Tony what is the advantage of scatter wound pickups ? I assume you mean the windings don't go on parallel/in line on the bobbins?
Tony what is the advantage of scatter wound pickups ? I assume you mean the windings don't go on parallel/in line on the bobbins?
Last edited by wokkaboy; 11-02-2016 at 11:06 AM.
Current Builds and status
scratch end grain pine tele - first clear coat on !
JBA-4 - assembled - final tweaks
Telemonster double scale tele - finish tobacco burst on body and sand neck
Completed builds
scratch oak.rose gum Jazzmaster - assembled needs setup
MK-2 Mosrite - assembled - play in
Ash tele with Baritone neck - neck pup wiring tweaks and play in
Hey Wok where i was taught its just a load of old pfftOriginally Posted by wokkaboy
Scatterwound is really just another sales pitch, you are random winding multi layers of wire as apposed to the exact same number of winds per pass on the cross section of the bobbin that a machine does. What matters is the count of turns per square and the relation between the length and cross-section of a coil.
People think scatter wound has some sort of mojo to it, the coils can be a bit more random and inconsistent and theres no way your going to sit there and wind 20 coils a day by hand, thats where the automated machine comes in, consistency.
A couple of points straight from my notes: Electricity doesn't distinguish between layered and random wound coils, what matters is the count of turns per square and the relation between the length and cross-section of a coil.
A well wound coil is a well wound coil regardless if it's wound with professional equipment, or a sowing machine.
Some people like the inconsistency of scatter wound coils, some dont.
From my understanding, the advantage of scatter-winding in pickups is that you don't end up introducing something called Stray-Capacitance between the windings which would have a detrimental affect on tone, a pickup can be thought of as a large number of turns of wire around a metal core, in Electronics this is called an Inductor, I won't go too heavily into the theory of it since there's some complex mathematics involved, anyway, if the pickup was wound so that all the windings were neat and orderly, each winding would have a very small capacitance in parallel with it forming what's called a "Tank Circuit", this would resonate at a very high frequency, frequency resonances would show up as sharp peaks in the response of the pickup and in some cases the pickup would actually feed-back at these frequency resonances, so, to combat this pickup makers started winding their pickups with scatter-windings all jumbled up.
Remember that a pickup doesn't put-out much current when it's outputting a signal, it's more of a voltage signal, in Electronics, a circuit such as the typical pickup circuit in an electric guitar, that puts out a low-current voltage-signal is what's called a High-Impedance circuit, and stray capacitance effects are more pronounced in High Impedance circuits.
Last edited by DrNomis_44; 11-02-2016 at 01:58 PM.
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote