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!
