Pickup handwound or machine wound?

[Pantofolaio79]

Hi everyone, I'm interested in buying a fender jazz custom shop 75..I have always noticed that custom shops generally have handwound pickups, this one I would like to buy mounts a wound machine 75 pickup..that real differences there are by handwound? I think even if the fender uses machine wounds they are still good but just personal preference differences .. what do you think? thank you so much

 

[dwizum]

Handwound and machine wound are really bad terms to describe what people think they mean. Typically a "handwound" pickup is still wound by a machine, in the sense that the bobbin is being spun by a motor, but a human is guiding the wire back and forth manually instead of letting a machine do it for them. Hence the term handwound.

Handwound pickups are sometimes called scatterwound, which is probably a more accurate term. The assumption is that a human will be less consistent at guiding the wire than a machine, and the wire will zigzag back and forth more aggressively or more randomly on a handwound pickup versus a machine wound one. That's a bit of a leap, since there are a lot of humans that have been winding pickups for a long time who can easily create a very evenly wound pickup. And, it's trivial to program a machine to "scatterwind" a pickup exactly like a human might do. So although the handwound vs machine wound terms are convenient, they're not really accurate.

So that leaves us with a different question. Is there a difference between a scatterwound pickup (aka handwound) versus one where the windings are laid down nice and evenly and tight (aka machine wound)? Yes! There definitely is. There are clear physical differences, at least. A pickup coil with a lot of scatter and randomness will be less dense. The wire criss-crossing itself will result in less wire packed into a given physical space. If the pickups are being wound to a certain turn count, the overall size of the coils will be different. if the pickups are being wound to a specific resistance, the turn count will be different. These physical differences do translate into slight differences in the signal that's generated. The coil being less or more dense means the wire is physically in a slightly different portion of the magnetic field, so the signal will be stronger or weaker overall. And the density can cause other (probably less significant) differences since the electrical properties will be slightly difference (in terms of impedance and capacitance within the coil).

Does that translate into a difference in tone? Arguably, yes - although there are enough variables involved that it gets cloudy very quickly in terms of describing the difference, and it would be misleading to try to make sweeping statements. If you're comparing a handwound pickup vs a machine wound one, do you know what all the differences between the two pickups are? Probably not! So, attributing a difference in tone between the two is difficult, at best.

As you noted though, handwound pickups are typically treated as more desirable. In my opinion, this has more to do with the culture and tradition of pickup making than anything else. Most people attribute handwound pickups with the early days of electric basses, and hence it falls under the trope of "well, if this is the way it was done back in the day, it MUST BE THE BEST WAY!!!" There are a lot of people who have a lot of money and emotion invested in Musical Instrument Tradition, and those people will fight tooth and nail to persist the notion that it's somehow impossible for anything bass-related to ever get better than the way things were done in the past. It's okay if you like traditional pickup styles of course, but I think it's a stretch to automatically assume they're better.

So, with respect to your question - yes, there will be differences, but the differences don't inherently make one option better than the other, since your personal preferences will play a role in determining which one you like better - and both pickups will be "good" otherwise.

 

[iiipopes]

OK. Let's clarify. All pickups are wound with a machine with a small motor rotating a bobbin at a set rpm. The end of the wire is hand threaded onto the bobbin, then the machine is turned on. Newer machines have an integral counter attached to the shaft to count the number of winds. The difference between "hand-wound" and "machine wound" usually means whether: 1) machine wound, the wire is fed from the spool onto the bobbin by a second machine that looks kind of like an oversized bait casting reel with a clutch to control wire tension and a reciprocating mechanism to wind the coil evenly across its depth, or 2) the wire coming off the spool is fed through the operator's hands who with extensive experience can feel the tension and guide the wire onto the bobbin.

The pros/cons of each:

Machine. Pros: consistency of both tension and number of turns on the coil. For larger manufacturers especially, this helps each pickup sound the same as the next so the customer knows what to expect. Less breakage from hands inadvertently pinching the wire or getting too much or too little tension on the coil. Cons: can be "too even," as generally the turns are closer together, increasing intra-coil capacitance which truncates the highs to ground.

Hand. Pros: mojo. Leads to the search for the "holy grail" of tone, as in the early days both Fender and Gibson had a person standing there with the machines. Think Abigail Yberra, "I wound them as Mr. Fender taught me how to wind them," and Seth Lover, "We wound the bobbins until they were full." The inconsistency of windings means less space between individual windings, which means less intra-coil capacitance, so not as much truncation of the top end, and more variance of tone from one pickup to the next, from both the capacitance and number of turns per bobbin.

Some companies, like Rickenbacker, advertise "scatter wound" to their reissue pickups. This is nothing more than a secondary reciprocating cam mechanism built into the winder to give some variance to the overall winding. Moreover, the difference in the top end is minimal, and I would challenge anybody to tell me that two pickups using identical bobbins, magnets, number of turns of wire, and the same instrument, to tell me which was "machine wound" and which was "hand wound."

 

[Zooberwerx]

No experience but I do hand-wind the trimmer spool on my WeedWhacker. Same thing?

Riis

 

[Pantofolaio79]

Handwound and machine wound are really bad terms to describe what people think they mean. Typically a "handwound" pickup is still wound by a machine, in the sense that the bobbin is being spun by a motor, but a human is guiding the wire back and forth manually instead of letting a machine do it for them. Hence the term handwound.

Handwound pickups are sometimes called scatterwound, which is probably a more accurate term. The assumption is that a human will be less consistent at guiding the wire than a machine, and the wire will zigzag back and forth more aggressively or more randomly on a handwound pickup versus a machine wound one. That's a bit of a leap, since there are a lot of humans that have been winding pickups for a long time who can easily create a very evenly wound pickup. And, it's trivial to program a machine to "scatterwind" a pickup exactly like a human might do. So although the handwound vs machine wound terms are convenient, they're not really accurate.

So that leaves us with a different question. Is there a difference between a scatterwound pickup (aka handwound) versus one where the windings are laid down nice and evenly and tight (aka machine wound)? Yes! There definitely is. There are clear physical differences, at least. A pickup coil with a lot of scatter and randomness will be less dense. The wire criss-crossing itself will result in less wire packed into a given physical space. If the pickups are being wound to a certain turn count, the overall size of the coils will be different. if the pickups are being wound to a specific resistance, the turn count will be different. These physical differences do translate into slight differences in the signal that's generated. The coil being less or more dense means the wire is physically in a slightly different portion of the magnetic field, so the signal will be stronger or weaker overall. And the density can cause other (probably less significant) differences since the electrical properties will be slightly difference (in terms of impedance and capacitance within the coil).

Does that translate into a difference in tone? Arguably, yes - although there are enough variables involved that it gets cloudy very quickly in terms of describing the difference, and it would be misleading to try to make sweeping statements. If you're comparing a handwound pickup vs a machine wound one, do you know what all the differences between the two pickups are? Probably not! So, attributing a difference in tone between the two is difficult, at best.

As you noted though, handwound pickups are typically treated as more desirable. In my opinion, this has more to do with the culture and tradition of pickup making than anything else. Most people attribute handwound pickups with the early days of electric basses, and hence it falls under the trope of "well, if this is the way it was done back in the day, it MUST BE THE BEST WAY!!!" There are a lot of people who have a lot of money and emotion invested in Musical Instrument Tradition, and those people will fight tooth and nail to persist the notion that it's somehow impossible for anything bass-related to ever get better than the way things were done in the past. It's okay if you like traditional pickup styles of course, but I think it's a stretch to automatically assume they're better.

So, with respect to your question - yes, there will be differences, but the differences don't inherently make one option better than the other, since your personal preferences will play a role in determining which one you like better - and both pickups will be "good" otherwise.

Thank you so much your answer is complete and very clear .. you made all my curiosities in a magnificent way!

 

[dwizum]

No experience but I do hand-wind the trimmer spool on my WeedWhacker. Same thing?

Riis

Pretty much yes, just times a thousand or so, and with wire so thin that it breaks if you frown at it.

 

[Pantofolaio79]

OK. Let's clarify. All pickups are wound with a machine with a small motor rotating a bobbin at a set rpm. The end of the wire is hand threaded onto the bobbin, then the machine is turned on. Newer machines have an integral counter attached to the shaft to count the number of winds. The difference between "hand-wound" and "machine wound" usually means whether: 1) machine wound, the wire is fed from the spool onto the bobbin by a second machine that looks kind of like an oversized bait casting reel with a clutch to control wire tension and a reciprocating mechanism to wind the coil evenly across its depth, or 2) the wire coming off the spool is fed through the operator's hands who with extensive experience can feel the tension and guide the wire onto the bobbin.

The pros/cons of each:

Machine. Pros: consistency of both tension and number of turns on the coil. For larger manufacturers especially, this helps each pickup sound the same as the next so the customer knows what to expect. Less breakage from hands inadvertently pinching the wire or getting too much or too little tension on the coil. Cons: can be "too even," as generally the turns are closer together, increasing intra-coil capacitance which truncates the highs to ground.

Hand. Pros: mojo. Leads to the search for the "holy grail" of tone, as in the early days both Fender and Gibson had a person standing there with the machines. Think Abigail Yberra, "I wound them as Mr. Fender taught me how to wind them," and Seth Lover, "We wound the bobbins until they were full." The inconsistency of windings means less space between individual windings, which means less intra-coil capacitance, so not as much truncation of the top end, and more variance of tone from one pickup to the next, from both the capacitance and number of turns per bobbin.

Some companies, like Rickenbacker, advertise "scatter wound" to their reissue pickups. This is nothing more than a secondary reciprocating cam mechanism built into the winder to give some variance to the overall winding. Moreover, the difference in the top end is minimal, and I would challenge anybody to tell me that two pickups using identical bobbins, magnets, number of turns of wire, and the same instrument, to tell me which was "machine wound" and which was "hand wound."

What exactly do you mean by consistency in a sound? thank you so much!

 

[Zooberwerx]

Pretty much yes, just times a thousand or so, and with wire so thin that it breaks if you frown at it.

Yes, but does the pick-up bind up to the point you start slamming the headstock on the ground?

Riis

 

[dwizum]

What exactly do you mean by consistency in a sound? thank you so much!

Old pickups in the early days of electric guitars and basses were not manufactured consistently. You could pull ten PAF humbuckers from the neck position of ten Les Pauls and get ten totally different pickups, since there were substantial variations in the materials and the winding techniques. For better or worse, that just enhances the mystique around "hand wound" pickups since it means the "real" vintage pickups are a moving target. So you just end up with competitive manufacturers all trying to claim that their pickup is the real deal copy of the real vintage pickup, and they may all be right or wrong depending on what you're comparing it to. The lack of a true exact standard just fuels the marketing fires.

This series of videos are a little outdated, but a good view over a commercial pickup manufacturing operation, and it shows both fully automated machine wound pickups as well as "hand wound" pickups:

 

[wcriley]

I'm probably the only person (or one of very few people) here who can say they've truly handwound a pickup.
It was for an Epiphone Electar lap steel that had been used for USO tours during WW2. As basic as a magnetic pickup can get...just wire wrapped around a bar magnet. No bobbin, polepieces, etc.
The original wire had become corroded and was crumbling.
I hand wrapped wire from a modern PU coil around the magnet until it reached the approximate bulk of the original. The modern wire was much thinner than the original, so probably more wraps...I didn't/couldn't count them.
Because I'd never heard the original PU, I have no way of knowing how my rebuild compared, but the owner of the instrument was happy.

 

[micguy]

I'm probably the only person (or one of very few people) here who can say they've truly handwound a pickup.

There are at least two of us.

I don't think anyone does any true handwound pickups for sale - there's always a machine spinning the bobbin. OK, except the one I made in college, but that took HOURS to wind - the bobbin was anchored to my turntable, and I turned it by hand and counted EVERY STINKIN' turn.

Do you really want a hand wound (hand guided wire) pickup? If what you're looking for is low interwinding capacitance (which is the sole rational reason you'd probably want a handwound pickup), a machine programmed with a scatter winding program can do that better than a human, and do it repeatedly - you can get a set for your bass that are wound the same. A human can't do that. The same machine with a different program can do a wind with the turns all neatly lined up (and give you higher interwinding capacitance), and.... do it repeatedly.

If someone is selling "hand wound" pickups, what it really tells you is not that they're better, it just tells you they haven't invested the money necessary to make consistent pickups.

 

[iiipopes]

What exactly do you mean by consistency in a sound? thank you so much!

One item that determines the frequency response and resonant peak of a coil, which is the tone of the pickup, is the impedance of the coil. The impedance of the coil is determined in part by how much wire is on the coil. All else being equal, if two coils have the same amount of wire wound the same way, they will have the same frequency response and resonant peak. In other words, they will have the same tone. If the wire is different, whether in amount, diameter, winding or otherwise, the frequency response and resonant peak of the coil will be different, and the tone will be different. Look at a website like Kinman or D'Addario that wind essentially the same pickup but with different amounts of wire and read the difference in the descriptions of tone of each pickup.

 

[iiipopes]

No experience but I do hand-wind the trimmer spool on my WeedWhacker. Same thing?

Riis

Actually, similar. If you are careful in feeding the spool, you can get a nice layer of wacker cord that allows you to get more on each winding of the spool, and you can use it longer between rewinds. If you use thicker cord, you might also get more use out of a spool full, depending on what you are wacking. If you use thinner cord, you might also get as much use, but you're using more cord because it is not as durable. OTOH, if you randomly wind the spool, you might get a twisted mess that results in the spool not holding as much cord, and it won't last as long. How does this translate to the tone of an electronic musical instrument coil? I don't know, but it does illustrate the difference in coil windings in a more visible way.

 

[Killing Floor]

Jaco didn’t need his pickups wound

 

[Pantofolaio79]

One item that determines the frequency response and resonant peak of a coil, which is the tone of the pickup, is the impedance of the coil. The impedance of the coil is determined in part by how much wire is on the coil. All else being equal, if two coils have the same amount of wire wound the same way, they will have the same frequency response and resonant peak. In other words, they will have the same tone. If the wire is different, whether in amount, diameter, winding or otherwise, the frequency response and resonant peak of the coil will be different, and the tone will be different. Look at a website like Kinman or D'Addario that wind essentially the same pickup but with different amounts of wire and read the difference in the descriptions of tone of each pickup.

In my specific case I refer to the pickup of the fender custom shop .. they make the difference in the different models between handwounds and machine wounds ..

 

[Bruiser Stone]

Speaking for myself, Lindy Fralin.
I don’t care how they do it, it works.

 

[rickster4003]

No experience but I do hand-wind the trimmer spool on my WeedWhacker. Same thing?

Riis

Do you scatter wind?!

 

[NoiseNinja]

If I was to wind a pickup by hand be sure it would turn out absolutely crap, though that would by far most likely be true for me making a machine wound pickup too.

But to be serious for a moment my best guess is that if you take 1000 machine wound pickups and 1000 hand wound ones, then there would be a greater amount of inconsistency from unit to unit between the hand wound ones, even if they were wound by very skilled and experienced pickup makers.

Normally with electronics that would be a bad thing, but guess that will be largely dependent on who wind the pickups and what kind of quality control is applied afterwards.

I would think though that if you go through the troubles of winding a pickup by hand then you would likely also be more picky about the quality control it goes through afterwards.

This is all more or less pure speculation though, but I think it is pretty safe to say that there would be no clear obvious advantages of hand wound pickups over machine wound ones.

Jaco didn’t need his pickups wound

On a more serious note:

Jaco also pulled out the frets of his bass with a butter knife and was mentally ill (which kind of makes him sound like me, even if I can only dream about being even a fraction as good at playing bass as him, and only I would no doubt have ended up totally ruining that bass), hardly an example to follow blindly, no matter how great he was at playing bass.

Also worth speculating on which heights he hypothetically could possibly have taken 6 string fretless bass playing to.

 

[Zooberwerx]

Do you scatter wind?!

Actually, no. Funny as it sounds, there's an alignment process that has to be followed when re-stringing a double coil spool. You cut two equal lengths of trimmer cord and hold one each between the fore / middle and middle / ring fingers to separate as you wind the spool. If they overlap, they have the tendency to bind and break.

What's really sad is the fact I know this and speak with some degree of self-proclaimed authority. Somebody please drive-by and ****ing shoot me. Feel free to PM for address and directions.

Riis

 

[Chrisk-K]

Electrons don’t care whether wires are hand wound or machine wound.