Humbuckers
The Dreaded Mudbucker
When a Strat or Tele or even a P90 just isn’t enough, there’s nothing like the gut punch of a humbucker to get your point across. On the other hand, a frequent complaint about humbuckers is they are muddy, they cancel out too much of the really high frequencies along with the hum to get good clarity. While a lot of this can be fixed by slight adjustments to picking technique*, there is some truth to the charge – the average humbucker really could use some more presence and detail to bring out its full potential.
*(Go back and forth between Strats and LP’s a few times over the course of a month or two and you’ll discover what a curious thing it is that suddenly every humbucker ever made is too muddy and every single coil too thin – til you naturally alter your technique a little.)
In most cases this problem is due far less to the humbucker’s nature than to bad design and manufacturing techniques: Overpotting or potting with wax mixed too thick, covers, baseplates, screws and slugs made of tone-killing alloys, or inattention to the importance of coil patterns are just some of the problems that contribute to the bum rap the humbucker often gets. Correcting these errors is easy enough, and it helps a lot. But there’s another level of humbucker tone even beyond that. I always thought humbuckers had the potential to be the ultimate pickup design for 3D complexity and sonic depth, because if you could get some of those cancelled high frequencies back and in just the right proportion, the humbucker would cover such a huge frequency range – like being able to look down from the top of a mountain and see all the way to the valley floor without any clouds or haze in the way. If only a humbucker could be made that combined its natural beef with P90 detail and clarity…
I’ve found a way.
One part of my recipe is coil mismatching (winding one coil with significantly more turns of wire than the other), which helps by releasing some of those high frequencies back into the signal chain, and without a noticeable increase in noise. My bridge humbuckers (aka Slugbuckers) are all wound with a stronger slug coil for more midrange grunt while my necks (Woodbuckers) are always wound with the screw coil stronger for a more bell-like tone.
The downside is that due to the mismatch, you will get a bit of hum on high gain settings, particularly with my bridge pickups which have a wider coil disparity than my necks. However it's nowhere near as bad as single coil so no worries, and the increased P90-like clarity and sizzle on top is well worth it.
Mismatched coils is hardly an original idea and I know of at least one winder who takes it to a greater extreme than I do. But my utilization of this concept and its combination with other ingredients is unique, at least as far as I know. I am probably the only winder who does this so exclusively; the formula works so well that outside of R&D I’ve never made a humbucker with even coils and so far I have no plans to ever do so.
The Dreaded Ice Pick
Another complaint about humbuckers, particularly vintage output models intended for the bridge position, is a midrange scoop that exaggerates the treble (the dreaded “icepick in the ear”). Such pickups usually lack the midrange warmth and guts to keep the treble from standing out so strong. In many cases they double down on this problem by emphasizing the most unpleasant combination of frequencies in the treble range.
This is often the result of a far too neat wind pattern, the kind that makes electrical engineers to salute and guitar players cry. It makes a pickup sound both harsh and 2-dimensional, like when your ears are plugged from a cold and you can’t tell if a sound is coming from right next to you or a block away. Often this problem is made even worse by the choice of materials – polepieces, slugs and keeper bars made of steel alloys that only sharpen that icepick. The result is a pickup that drives guitar players crazy as they constantly adjust their EQ in vain – because they are STUCK WITH A PICKUP THAT PARADOXICALLY SOUNDS BOTH TOO BRIGHT AND TOO DARK AT THE SAME TIME!
THAT is what got me into winding…
When a Strat or Tele or even a P90 just isn’t enough, there’s nothing like the gut punch of a humbucker to get your point across. On the other hand, a frequent complaint about humbuckers is they are muddy, they cancel out too much of the really high frequencies along with the hum to get good clarity. While a lot of this can be fixed by slight adjustments to picking technique*, there is some truth to the charge – the average humbucker really could use some more presence and detail to bring out its full potential.
*(Go back and forth between Strats and LP’s a few times over the course of a month or two and you’ll discover what a curious thing it is that suddenly every humbucker ever made is too muddy and every single coil too thin – til you naturally alter your technique a little.)
In most cases this problem is due far less to the humbucker’s nature than to bad design and manufacturing techniques: Overpotting or potting with wax mixed too thick, covers, baseplates, screws and slugs made of tone-killing alloys, or inattention to the importance of coil patterns are just some of the problems that contribute to the bum rap the humbucker often gets. Correcting these errors is easy enough, and it helps a lot. But there’s another level of humbucker tone even beyond that. I always thought humbuckers had the potential to be the ultimate pickup design for 3D complexity and sonic depth, because if you could get some of those cancelled high frequencies back and in just the right proportion, the humbucker would cover such a huge frequency range – like being able to look down from the top of a mountain and see all the way to the valley floor without any clouds or haze in the way. If only a humbucker could be made that combined its natural beef with P90 detail and clarity…
I’ve found a way.
One part of my recipe is coil mismatching (winding one coil with significantly more turns of wire than the other), which helps by releasing some of those high frequencies back into the signal chain, and without a noticeable increase in noise. My bridge humbuckers (aka Slugbuckers) are all wound with a stronger slug coil for more midrange grunt while my necks (Woodbuckers) are always wound with the screw coil stronger for a more bell-like tone.
The downside is that due to the mismatch, you will get a bit of hum on high gain settings, particularly with my bridge pickups which have a wider coil disparity than my necks. However it's nowhere near as bad as single coil so no worries, and the increased P90-like clarity and sizzle on top is well worth it.
Mismatched coils is hardly an original idea and I know of at least one winder who takes it to a greater extreme than I do. But my utilization of this concept and its combination with other ingredients is unique, at least as far as I know. I am probably the only winder who does this so exclusively; the formula works so well that outside of R&D I’ve never made a humbucker with even coils and so far I have no plans to ever do so.
The Dreaded Ice Pick
Another complaint about humbuckers, particularly vintage output models intended for the bridge position, is a midrange scoop that exaggerates the treble (the dreaded “icepick in the ear”). Such pickups usually lack the midrange warmth and guts to keep the treble from standing out so strong. In many cases they double down on this problem by emphasizing the most unpleasant combination of frequencies in the treble range.
This is often the result of a far too neat wind pattern, the kind that makes electrical engineers to salute and guitar players cry. It makes a pickup sound both harsh and 2-dimensional, like when your ears are plugged from a cold and you can’t tell if a sound is coming from right next to you or a block away. Often this problem is made even worse by the choice of materials – polepieces, slugs and keeper bars made of steel alloys that only sharpen that icepick. The result is a pickup that drives guitar players crazy as they constantly adjust their EQ in vain – because they are STUCK WITH A PICKUP THAT PARADOXICALLY SOUNDS BOTH TOO BRIGHT AND TOO DARK AT THE SAME TIME!
THAT is what got me into winding…
Handwound vs. Pure Handwound
There is a lot of confusion out there about what exactly constitutes a “handwound” pickup. There may be some disagreements out on the fringes of the winder community, but at least 90% of us consider a pickup handwound if the traverse of the wire back and forth on the spinning bobbin is hand-guided. It is still a handwound pickup if the bobbin is turned by machine. In fact, hand-guided/machine-turned is no subtype or exception; it is the essence of handwound. Probably 99.999% of handwound pickups are made with machine turned bobbins. Anyway, by this definition, ALL of my pickups are handwound.
NOTE: Pure Handwound is now available in all my pickups -- humbucker and single coils -- however, on minihumbuckers, the DCR spec will be higher because a narrower wire gauge has to be used.
But I have a line of humbuckers that falls into that .001%. My Pure Handwound line differs from my regular wind in that the wire is wrapped on the bobbin ENTIRELY BY HAND. There is no machine used to turn the bobbin or anything else other than a clamp to hold the bobbin in place – my hands and the wire are the only moving parts. It’s a lot of work but the sound difference is worth it. The regular wind has great dynamics, harmonics, sparkle, clarity and detail, and is very sensitive to height and polepiece adjustments. The Pure Handwound significantly magnifies all these qualities and somehow even adds some sustain to the mix. The string separation is as good as it gets, which means you can strum a Pure Handwound neck pickup as hard as you want, mud-free. Faked double-leads, like when you play southern rock but you’re the only guitar player in the band, sound almost like two separate guitars. (I probably should have called them Hand Wrapped instead of Pure Handwound, but it's too late now.)
I’d like to pretend I’ve studied all this in a lab with oscilloscopes and I could give you charts and graphs explaining it all, but I really have no idea why this works. It just does. I got the idea from opening up a Timbucker a few years ago and discovering a wind pattern that to my mind could only have been laid on the bobbin by hand. A machine turned bobbin couldn’t have created this pattern, what I call the crop circle of wind patterns. Tim White, creator and purveyor of Timbuckers, has since called it quits and I’ve never talked to him about whether he did in fact lay the wire on by hand or otherwise independently verified that he did. But hand-wrapping would explain why his waiting list was nearly 2 years by the end (hand wrapping takes a lot of time). I also make no claim to be able to duplicate his pattern – I still don’t know how he did it.
What I do know is that, like his method, whatever it was, my hand-wrapping technique also creates patterns that can’t be duplicated with a machine turned bobbin and the results are extremely close to his, especially in terms of clarity, dynamics, detail and string separation, mine sounding maybe a touch smoother on top than his.
I strongly recommend your Pure Handwound be made with no cover because even the best covers shunt some of the PH magic to ground. Plus it’ll save you the cost of the cover. There are some covers that I can at least live with (RS Guitarworks aged covers, raw covers, and ThroBak) but even they have a bit of an effect. It's not always a bad thing, sometimes a cover can help tame the icepick in the bridge. But it's always a detriment, however slight, in the neck.
Magnets
For humbuckers, I generally go with A2 but will use A3 or A4 depending customer preference and need. UA5 is another option, and A5 on hotter bridge winds, very rarely on neck pickups. Alnico 8 and Alnico 9 are available for higher output models and for other atypical applications.
Pricing:
Regular Wind...................................................................$155
Pure Handwound.............................................................$210
Super Telebucker (Telebucker 5) Reg Wind.....................$165
Super Telebucker (Telebucker 5) Pure Handwound.........$215
Options:
Splat Option**................................................... $20 per pickup.
New Looking Nickel or Gold Cover.............Inquire via phone or email
RS Relic Aged Nickel Cover............................$30 (yup, RS just hiked their prices, sorry)
12-screw “Sweet Heat” option.....................$10 (the effect is a bit sweeter/smoother sound, and – of course – even more adjustability)
4-conductor.........................................................NO CHARGE
F-spacing .............................................................NO CHARGE
**The Splat is a means of getting a beefier option to the typical wimpy/slicey split humbucker tone. One coil is tapped part way so when you throw the switch you get all of one coil plus part of the other coil for a bigger, more authentic "single coil" tone. For example, if you had an 8k pickup, instead of the 4k split that sounds like a mosquito on a good day, you could have 5.5k, 6.0k, 6.5k or anywhere in between. Though I will likely make some recommendations for what's best for what you want, the exact spec is up to you...
There is a lot of confusion out there about what exactly constitutes a “handwound” pickup. There may be some disagreements out on the fringes of the winder community, but at least 90% of us consider a pickup handwound if the traverse of the wire back and forth on the spinning bobbin is hand-guided. It is still a handwound pickup if the bobbin is turned by machine. In fact, hand-guided/machine-turned is no subtype or exception; it is the essence of handwound. Probably 99.999% of handwound pickups are made with machine turned bobbins. Anyway, by this definition, ALL of my pickups are handwound.
NOTE: Pure Handwound is now available in all my pickups -- humbucker and single coils -- however, on minihumbuckers, the DCR spec will be higher because a narrower wire gauge has to be used.
But I have a line of humbuckers that falls into that .001%. My Pure Handwound line differs from my regular wind in that the wire is wrapped on the bobbin ENTIRELY BY HAND. There is no machine used to turn the bobbin or anything else other than a clamp to hold the bobbin in place – my hands and the wire are the only moving parts. It’s a lot of work but the sound difference is worth it. The regular wind has great dynamics, harmonics, sparkle, clarity and detail, and is very sensitive to height and polepiece adjustments. The Pure Handwound significantly magnifies all these qualities and somehow even adds some sustain to the mix. The string separation is as good as it gets, which means you can strum a Pure Handwound neck pickup as hard as you want, mud-free. Faked double-leads, like when you play southern rock but you’re the only guitar player in the band, sound almost like two separate guitars. (I probably should have called them Hand Wrapped instead of Pure Handwound, but it's too late now.)
I’d like to pretend I’ve studied all this in a lab with oscilloscopes and I could give you charts and graphs explaining it all, but I really have no idea why this works. It just does. I got the idea from opening up a Timbucker a few years ago and discovering a wind pattern that to my mind could only have been laid on the bobbin by hand. A machine turned bobbin couldn’t have created this pattern, what I call the crop circle of wind patterns. Tim White, creator and purveyor of Timbuckers, has since called it quits and I’ve never talked to him about whether he did in fact lay the wire on by hand or otherwise independently verified that he did. But hand-wrapping would explain why his waiting list was nearly 2 years by the end (hand wrapping takes a lot of time). I also make no claim to be able to duplicate his pattern – I still don’t know how he did it.
What I do know is that, like his method, whatever it was, my hand-wrapping technique also creates patterns that can’t be duplicated with a machine turned bobbin and the results are extremely close to his, especially in terms of clarity, dynamics, detail and string separation, mine sounding maybe a touch smoother on top than his.
I strongly recommend your Pure Handwound be made with no cover because even the best covers shunt some of the PH magic to ground. Plus it’ll save you the cost of the cover. There are some covers that I can at least live with (RS Guitarworks aged covers, raw covers, and ThroBak) but even they have a bit of an effect. It's not always a bad thing, sometimes a cover can help tame the icepick in the bridge. But it's always a detriment, however slight, in the neck.
Magnets
For humbuckers, I generally go with A2 but will use A3 or A4 depending customer preference and need. UA5 is another option, and A5 on hotter bridge winds, very rarely on neck pickups. Alnico 8 and Alnico 9 are available for higher output models and for other atypical applications.
Pricing:
Regular Wind...................................................................$155
Pure Handwound.............................................................$210
Super Telebucker (Telebucker 5) Reg Wind.....................$165
Super Telebucker (Telebucker 5) Pure Handwound.........$215
Options:
Splat Option**................................................... $20 per pickup.
New Looking Nickel or Gold Cover.............Inquire via phone or email
RS Relic Aged Nickel Cover............................$30 (yup, RS just hiked their prices, sorry)
12-screw “Sweet Heat” option.....................$10 (the effect is a bit sweeter/smoother sound, and – of course – even more adjustability)
4-conductor.........................................................NO CHARGE
F-spacing .............................................................NO CHARGE
**The Splat is a means of getting a beefier option to the typical wimpy/slicey split humbucker tone. One coil is tapped part way so when you throw the switch you get all of one coil plus part of the other coil for a bigger, more authentic "single coil" tone. For example, if you had an 8k pickup, instead of the 4k split that sounds like a mosquito on a good day, you could have 5.5k, 6.0k, 6.5k or anywhere in between. Though I will likely make some recommendations for what's best for what you want, the exact spec is up to you...
