8 months ago

107

Humbucker Soup:

The Coil
The coil and its windings are the other part of the equation that is very important to the final sound. Coils are slightly more predictable than magnets, but not by much.

The coil, a very thin copper wire, is wound around a bobbin. Other metals, such as silver, can be used, but they are much less common and more expensive. The coil windings are particularly significant: the more turns/winds around the bobbin, the more output/voltage the pickup will produce, and the more “resistance” the coil will have.

The coil by itself, without the presence of a magnet, is actually another electronic component, called a resistor. Two of the common specs to look at when purchasing a pickup is its Output mV, and its DC Resistance. For example, the DiMarzio True Velvet single-coil electric guitar neck pickup has an Output mV of 130 and a DC Resistance of 6.21 Kohm. The Dimarzio Dark Matter 2 passive middle single-coil has an Output mV of 200 and a DC Resistance of 7.33 Kohm. We can tell, by looking at these two examples, that the Dark Matter pickup is going to be louder.

DC Resistance
DC Resistance is tied directly to the coil, but the Output mV will be affected by the magnet. If you have two pickups with the same DC resistance but a different Output mV, then the one with the higher Output mV will have the stronger magnet.

The wire is usually 42 or 43 AWG (American Wire Gauge). 42 AWG is used in most pickups, but 43 AWG is often used to get more windings around the bobbin, creating a “hotter” pickup. Other gauges are also used, but much less commonly. Thinner wire has a higher inherent resistance, so the same length of 43 AWG wire will have a higher DC Resistance than a 42 AWG wire.

Coating
The wire is coated with an enamel, poly, or a heavy formvar, which acts as an insulation when winding the coil, so the wire does not short itself out. All things being equal, the different insulating materials should have no effect on the final sound. It is possible that various insulating materials might compress differently as they are wound, producing slightly varied sounds, but these are very likely to be minimal against other factors. Some pickups do use a double formvar coating that is said to achieve a brighter sound (due to a change in capacitance), because there is more space between the winds.

Windings
The number of winds is going to be a large factor in the final sound. As you add more winds, the space between them creates a capacitor that rolls off more and more high-end frequencies. You can see this in action by taking another look at those Dark Matter 2 pickups we talked about earlier. These pickups are darker in tone, probably in part due to the 7.33 DC Resistance, which we know is the result of its larger-sized coil.

One way to manipulate the capacitance is in the way that the coil is wound. Machine winding is very uniform and can add more capacitance, while hand winding (known as scatter winding) is much less uniform and leads to less capacitance and a brighter tone. This is the reason hand-wound pickups are often described as being brighter and clearer than their machine-wound counterparts. Machine winding leads to pickups that can be mass-produced and counted on to sound a certain way. All Dark Matter 2 pickups, for example, will sound the same. Hand-winding leads to one-of-a-kind pickups, and you never know exactly how they will sound until you try them.

Balance
A pickup maker/seeker needs to balance the right type of magnet, with the right amount of winds, in the right way, to create the perfect sound, and in a guitar with multiple pickups, they need to create pickups that complement each other.

Let the fun begin!

Loading comments...