Pickup winding question . . .

Paul_C

I saw this picture just now and it got me thinking.



What would it sound like if you used the same base, magnets etc. but wrapped the wire round the outside (making it a single coil unless you stacked them) of both instead of having two separate coils?

Funkfingers

Wrap the copper wire around the outside of what?

Around the outer sides of both bobbins - as if they were one wide form coil?

I predict Not Good.

Paul_C

Yes, so the wind makes a wide, rectangular shape.

It may well sound awful, but surely someone has tried it ? 

thermionic

It would just be a very wide single coil.

ICBM

I wouldn't work well because it would be a single coil with opposite magnetic poles within the coil area, which would cancel each other out to a large extent. Given the separation of the polepieces it would produce some signal, but most likely weak and/or with a lack of fundamental and lower harmonics, since their length on the string is more than the distance between the polepieces and so would cancel themselves.

Alegree

That's basically a P90 on a larger scale

Funkfingers

... with the coil in a sub-optimal position relative to the bar magnet.

Perhaps, if a very thick bar magnet were positioned, on its edge, in the middle of the hypothetical wide rectangular copper coil, it might stand a chance. It would look like a mutant Charlie Christian pickup.

ICBM

Alegree said:

That's basically a P90 on a larger scale

Except that a P90 has only one row of polepieces, with a single magnetic polarity through the coil even though there are two magnets.

This 'single humbucker' would probably sound more like what happens if you reverse one magnet in a P90.

Alegree

ICBM said:

Alegree said:

That's basically a P90 on a larger scale

Except that a P90 has only one row of polepieces, with a single magnetic polarity through the coil even though there are two magnets.

This 'single humbucker' would probably sound more like what happens if you reverse one magnet in a P90.

Having made thousands of P90s, I'm pretty well versed on how they work.

Reversing one magnet in a P90 gives a very weak magnetic field. This hypothetical pickup is a bit like the lace sensor design with the string seeing positive and negative, albeit both inside the coil, as opposed to one on either side. I'd imagine it may work quite well, actually.

Sounds like an interesting experiment when I have a little window in my schedule.

Winny_Pooh

Alegree said:

ICBM said:

Alegree said:

That's basically a P90 on a larger scale

Except that a P90 has only one row of polepieces, with a single magnetic polarity through the coil even though there are two magnets.

This 'single humbucker' would probably sound more like what happens if you reverse one magnet in a P90.

Having made thousands of P90s, I'm pretty well versed on how they work.

Who bought them?

Alegree

Winny_Pooh said:

Alegree said:

ICBM said:

Alegree said:

That's basically a P90 on a larger scale

Except that a P90 has only one row of polepieces, with a single magnetic polarity through the coil even though there are two magnets.

This 'single humbucker' would probably sound more like what happens if you reverse one magnet in a P90.

Having made thousands of P90s, I'm pretty well versed on how they work.

Who bought them?

?? My customers