Twinfan, a fair comment respectfully made. I guess you have to take into account that Throbak make ONLY PAFalikes and that they're very expensive. What interested me was his point that early PAFS were scatterwound when SD totally denies it and states that you should NEVER scatterwind a humbucker. It's is interesting to read the widely differing opinions about the old PAFs and how they were made.
This came up in a chat with tim a while back, how they were made that is. My memory might be a bit hazy, so bear in mind this is tims info attentuated by several years, but he had some very interesting insights on the matter (unsurprisingly)
Basically, they were made as cheaply as possible and quite inconsistently, and there were some very happy accidents.
A lot of/most of (maybe all of; I'm not clear on this part) of the early PAFs were made by immigrant labour, often women (though thats of no relevance), sitting all day winding bobbins, one coil at a time under loose guidance as to how. I dont know if they were told to make any particular scatterwinding pattern (though scatterwinding patterns vary from pickup to pickup the basic method is fairly similar all the time, as I understand it - though I'm not sure how close to 'proprietary' that method is so I'll leave it out).
The important parts are these: 1. winding style varied a lot from person to person 2. All the people winding thew the coils into one big bucket 3. The coils were then assembled into humbuckers later, by different poeple. The pickups were not made one at a time in a dedicated fashion by a single individuall; only the coils were.
This meant that different winds and different numbers of turns were combined in the pickups, and old pafs had offset coils as a major and common feature in their 'design' and lots of different combinations of hand-wound coils (note offset winds are a major design feature in BKs; all but a couple have some offset). No doubt the winders were very good at winding, but from winder to winder they werent consistent, and any given winder quite probably varied their patterns too (probably out of shear bordom; they werent doing it for love of tone, remember), so there was a lot of mismatching. Plus handwinding always has innate innacuracies compared to machine winding that will always be somewhere between ideally scatterwound (minimal paralel turns, larger spaces between winds, lower distributed capacitace, higher, broader top end response) and perfectly machine wound (all parallel turns), so certainly there will have been some degree of 'scatterwoundness' in all of them whether by design or not, and the amount of 'scatteroundness' would vary from coil to coil.
That means that there was no definite original paf sound. The manufacturing process couldnt produce it. There were good and cr@p sounding pafs and all points in between. Some good ones were chosen in/for guitars by players that became popular and so we came to hear a certain set of sounds made by pafs, chosen by the human ear, and those sounds were distilled into our various ideas as to what a paf absolutely sounds like. They were actually much, much more variable than that.
Tim (and no doubt others, quite possibly throbak too; I have no idea about their methodology or history, or their view of the methodlogies or history of pickup making; what history they heard about it, or believe to be true) spent years researching and picking apart old pafs that sounded good (an acceptable sacrifice, surely?) and figuring out what combination of elements were bought together by chance in the pickups that sounded good and performed well, and then intentionally and consistenly reproducing it, and using the common characteristics to inform new designs.
Its kinda like evolution actually! The random combination of randomly wound coils is equivelent to genetic mutation; and engine for unguided variation, and they all encouter the human ear, and the best sounding designs survive.
If Tim or some other chap at BK that actually knows this history stumbles across this; sorry for all the mistakes I no doubt made :lol:
