Common Myths of Scatterwinding

Myth 1. Scatterwinding is just a bunch of hype

Is good tone just hype?  Scatterwinding is putting the most space between each consecutive wind as possible, thereby lowering the capacitance of the pickup.  This is achieved by the winding pattern and the tension of the wire, which is usually done by hand, and takes years of experience.  This is, in my opinion, the most important aspect in pickup making next to resistance and magnetism.

scatterwinding a single coil

Myth 2. Scatterwinding can only be done by hand

Nope.  Although hand-guiding the wire onto the bobbin is probably the best and easiest way, you could get the same results from a machine.  I have heard that when Jason Lollar was starting out pickup winding, he made his own machine that would turn the bobbin and guide the wire automatically.  A pickup can be scatterwound in this way as long as the motion and wire tension are calibrated.  The problem is that machines are consistent and the point of scatterwinding is to be inconsistent, it is hard to replicate the motion of the human hand.

Myth 3. All handwound pickups are scatterwound

Not really.  The winding pattern and the tension are still dependent of a number of variables: machine type, speed, wire type, and most importantly, who is winding the pickup.  All will make a pickup sound different.

Myth 4. Scatterwinding just means randomly guiding the wire onto the bobbin

Wrong, it almost has more to do with wire tension, which takes a lot of time to perfect by hand.  If the pickup is too loose, you won't get the correct number of turns and the pickup will sound thin.  Too tight and it will sound dead.  Here is a useful tool for figuring out the proper tension.

Myth 5. Scatterwound pickups need to be wax potted

Not always.  Microphonics are screeching sounds coming from winds of wire and little parts of the pickup vibrating together.  This can be a big problem when playing at a high volume on stage.  A lot of it has to do with the quality of the parts used, the age of the pickup, and how it was wound.  If you use a pickup that has been made with quality parts that fit together tightly and that has been carefully scatterwound, you do not need wax potting, and that gives your sound extra openness and clarity.  I have been testing this myself for years.

Myth 6. Single coils are scatterwound and humbuckers are not

Traditionally this is the case as most humbuckers are wound on a machine.  Personally, I prefer all pickups to be scatterwound.  Anywone who plays a with a humbucker in the neck position knows that it doesn't really cut through the mix as well as the bridge in a band situation, try using a scatterwound humbucker!

Custom Pickups!

build pickups to your personal specs!

Pickups have a lot to do with the sound of an electric guitar and how it behaves through an amp and they are usually one of the first places guitar makers cut costs when they are designing entry-level guitars.  That's why pickups are the first thing you upgrade when you're searching for better tone, and they are usually much cheaper than buying a better guitar.

They simply consist of magnetic polepieces wrapped in thousands of winds of copper wire.  The type of magnets and wire obviously have a lot to do with the tone, but so do the winding style, number of winds, and type of material used to pot them (see: wax potting).  Below you will find a short list of what goes into building a pickup and the effect it has on the tone.  All of these components are ones that were used on early Gibson and Fender pickups to produce the legendary tones that they are famous for today.  I tested all of these different materials and methods myself with the pickups I built as well as consulted the fine people at SF Guitarworks and Mojotone to come to the conclusions that I made.  Read through this short list before ordering your new set of pickups through our website and you'll be a pickup expert too. 

Magnets

Alnico V-  by far the most popular magnet for vintage-style pickups.  Drives your amp harder to break up sooner, lowers headroom.  Tight punchy lows, low to moderate mids, singing highs.

Alnico III-  the brightest of the alnico magnets.  Lower output than Alnico V.  Used in very early Teles and Strats from the 50's.  Nice round highs and a strong midrange with good bite.

Alnico II-  spongy attack.  Smooth highs and strong mids. Lower output than Alnico V.  Used in Gibson PAF humbuckers and some P-90's.


Wire

Formvar- common in vintage Fender pickups.  Warm and smooth sounding.

Single Build Plain Enamel- also used in many vintage Fender pickups, useful when squeezing a maximum number of winds on the coil.  Aggressive and sharper on the bass and treble response.

Polycoated- darker sounding overall.  Great when used in high output pickups for smoothing out harshness.

Construction Techniques

Scatterwinding- All of our single coil pickups are scatterwound, it is widely known in the pickup building world that scatterwinding is the best technique for building pickups because of the increased clarity and response to subtle details.  It really opens up the sound.  For more information see my blog entry on Scatterwinding.

Overwinding by 5%- some blues and rock players prefer pickups that drive their amp harder for more breakup through the amp.  Overwound pickups also produce 5% more bass and 5% less treble.  The high strings will sound fuller and sweeter but the wound strings will sound darker.

Underwinding by 5%- If clarity is your goal then underwinding is ideal.  It produces 5% less bass and 5% more treble and makes your wound strings sound clearer.  

Wax Potting-  If you are using gain or excessive volume in your rig it is highly recommended that you order your pickups with wax potting.  The hardened wax holds the windings together to keep them from vibrating against each other and causing feedback and microphonics.  On the contrary, early Fender pickups were not wax potted and some are regarded as being some of the best sounding in the world, pickups without wax are generally more open sounding.  For more information please see my blog entry on wax potting.  All of our pickups are wax potted unless otherwise stated.

Staggered/Flat polepieces-  Most modern pickups are staggered to compensate for fretboard radius and varying string-to-string balance in volume.  You may opt for flat polepieces in your setup.  Most Telecaster bridge pickups have flat polepieces and they sound just fine.  All of our pickups have staggered polepieces unless otherwise stated.

Beveled Polepieces-  beveling the edge of the polepiece makes them look a little nicer.  Some say that it smooths out the tone of the pickup as well.  All of our Stratocaster, Jazzmaster, Jaguar, P-Bass, and Jazz Bass pickups have beveled polepieces unless otherwise stated.

What is 'scatter-winding' anyway??

Many high-end pickup manufacturers like to boast (myself included) that their pickups are "scatter-wound," but many people don't really understand what this term means.  In fact the whole art of winding pickups is quite foreign to a lot of people, even if they play guitar.  Quite simply, scatter winding is a method of making pickups that results in a unique and beautiful sound.  In this post I'll take a stab at trying to explain the principles of this method.

All electric guitar pickups use the same basic design, they are simply magnetic polepieces wrapped in very thin copper wire.  The polepieces generate a magnetic field that the string vibrates in, and the copper coils turn that vibration into an electric signal. 

In the '50s, electric guitars started getting extremely popular.  Humbuckers, used primarily in Gibson guitars, used a uniform wind made on a machine; and single-coils, used primarily in Fender guitars, used a scatter-wound coil made by hand.  Technically you could use either method for either type of pickup, but it is widely believed that single-coils sound better scatter-wound.  Tension also matters when winding a pickup, looser winds typically sound clearer and better.

When I first started winding pickups I didn't understand that the way in which you wind the pickups actually has an effect on the tone.  It made sense to me that the quality of wire you use, the number of turns, the quality of the magnets, and the strength of the magnets all played a part in the overall tone.  But I figured you would need some sort of ultra sensitive computer to hear if they were scatter-wound or not.  I made a couple of pickups by just guiding the wire back and fourth in a very even manner.  I made a couple variations of these and tested them, then I made a set of pickups using a scatter-winding technique.  The first thing I noticed was that the resistance (electrical output measured in ohms) of the pickup had dropped significantly.  When I installed them and tried them out I was amazed!  I was hearing details that I had never heard before, there was more treble and harmonics than I had heard from my earlier pickups.  The video below shows me scatter winding a pickup.  The wire is as thin as a human hair so you can't really see it, but you can see how my hand is moving to get an idea of how it's done.  It also helps to be blasting Pink Floyd while you're doing this for 15-20 minutes per coil.

When coils are wound on a machine, each consecutive wind is very close to the last wind.  when you scatter-wind a pickup the idea is to put lots of space between each consecutive wind, this lowers the distributed capacitance of a pickup so that more treble and detail get through.  Your tone control on your guitar has a capacitor on it, as you turn that control counter-cockwise it uses more and more of that capacitor to bleed off highs to the ground, and the result is you hear a darker guitar tone.  Scatter-winding does just the opposite, it gives the pickup more treble.  This sounds really good on single coils because they have a very open sound to begin with, extreme highs and extreme lows, a lot of the guitar's natural tone and character comes through.

When I'm scatter-winding a pickup, I try not to follow any sort of pattern and I move the wire randomly across the bobbin.  Machines are not good at this because they are programmed to do things very neatly.  I suppose you could program a robot to mimic the motion of the human hand, but that wouldn't exactly be cost-effective.  The human hand is a really good tool for this because it's hard for us to do things in a consecutive pattern.

Update 08/04/2010

You can also scatter-wind by simply guiding the wire back and fourth faster across the bobbin, thus putting more distance between each wind.

Scatter-wound pickups are more expensive because they have to be made by hand.  It also makes the pickup more unique because you can never exactly replicate what you did before, so each pickup has its own tonal character.  When Fender first started out as a company, all of their pickups were wound by hand, they are considered by many to be some of the best sounding pickups in the world.  Today they make thousands of guitars a year so naturally it doesn't make sense for them to hand-wind each pickup, but there are a few other winders out there like myself who still hand-wind every single pickup.