Scatter winding

[richard]

I'm trying to understand more about pickups and I'm intrigued by scatter winding. Presumably it has a pronounced effect on the EQ of a pickup ?

I've read Tim say that no two scatterwound pickups can be exactly the same but is it the 'pattern' of the wind that gives it it's own characteristics ? Say you take a Rebel Yell - will Tim and his colleagues try to emulate the pattern of the optimum wind for this pickup ? Will each of the BK pups have a different pattern that they will attempt to reproduce ? How much difference between say one RY or HD and another is to be expected ?

[JamesHealey]

Scatter winding is a lot like transformer interleaving which is essentially not winding the same pattern through out to prevent inductivity.
Which spoils good clear high end.

[oilpit]

Presumably it has a pronounced effect on the EQ of a pickup ?

No...

Scatterwinding makes a pickup slightly brighter, generally some more harmonics and a little more bite.
If there were two sound clips online, one scatterwound and one not (assuming all other variables were the same) nobody could tell the difference.

It really is just a winding technique, it's not as dramatic as you make it out to be

[ericsabbath]

I have no idea if that's related to the scatterwinding, as I only had scatterwound pups from BKP and a couple motor city pickups, but no matter the specs, they always clean up better with the volume pot and soft picking than all the other non-scatterwound pickups I had or played

even when I compare hotter pickups like the Miracle Man or Aftermath, they still clean up through gain a lot better than mid output models from Seymour, Gibson or PRS

I did a couple band practices in the last weeks with Seymour Custom Shop and PRS pickups and they were very disappointing in clarity, dynamics and had that harsh top end when I tried to get a "clean" tone under gain
I never use clean channels... I just set gain around noon and turn off my booster, a vintage maxon equalizer
with BKP I have no trouble with that, but with other pickups it's a pain in the ass
I could blame their output levels (Scott Ian El Diablo = 22k, PRS Dragon II = around 13k, but feels hotter than that), but the same happened with the Gibson 490t (8k, alnico 2) and PRS McCarty Treble (8k, alnico 5), which are quite low output
they just can't clean up like a BKP and they get muddy easily in the mids under high gain