1) Scatter wound coils sound better than machine wound.
2) American made pickups have American made magnets.
3) DC Resistance is a good indicator of sonic character.
4) Hum is part of the sound.
5) Aged magnets are responsible for aged sound.
6) Overwound HOT pickups are necessary for Heavy Metal
7) Extreme Compound Radius fretboards (10” ~ 16”) are necessary
8) Everything about a pickup contributes to the sound.
9) The neck pickup is carefully positioned under harmonic nodes.
10) Jimi Hendrix’s sound is the result of reverse magnet stagger.
11) Heavy bodies promote sustain.
12) Locking tuners improve tuning stability.
13) Strings set with extremely low action don't rattle or buzz
14) A guitar’s neck should always have a significant bow (more than .005”).
15) Brass Nuts and bridge saddles improve tone
16) Priceless vintage guitars have great sound.
17) Famous companies always get things right.
18) Fender’s Tele neck pickup has a very dark unresponsive sound
19) Wax potting lightly so allowing only good microphonics.
20) Compact pickup sound good.
1) Scatter wound coils sound better than machine wound.
Make no mistake, no guitar pickup is scatter wound because the bobbin is not round (as it must be) and the plastic coated winding wire used in pickups is not suitable. True Scatter winding is a highly organized form of coil winding with cotton covered wire originally designed for Radio Frequency coils used in vintage Vacuum Tube Radio’s. See picture below. It was developed in the early 1900’s to minimize capacitance in the Pico farad region which adversely affect Radio frequencies in the 50+ KHz band. The impact on audio frequencies, even at 20KHz, is non existent or is so tiny as to be inaudible. Anyone who believes so called scatter wound pickups are superior to expertly machine wound is deluded.
The so called scatter winding in guitar pickups is really nothing more than cheap and nasty random, haphazard traversing known in Electrical Engineering circles as Jumble winding. It is almost impossible to have meaningful control of the winding pattern because there are 140 turns per layer and approx 60 layers which take approx 10 minutes to wind …. no human can precisely maintain the feed rate of the traverse, the precise reversing points and the number of layers during winding. More importantly the winding tension is not known or even measured and is not precisely controlled since the wire is guided and tensioned with the operators fingers. This kind of traverse has been given the name Scatter Winding solely for marketing purposes, often because the deluded maker will not afford let alone appreciate a predictable and controllable precision computer controlled machine. Busted well and truly and we have proved it by comparing so called scatter wound and machine wound pickups. There ain’t any difference provided the highly important winding tension is the same!!! Also read what Wikipedia has to say about Scatter winding.
5) Aged magnets are responsible for aged sound. There are some pickup makers who claim they degauss magnets in order to produce aged sound. It’s simply not true because it’s the Formvar coating on the wire of old Strat pickups that produce aged sound, nothing whatsoever to do with less strong magnets. Read the Blog article Aged Sound Explained Really Busted!!!
Pickups with staggered magnets will have unbalanced string levels, the middle strings (D & G) will be annoyingly louder than the outside E strings when used with excessively flat fretboards. Kinman offers a Flat Magnet Stagger designed especially for excessive Compound Radius 10 ~ 16 inches. USA Custom Guitars offer a compound radius 9 ~ 12 inches which works quite well and avoids the problems. Busted!!!
He reasoned that a stiffer neck or adding mass to the headstock would achieve the same result. To prove the point he clamped a small steel Toolmakers vice to the headstock and this had the same result. Of course the weight of the vice made the instrument neck heavy and unbalanced with the consequence the neck had to be held up by the player or else it pointed to the floor.
Searching for a practical solution he added 2 carbon fiber stiffening rods to a Fender Bass neck and this too caused a dramatic improvement. Steinberger basses and guitars had a headless design as well as Carbon Fiber necks which went way beyond what was necessary to solve the problem. These radical instruments became well known for their uniform sustain over the entire fretboard due to the in-flexibility of Carbon Fiber Reinforced Plastic. Thick brass plates added to the back of the headstock appeared on the market in the 1980’s, these things worked in the same way as Chris’s Toolmakers vice with the same unbalancing problem.
Sustain is not derived from the body but by inhibiting mechanical resonances in the neck. Heavy bodies contribute nothing to promote sustain. Busted!!!
12) Locking tuners improve tuning stability. Chris Kinman proved that even old world split shaft tuners can keep the strings in tune even with heavy whammy bar use (see >Technical >Perfect Guitar >Keeping it in TUNE). The problem is not with the tuners but with friction between string and the Nut slots and or material. CK fashioned Nuts from low friction Teflon material and found all strings returned precisely pitch except the 3rd G string, and that was not because of Nut friction but rather because the diameter of the core of the G string is too stiff and inflexible to straighten after being bent when pulled through the Nut slot and across the crown of the bridge saddle during string stretching or heavy Vibrato bridge use. Avoiding bending of the strings core is the ONLY reason a locking Nut and Bridge improves tuning stability. Busted!!!
You can try a simple experiment, the results might startle you. With the action set very low play a few notes with the neck pickup on the low E-6th to get the sound fresh in your mind. Then raise the saddle so there is a 2.2mm gap between the underside of the string and the crown of the fret. Adjust the bass side of the neck pickup so suit. Then repeat the same notes to hear the full sound of the string. If there is a huge different it illustrates the sound lost to string crash. Really Busted!!!
17) Famous Brands always get things right.
1. Gibson’s fretless wonder
- exclusive to 1970’s Les Paul and SG Customs small frets that have no significant height make string stretching extremely difficult because finger tips slide over the tops of strings instead of getting a grip on them. Also due to dissipated pressure of finger tips (being lost onto the fretboard) getting all notes of a chords to sound properly is also difficult. One has to wonder at what Gibson were thinking about their fretless wonder models that were premium priced. Players often had their tiny frets replaced with Gibson’s much better jumbo frets which were perfect for sideways stretching and making chords. Unbelievable!!!
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2. Gibson’s inaccurate fret positions
- Google “gibson innaccurate fret positions” and you will be shocked to learn the awful truth. All model Gibson guitars made from early on up until at least the 1990’s had inaccurate fret positions, some being 1.5mm out of whack. To top this off the nut was also positioned approximately 2mm too close to the bridge end than is optimum. Discerning Gibson players spend a lot of time tempering their tuning trying to get their instruments to play in-tune in different keys but it’s a loosing battle. Hopefully Gibson acquired a new fret slotting machine when they moved to Nashville.
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3. Fender’s TwinPivot Strat bridge
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Has the two E saddles 4mm closer together (52.4mm as distinct to 56.4mm of vintage 6 point bridges). While this provided more space between the outside E strings and the edge of the fretboard one of the two E strings misaligns with the magnet of the neck pickup causing a severe loss of volume. Many hundreds of thousands of Fender Strats issued with Twin Pivot (2 point) bridges suffered this horribly annoying problem. This flaw has been ignored by Fender to this day. How could they?
In 2002 Kinman solved the problem with the introduction of Narrow Magnet Spread (49.5mm) neck pickups and Intermediate (51mm) middle pickups. No other pickup maker has attempted to solve it. -
4. Gibson’s P-100 & P-90H pickups
- Intended to silence the glorious P-90. It succeeded in getting rid of the massive amount of hum and it also succeeded in totally destroying the P-90 sound. And now they try again with the P-90H, a Sidewinder, and still don’t succeed. How could they?
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5. Noiseless Sidewinder P-90 pickup
- Sidewinder coils arrangement are the most inferior hum-cancelling design of all. The design has a huge electrical engineering flaw whereby string signal is cancelled almost as much as hum is cancelled. This happens as a result of magnetic coupling between the coils which are wired out-of-phase. String signal cancellation robs the sound of the aliveness and openness and wonderful dynamic range a P-90 has. The huge amount of over-winding and consequent high Resistance needed to derive satisfactory output contributes to the choked, un-responsivness just as much (see point 6 above). Such pickups are look-alikes, not sound-alikes. How could they? Busted BIG TIME.
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6. Stacked pickups
- Suffer from the same problems as Sidewinders but to a slightly less degree, being a variation on a flawed theme. Stacks coils are fully coupled magnetically, there is no magnetic shielding separating the coils as there is with every Kinman pickup. How could they? Busted BIG TIME.
18) Fender’s Tele neck pickup has a very dark unresponsive sound
Until recently Fender Tele neck covers were made of brass, the worst possible material for a pickup cover because it chokes the highs and impacts negatively on dynamic range and touch sensitivity, making the sound dull and unresponsive. Nickel-Silver is the preferred material since it does not have these problems, the sound is much more alive and open. Fender should have known better than to use a Brass cover on a guitar preferred for country twang. CONFIRMED.
19) Wax potting lightly so allowing only good microphonics. Microphonics occur at an unchanging and precise resonant frequency of the coil structure and the chances of that frequency occurring precisely at any harmonious note is virtually non existent. BUSTED.
20) Compact pickups sound good (size does matter so pickups need to be as big as possible). Compact pickups like dimarzios Area series force the coils to be squashed into a small space which impacts on dynamic range and high frequency response in a negative way. In the case of diamrzio compact equates to economy (cheaply made). Other pickups that suffer from small size are mini-humbuckers and Filtertrons. (see Mini Buckers and Filtertrons on another Blog page) BUSTED.