ability. All of her products are handmade and they have to be if she wants to incorporate natural oils because they change every year according to the nature of the particular crops. She's had some items in production for years but the recipe is constantly shifting depending on availability and consistency of the raw materials. She's sent stuff off to chem labs for duplication where they have very expensive and complicated analysis equipment and they never come back perfect. Not to offend the mad skillz the pickup makers here (I've got a pair of SGDs on order), but my suspicion is that there is a greater margin of variability in creating consistent sounding pickups. I think it's possible to wind in similar but different patterns and get a very close match.

[SGD Lutherie]

Originally Posted by edwinhurwitz

I think it's possible to wind in similar but different patterns and get a very close match.

I agree. The main things are the number of turns per layer, and the total number of turns, along with the gauge of the wire. But then you also have the geometry of the coil, the type and size of the core, and the type and strength of the magnet, etc.