Bare Knuckle Pickups Forum
Forum Ringside => Pickups => Topic started by: HTH AMPS on July 05, 2011, 09:20:51 PM
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http://www.premierguitar.com/Video/20080718/244/Seymour_Duncan_Custom_Winding_Pickups_Part_1.aspx
Thought this might be of interest to some of you on this forum - Seymour Duncan sharing some tips/tricks on how he winds pickups.
Interestingly, he states that he feels scatter-winding humbuckers is a bad idea. He's entitled to his opinion, however I think BKP are getting some pretty tasty results from doing this.
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im sure those silver wire mega expensive seymour duncans are scatterwound....
same with the antiquity line.
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Antiquitys are wound on the old Leesona aren't they? Not exactly scatter, but not exactly uniform?
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antiquities are on the leesona as well as any custom shop ones that are requested old spec and/or specific requests to be wound on that one. They're more on the scatterwound side than perfectly uniform
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I think BKP's are a few steps up, compared to a lot of SD's and factorypickups like in my American Series Strat HSS. So, the BKP-team must do something right!
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The SD Custom Shop stuff is very, very good.
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Don't have experience with the SD CS, but I believe you straight away. Heard great things about Amber and Kloppman too, but when I see these prices...
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Yeah, the price gets high quickly!
BKPs have got more exopensive recently, but still represent great value :)
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Yeah, the price gets high quickly!
BKPs have got more exopensive recently, but still represent great value :)
Compared to other boutique-manufacturers I think BKP's are still affordable and they sound great. A VHII/Mother's Milk set is on it's way for my HSS American Series-strat. :)
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It would be interesting to hear some input from Tim on this one. He must be doing something right on the humbuckers, otherwise he wouldn't have such a dedicated following. Hopefully he can explain how he makes the scatter winding work with the humbuckers.
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Tim>Seymour
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It's just Seymour's view on scatter winding, many top winders around the world don't seem to have any trouble with the method! certainly not Tim.
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It's just Seymour's view on scatter winding, many top winders around the world don't seem to have any trouble with the method! certainly not Tim.
Yeah I'm definitely with Tim on this one, I just think it would be interesting if he could explain his approach a bit. I'm sure most people on here are always interested to learn more about their favorite pickups :D
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I don't think you'll get much more out of Tim than he's already said. A Master Chef does not share his recipes. I've seen the vid before and I think SD is just plain wrong - I would defy him to say that BKs sound anything other than fantastic and Tim attributes much of his tone to scatterwinding. If you look at Bill Lawrence's site he totally dismisses the notion of scatterwinding claiming it is snake oil type marketing. I put it diwn to jealousy because there are plenty of smallish companies using scatterwindning to produce wonderful pickups and we guitarists are not idiots. We wouldn't buy it if it didn't sound good.
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Seymour is a great guy, a good player, generous and one of the pioneers of aftermarket guitar parts, although he has always had a slight fetish for perfectly balanced humbucker coils, believing that it reduces the audible hum. I remember when he offered a service of taking PAFs apart and unwinding the coil with the higher reading until the DC resistance of the two coils matched exactly! Now, since then we've all learned that even with the exact same number of turns, because the bobbins are slightly different, the resistance will also be different.
Seymour has always been very meticulous in his work and finds the fact that scattered or even messy coils can produce tones that can be very pleasing, very hard.
It's a hard one. What is the best pickup? One that is built perfectly and will work reliably for many years, or an old one made hastily with little care, which may stop working at any minute but which has some magical tone which maybe nobody can hear when the drummer kicks in?
To Tim's credit, he has done the best possible to combine the two with a range of pickups which deliver all the tone, are wonderfully crafted, and guaranteed for life.
From my own point of view, scatterwinding is a very labour intensive way to wind pickups and the whole thing needs to be assembled with care because scatterwinding puts more stress on the bobbin, but if you think of how a string vibrates, it doesn't just move in one direction, side to side, so won't a scatterwound coil pick up more of the string dynamics? It isn't snake oil even though some pickup makers want it to be!
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I think it might have something to do with sales too. you all know that their top op the line pickups costs half a farmhouse. Since Scatterwound pickups have been become extremely popular the last couple of years, they'll try to tell you that theirs are better.
Business is business no matter if its pickups, computers or sailboats.
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my take on SD not liking to scatterwind humbuckers - you have two coils, so repeatability is tougher (I'd imagine) as compared to a single coil since in a humbucker you have two coils interacting with eachother.
thats my take anyway.