The past couple of days have been all about winding this pickup. I also had a little pickup-making revelation which I will share after the build update.
We left off with the molds that Mr. Bruce made and the magnetic structure that I built up out of parts. I took the parts to my pickup shop and wound these two coils. These rather fat-looking pieces are wound with 10,000 turns if #44 AWG wire.
Here's the assembled pickup before it goes into the epoxy. I shielded everything with copper tape.
And here it is in the mold. I cast the assembly in black epoxy.
And here's the pickup in the test bass.
So here's the revelation:
I've been struggling with this 2-3 pickup configuration for a while now. Today, I finally found success. In past iterations, the combination of the two pickups together functioned, but getting a that nice marbly phase-cancelled tone eluded me. Most of the time, they just sounded fairly nondescript.
My first run, I made a set of ceramic-powered blade mini-humbuckers. They sounded OK, but the pickups just didn't have enough output. Next, I tried a set of ceramic single coils, using the two of the same miniature ceramic magnets that I used in the HB. The single coils were strong enough, but they had a real saturated sound that I didn't like. From there, I moved on to a set of neodymium mini-humbuckers, using the same parts I made for the ceramic HB's. The neo's came with their own challenges - I had to bring the wind count way down to get a usable pickup. I finally settled on a design, but the problem with the neo's was two-fold. For one, they just seemed to put out a HUGE amount of information, and combining the two pickups became a even bigger mess. Secondly, the the magnetic field generated from 6 neodymium magnets really had an effect on the string pull. I think a more appropriate use of the neo would be a single pickup configuration.
Anyway, I was almost ready to give up on getting a sound I liked out of the two pickups combined. I assumed that perhaps the pickups were too close together to get a good phase-cancelled vibe going on. I decided to give it one more try, and instead of making 3 broad-ranged pickups, I designed a pickup with a more focused and more narrow spectrum of sound. After all, I'm planning to have three pickups across the entire playing area.
I made one "final" pickup with the new parts, and used the old test pickup as a bridge pickup. I wired each pair of coils in series and wired those in parallel. Pretty straightforward. However, I really didn't like how it sounded. They sounded harsh, and had a lot of upper mids going on. Needless to say, I was almost dismayed. Then, the lightbulb went off, and I wired the
two pairs in parallel, and wired those in series. And for some reason, that worked!
Anyway, I'm really digging how these pickups are shaping up. The middle pickup solo'd sounds tight with a nice immediate attack and and just enough bass to fill out the low end. The middle and bridge combined make that phase-cancelled sound that no one can get enough of. The added bonus is that I don't think I need to add any more wire to the bridge pickup. That's good, because I don't think I have any more room to add any more wire!
