Dylan, I appreciate the scientific method. I wish this subject could be approached even more scientifically by removing emotionally subjective terminology like volume, tone, and feelings, and just discuss voltage, current, frequency, impedance, DC resistance, and frequency. I understand music is such an emotional subject for most people, it's hard for the geeks to get in a factual word. Thanks for all your efforts on the subject in this area. I'm into hobby electronics myself and am currently working on my first solid state head by piecing together a few effects circuits between a buffer, preamp, and power stage of a simple 100amp circuit. I've been breadboarding active filters looking to achieve better even order harmonics. (sorry for the bio but I wanted to convey the context of the following question) As far as this series and pickup winding, I would really like to know, what can you accomplish in the pickup, wire selection, etc. that I can't do within the preamp filtration circuit? I am fairly confident in my ability to trim, boost and/or isolate any parts of the frequency without adding meaningful harmonic distortion. Basically, as far as I can tell, your tuning an LC (inductance/capacitance) filter that affects the voltage sine wave generated by a crude motor (vibrating ferrous metal inside a magnetic field). In an active filter, I'm affecting the sine wave generated by the same crude motor with a slightly more complicated filter. People can only hear from 20hz to 20,000Hz, and I can boost or limit any part of that frequency with the right circuit. What's the scientifically measurable advantage/difference of fine tuning the pickup L/C side of the circuit?
Love the videos! Don't forget to include how certain wire coatings age. Those vintage sounding pickups from the 30's, 40's and 50's...didn't sound like they do now when they were brand new.
I have a question connected to that. The old enamel style wire can be damaged by the friction between the wires and this can be the reason for broken winding or a direct contact between the windings. The PU-Coating should be able to handle it better. That brings me to another question. The coating must have an influence on the tension while you handwind a pickup. Can the coating stretch with the wire easily? Does it slip easier? My first guess why people use one or the other is either the price or that one of them is easier to used in machines so they won't cause problemst to keep the calibrated tension. Is all the wire round or are there other crosssection-profiles too?
Out of all the industries in the world guitar making seems to be the most extreme. Everyone that you have to build this way or you have to do it that way. Basically stifling creativity. Pickups, switches, jacks, bridges, strings, tuning machines, wiring, woods, fret wire, chisels, to CNC or not, and so on. Even as a 40 year musician I've heard so much. It's like people will spend their lives not appreciating instruments. Instead they whine, complain, get mad or outraged by a thing that they conceive to be imperfect if not done a certain way. Like I just said I have been a musician 40 years, and in the past 2 I've started to build guitars. In some ways it's like why bother anymore because some elitist thinks I don't "do it the right way." Then I think, why should I care what others think. If it plays the way it should, and more importantly the customer loves it, that' all that matters. Elitists have no place in the guitar building world. That's why guys like Dylan or Ben Crowe (Crimson Guitars) have my respect.
diferences in insulation will absolutely make a difference! If you change the dielectric constant (insulation) you will surely change the capacitance of the coil. anyone that says there is no difference knows nothing about electrical theory.
You hit the nail on the head. Dielectric is key to capacitance in a wound coil. I've also noticed that when winding coils by hand, there always seems to be a breakup of insulation; especially with enamel or formvar coatings; which causes shorts in the coil windings; which in turn will affect inductance and capacitance.
Thanks for all this info, my job requires be to burn coating off of electrical leads for electrical power transformers. Thanks to your information I can now look for the right type of mask to protect my lungs.
Dylan, great talk. you also need to look at the tolerance of the wire dia. based on the manufacturer. also watch for quality spills in the spool, it may start out at proper size or at one extreme of the tolerance and then at some point reduce to the minimum dia. of the tolerance. causing variation coil to coil. you should be able to catch this with inductance measurements. of course I'm sure you know wire tension can cause changes too. lots of variables to keep an eye on. : ) a lot of them probably don't really matter all that much, I do know from motor winding that it makes quite a noticeable difference (scatter vs stacked)
Dylan, I love your lessons. Great channel. I realize this is an older video, but I wonder if you or somebody on here can answer a question... I heard that one of the differences between inexpensive guitar pickups made overseas and more expensive, premium pickups like yours is that the wire that, say, the Chinese use is a copper ALLOY rather than pure copper, which makes the pickups cheaper to produce. I can't find any information about copper-alloy wire -- though there's lots of info about aluminum-alloy wire out there. Is it true? Are "cheap" pickups made from a copper- or aluminum-alloy wire rather than pure copper?
200 thousandths is written as 0.200, so the wire is way thinner than that. The number 0.0004 is spoken as 4 ten-thousandths, or 4 tenths with the thousandths being implied, or 400 millionths of an inch. The copper in Remington 42 AWG wire is 25 ten-thousandths of an inch in diameter (0.0025). The overall diameter of Remington single build 42 AWG is 28 ten-thousandths of an inch (0.0028), so the thickness of the enamel coating is 1.5 ten-thousandths of an inch (0.00015) which can also be said as 150 millionths of an inch. The overall diameter of Remington heavy build 42 AWG is 31 ten-thousandths of an inch (0.0031), so the thickness of the enamel coating is 3 ten-thousandths of an inch (0.0003) which can also be said as 300 millionths of an inch. I'd rather say or write millionths than ten-thousandths, plus there probably won't be any fractions or decimal points.
Also the point you make about coating on the wire is bang on the money anyone who has ever made home made capacitors would know and understand this point and it also raises a good question of quality of the pickup over time i guess a fair debate could be made that this point is of very little significance but my money is with your conclusion. awesome
That made me laugh so hard at 55 seconds, they were made back in blah blah blah blah blah. Your so good at it, can you make a video were you edit in all the blah blah blah blah blah. Please.
The coating material (if thicknesses are equal) can make a difference due to it's tendency to compress or "squish" under compression. Especially under heat (potting) while compressed.
Jay Dee on hand wound pickups that is rarely a factor. The tension is pretty low. Also, most of the materials used now have a much higher temp rating than wax potting requires so it really is not an issue.
I have used fine guage wire for production of neon transformers for over 50 years. I also play guitar so Im interested. Old style enamel wire is 105C coated., The red color is polyurethane, 130C and the other polyester coated wire is 180-200C coated. The heavy coated wire means a higher dielectric strength and will have a higher buildup. This reduced the coupling in the coil to core, core is the magnets in this case. Sane amount of turns and higher resistance on the heavy coated wire. This will shift the induction a little bit also. I guess I have wound over 2 million coils of small fine wire.
If you had the data presenting the number of turns, inductance, capacitance, current voltage etc; for a demo coil wound with the wires you have displayed it would be nice. These parameters would effect the sound to some extent, like volume, noise etc. Now talking about "warmth", "fatness" etc is something else. Next we could be going into psychoacoustics ! Hope you get the feedback you could really rationalize and use!
Thanks for your videos Dylan i'm always working with guitars doing repairs and custom projects and as the old saying goes 2 heads are better than one your videos are great thanks.
silicone is wrapped around spark plug wires to suppress radio frequency interference in your radio stations through your antenna. silicone can deaden a pick up coil.
In short, three things affect the performance of an inductive pickup. Wire size, thickness of the insulation and the insulation dialectical constant. Any of which can mask the affects of the other.
Good video, like your realistic approach. I have a question about a other subject. I'd like to know why on a guitar nut, the strings should be half inside the groove and half outside? First, is-it true? Many people think so. If it's true, could you make a video to explain why? Already ask this question to many people, never got a response better then 'I saw a luthier do it, so it must be OK to do so'.
I know you post is 3 years old. In my 34 years, that is a first I ever heard of that one. I have many guitars and they all vary. Most of them you can rub your fingers right over the nut and not touch the string at all. Now I have a Bass guitar (being such fat strings) I can barely feel the string on the brass nut. But I would really like to know where that comes from because truthfully I have never heard of that before. If you ever find out let me know. I'm curious.
The difference of various coating of magnet wire is mainly temperature dependent. From a physics standpoint, there is no way the coating of the wire can affect tone!!
its pretty cut and dry there... the more winds with the same wire basically gives you more output and a beefier tone with less "treble", all else being equal. Unless you have one of the Robot s the big companies use, your mechanical variation will lead to more tonal differences than, say, another 500-600 winds.
You could cut the same length of the same wire diameter with different coating and just start to measure. You could also cut off a piece of wire and see how much it lengthens when you hang on a certain weight to see the properties under tension. The video is interesting but it ends at There is this wire and that wire with different coating. There will be a difference but how much? How much difference is there at what price difference? How do the coatings react at really high tempertures like in south america plus heat from stage lighting (would be interesting also with different potting)
Can you cover the question of production variance vetween exactly the same pickups? If the variance in tone is on the same magnitude as the variance between, say, coating material?
This may be a ridiculous question, I was uable to ask you anywhere but here. ARe you able to take say a single coil, and add copper winding to it after it was finished to make hotter sound?
I'm from Papua New Guinean and I am very much interested to to rebuild aircon compressor and I'm looking for proper winding wire to wind the hermetic ac compressor. Can I have your contact details
You say in this video, the real question is what does the thickness of the coating do to your tone? You also say a thicker coated wire sounds different than a thinner coated wire. But you never talk about the tone difference between the three coatings. Am I missing something? Do you cover this in a different video? I'm not trolling. I really want to know the difference in the tone of the wire.
DALG Guitars thank you for noticing. I will look these over and put together another video to fill in the gaps. Please subscribe and make sure you get the answer you need!
I'd assume a thicker coating would have more highs but lower output. More highs cus the wires are further apart and lower output cus you can't get as much wire on there. That's a guess though. There are so many variables and nobody has ever done a video that covers all of them and how each affects tone
If enamel wire was the first wire used 60+ years ago, when did the other types start to be used; and did the advent of new wire lead to the introduction of new pickup types?
The Fender company used whatever was most cost effective in the early years, both in wire and AlNiCo magnets. They literally ordered AlNiCo pole pieces and got a mix of AlNiCo II, III and V!!! All the big companies habe done the research and development for guys like us over the years (lucky for us!) So in a more clear answer to yopur question, happy accidents happened over the years before anyone cared at all to figure all this out. Different needs led to different wire gauge and stricter quality control, but mostly the old timers used what was cheapest at the time.
@@professorclevis974 - thanks for the history lesson, makes perfect sense now that I think about it. I'm glad that Larry DiMarzio, Lindy Fralin, etc. have made it easier for us today.
Just measure the winding CAPACITANCE to show the difference between the coating.... As long as the pickups are wound using same machine, same turns and same exact tension and winding method...you will measure differences in the winding CAPACITANCE with the various coating and coating thickness. This effects the Q and resonant frequency, that is a scientific fact...Whether or not someone can hear the differences is subjective...
@johnrose2160 Exactly how would you measure the capacitance of the winding in a pickup? You can measure the inductance easily enough. I would think you'd have to find the resonant frequency using an oscillator and calculate the capacitance using the frequency, inductance, and the formula C=(((1/F)/2/π)^2)/L. I don't have a clue how much capacitance there would be in a pickup coil, but if the capacitance was 100 picofarads and the inductance was 3 henries, the resonant frequency would be about 9200 Hz. So, capacitance would have a large effect on the frequency response of the pickup.
Yes, I'm afraid you were. The coil wire is copper, but it is insulated. If it wasn't, every wind in the coil would touch the next, and you would have a straight short circuit. The signal would follow the shortest, easiest path. It would be like having no winds at all: completely useless as a pickup.
hi dylan, do you make pickups? im an ex gordon smith apprentice. im setting up a new guitar building venture in the south of france. would you be willing to send any samples out to me and maybe we can do some business in the future? .. please let me know. g8 video by the way. look forward to hearing from Andy evans(Aevo guitars)
We would love to work with you. We do not "send samples" but we would love to work with you. We have a dealer/builder program. Email me at dylan@dylanpickups.com
Remington plain enamel wire is 0027 in. Remington formvar is 0029 in. There is a .0002 inch difference in these two diameters of wire at just one tangent contact point. How many contact points does the wire make as the wires overlap. Multiply that number with the number of turns of wire and find out how much closer and smaller you can wind that coil. The closer is that coil ends up being to the pole pieces how much closer is to the strongest magnetic flux. There is a reason plain enamel wire cost more. That was what was used on the earliest guitars. Discounting and discrediting plain enamel wire makes no logical sense in view of the facts.. then again if you can't wind a tight coil in the first place then all bets are off and you might just as well choose any kind of wire
"Resonant peak", etc, we have enough problem with guitar theory as it is, luthiers already learned all that stuff in school, we just want to hear what it looks like.
I appreciate all the technical details, they are interesting, but you are not really giving any useful information apart from "yes, it does make a difference". How does it make a difference? If you watch this video that's the opinion you are expecting to hear. Not very useful.
@@DylanTalksTone ... How does the wire affect the tone? Does thinner wire make pickups sound darker? Does poly coating make them sound brighter? How does coating thickness change tone? How does the bobbin shape and size affect it? ... just giving examples of what you expect to hear in this kind of video. I don't have a specific question... it's just constructive feedback.
Yeah, all of DylanTalksTone videos ramble on too much and are never direct or to the point. I think this guy just likes hearing himself talk. I wish he would organize his information better; he jumps around topics and never exactly gives a definite or helpful answer.
