PURE HANDWOUND VS. REGULAR WIND
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 pickups 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.
If you are ordering humbuckers, Tele neck pickups, or any other pickup that might have a metal cover, 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 theystill 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.
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 pickups 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.
If you are ordering humbuckers, Tele neck pickups, or any other pickup that might have a metal cover, 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 theystill 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.
