I wound several poly humbuckers to the exact same specs. They all sounded different. When I switched to an auto traversing winder with more precise tension control, the tone became more controllable. I think if you were to perform this test with an automated or CNC winder, you could eliminate the variables of hand traversing and finger tensioning that can differ significantly from one coil to the next despite one's best efforts to keep everything the same. Also, the way you magnetize to slugs is critical. Even the slightes variation from one bobbin to the next will have consequences on the tone.

Formvar sounded great everywhere.

ok now i understand why they use to wire pickups with plain enamel back in the day, sounds amazing

I only heard a real difference between Heavy Formvar and the other two. so this matches exactly what Dylan stated. Maybe incredible slight difference between Plain Enamel and Poly, but looking at your wound bobbins, that also might explain the difference (totally different appearance and hence, electrical properties). But anyhow, incredible good video! Thanks for the effort placed into this!

Thanks for this vert informative video. I like this "formvar' 42's..sweet bottom end. 🤘😊

Really good experiment. But, I hear that the Formvar is the most clear and dynamic. Hopefully that's not bc of some other factors. Agree with others that the magnet strength in this test should have been tested too.

Nice demonstration and very helpful. I have Formvar pickups in my strat and was happy to discover that I did also prefer them in this demo. The formvar's sound a bit fuller to me than the others, not as narrow. Although sometimes more narrow/aggressive is what people like! interesting stuff

Great video, like the down to earth approach when talking about tone, in my experience that is not the norm. To me the Formvar had more punch, plain enamel and poly sounded really close to each other and had a rounder balanced sound. On a side note like the increase in video frequency and the information or little details you to talk about like higher capacitance equals less clarity, and in the previous video Hum-Canceling Single Coil that 43 AWG sounds brighter than 44 AWG. Keep up the good work.

My experience with a lot of different Strat pickups is this- To my ears, enamel and polysol sounds brighter and snappier to me than formvar, which sounds like it has less highs and less of that snap and attack that I like. That's with them all having the same alnico 5 magnets and DCR, so the wire insulation is the only variable.

Great craftsman type videos here - thanks! I think the Formvar was the best of the 3.

I know it's hard to analyze listening via KZfaq...my take away. Formvar was clear with a bit of a nasally tone, Plain enamel very clear although a bit thin sounding. Poly seemed a bit less dynamic and slightly flat.Thanks for doing this comparison!

Really good and informative video. One of the best pickup comparison vids I've seen, and done correctly.

I liked the formvar in the bridge and the Enamel in both neck and bridge. To me, PE has a little more midrange power ;) I started winding a few years ago and mostly stick to PE Wire because of a thinner insulation...

Incredibly informative video, and the tonal difference in the audio came out very clear. Great content!

You may want to consider getting a different LCR meter for testing Inductance - I've been made aware that it doesn't test at a low enough frequency to provide correct readings. I use the DER EE DE-5000 and measure at 100hz. Same thing for capacitance.

Really interesting. The difference, to me, was very subtle and I don't know how important this would be when playing in a mix or after EQ. One experiment I would like to see is the difference in sound between underwound/normal/overwound pickups. I would guess the underwound would be brighter and favour the neck position, whereas the overwound would be darker and favour the bridge position.

Plain enamel and poly are very similar, but poly has less bass/low mids. I agree with all your other descriptions.

this dude went balls deep scientific in debunking all these pickup myths . awesomeness

Plain enamel - the juiciest tone IMO! Great video, thanks for posting!

Excellent video! Very well made! Thank you, God bless you!

Based on the Impedance, Inductance, and Capacitance differences, one would expect some slight differences in tone - how much needs to be calculated and graphed. Variation in winding scatter alone would cause tone differences (and based on the video there was plenty of scatter differences as the feed was not exactly the same for each pickup). Qualities like "tighter lows" and "bell like highs" are 100% subjective and cannot be quantified. Therefore, I would love to hear each pickup tested, with around 5 different players, playing the exact same chord, and the output for each player put on a scope to look at the frequency response in aggregate. Overall great video and appreciate the effort!

Formvar sounded best to my ears. Poly was more nasal and "cheap"

I appreciate that there are perceptible differences, but they are so minute that they would all be lost in a mix.

to my ears on yt the poly sits right in the middle i like using poly ,seems to stretch and not break. very cool demo

Liked the formware for neck, and plain enamel for bridge position !

Great test, could really hear the difference, thanks. With the variations in inductance, some of that could be down to manufacturing variations in the slugs, and the positioning of them relative to the coil. It would be interesting to wind the coils on plastic bobbins, and use the same magnets.

PE is the sound of those late 60s recordings... those high-mids are difficult to miss

All about the same. And fine.

Formvar has twice the insulation thickness (double-build) as poly and PE. Poly and PE have nearly exactly the same thickness of insulation and both kinds of insulation have nearly the same electrical permeability factor. So the difference in the latter two would have to be the wind itself. Formvar is going to sound different with the same turns because it has lower capacitance because of the larger space between the wires. But if all other variables are the same poly and PE wire should not sound "different".

Poly sounded sterile, lifeless. Plain Enamel is the clear winner for me and true to vintage tone.

The poly was the clearest, but yeah, also nearly clipped, less reverb. But that can be added. If a person wanted the best tones, I'd go with poly.

Thanks for the experiment, very usefull. It will help me to choose the next set of pups.

So I completely respect, DTT, but in the start of the video 0:19, he says the plain enamel .042 has the exact same insulation thickness as the "poly" so you shouldn't be able to hear a difference. News flash, you can. It's significant. I think I like the "poly" on the bridge better, but it's definitely a different tone.

PE and Poly are very similar. FormVar more fuller. Good test.

Hello there Schuyler, this is Paul from Pauls Pickup Place in the Netherlands. Please excuse my bad grammer, english is not my native tongue. With all due respect my friend, but NOT ALL VARIABLES ARE THE SAME like you state, I'm sorry! 1. You magnetised the poles with no controll over the strength of the magnetism, just two Neodymium magnets, good enough to remagnetise a broken pickup pole, but not accurate enough for this purpose. 2. You handguided the wire without no control over the tension. 3. The winding pattern is at random (scattered) that means that there is no controll over the way you put the wire onto the bobbin. Amongst others, these 3 factors influence the sound of the pickup dramatically. You can though, iff you are experienced enough, make pickups with a complete different tone with different winding patterns and different tension, with the same insulation. I enjoyed your video, but it's no proof or reliable documentation, you would need at least to use a professional megnetiser and a machine winder with control over the tension and the winding pattern(s). There is difference in tone due to the insulation, like Dylan beautifully explains in one of its video's, but there are more factors that determine the tone of a pickup. Kind regards Paul.

Definitely a noticeable difference between the three. Poly is articulate and has a pronounced punch and treble peak. Enamel is pretty much the same as Poly except in that treble peak, where it falls a little lower and is more even accross all 6 strings. The formvar has a more pronounced low and mid-range. Which is probably a characterstic of the physical difference in insulator thickness. Good video. I think you can probably account for a fair amount of that extra treble from poly by degussing your magnet and adjust the poles.

Love the video, super informative. Really curious to see this same experiment on bass pickups.

in the late 60's fender war using both poly and plain enamel...i can hear just a little difference in formvar. To me it is all about the insulation thickness, but i would like to experiment different wire insulation too. awesome vid.

Sounds almost identical. For me.

spot on analysis, plain enamel sounded better with most clarity. My question is " was this because of variations in winding process" perhaps that coil had a better pattern of overlap or something. But I don't know, I just figure that could be a variable.

Try double-billed poly-nylon. Also middle position, but turn the mounting thing around so it's as far back in the middle cutout as possible.

I want to see waveforms not a whiteboard. I'm listening on cranked studio speakers. unless you have measurements that have the string height to the magnet measurements down to the micrometer it's just a fun game and not science. what is the spread of the magnetic field/strength over the pickups?.. were all poles zeroed out as equal? too many variables.. I TOTALLY APPRECIATE you running the experiment. The differences are noticeable but not outside the scope of the other variants. If you rewrapped the same exact bobbin each time and set it into EXACTLY the same spot in the guitar ... that might be closer to science.. "3 identical strat pickups" really isn't a thing ;)... still.. killer vid and thanks for doing it.

Thanks for doing this interesting experiment. I suspect you have the decimal point in the wrong place for pickup capacitance. The capacitance of a Strat pickup might typically be 130pF or 0.13nF. You have to make this measurement at high frequency, say 100KHz so the impedance of the coil is high enough to get a reasonably accurate measurement of self capacitance. I'm not convinced the meter you are using can give you accurate measurement of coil capacitance. Output is directly proportional to the number of turns on the coil. Resistance is not a measurement of output, it is simply that the more turns you put on the coil the higher the resistance. I get really tired of people saying things like 'resistance output' or this pickup has a 6Kohm output. Inductance is a better indicator of how much signal a particular pickup will produce ... and even then inductance is not a measurement of output. Even with exactly the same number of turns on several coils using the same wire from the same spool you are likely to see variations in coil resistance due to variations in the copper, any wire stretching from tensioning and in coil temperature. Coil resistance varies a lot with temperature, you can hold a pickup coil in your hand for a few seconds, put it down, measure the resistance and watch it change as the coil cools down. When using wire with different insulators from different spools and therefore manufactured at different times, a larger difference in resistance is to be expected. All pickup coils have a main resonance due to the coil inductance in parallel with the coil self capacitance in parallel with the instrument cable capacitance (with the volume at maximum). Any other variations in a pickups frequency response are due to frequency cancellation related to the coils dimensions and its interaction with the magnetic field changes from the vibrating strings.

WHICH IS BETTER IS SUBJECTIVE WHEN IT COMES TO SOUND BUT THEY ALL ''SOUND'' DIFFERENT. Another problem is that PE wire and Formvar aren't the same as they have been in 50's 60's 70's. I use both and do like PE and but they are different, chemical compound is different and anyone of you dudes can check that out. So how much is ''vintage'' that is questionable. IMHO pickups from the past are unique not just due to wire moreover the vulcanized fiber was different to. I'm not saying old were better just different that is fact, Good video.

I wonder if anyone has ever tried winding a pickup with two different types of wire in parallel. All you would have to do is run two strands at once and half the number of turns to fill the bobbin. I wonder what that would do to the sound.

i have always suspected with the tolerances not being as accurate and the production not being as "tight", the vintage wire that was called "42awg" was/is probably closer to todays 41awg. I have never wound a pickup but i know they sell "thicker wire and a few makers actually will wind with them.

7:35 Formvar 7:41 Enamel 7:47 Polyurethane 7:52 Formvar 7:57 Enamel 8:03 Polyurethane

Very cool video. I'm doing some research at the moment for my first pickup build. Currently building my winder and had wire choice on my mind. Thank you for this. Building a tele set of singles. Going with the formvar........ I think lol

How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? The never ending pursuit of tone. I don't hear anything seriously different between any of them.

It looks like the wire you are calling "Fomvar" is actually Plain Enamel. Google them and the color difference is obvious. The plain enamel coating makes the color dark.

2.2 H and 33nF will give a resonance frq at about 600 Hz.. You can’t measure the capacitance this way.

Appreciate you making this. I just bought some plain enamel wire having watched this (and a previous video where he did a blind test and it was the one that sounded best to me there, too). My only critique would be to make your tests blind, too, and then reveal which was which at the end. Still, even without that, your test confirmed what my ears told me with the other vid. Thanks!

I liked PE. Dylan is a good view too.

I think that if you had not labeled the wire types in the sound clips, no one would be able to tell the difference.

Question regarding the tape on the poles: Is that a vintage spec thing? For some reason it's stored in my (admittedly often-confused and potentially fallable) brain that the bobbins were lacquer coated before winding rather than taped. It's probably a barely there, imperceptible difference in coil geometry, but just more of a technical curiosity for me (on my quest towards omniscience).

I wish you would demo them with some distortion so we could hear more character....

You sure that poly wire insulation is the same thickness as the PE? The standard polyurethane wire (Elektrisola) on the Remington sight is listed as "heavy" and just slightly thicker than the HF wire. The high-end level sounds closer to the HF on the bridge. The PE sounds warmer. Maybe just less highs, but could be stronger fundamentals. Other variable might be at play, but at 1/16" from the strings even a difference of less than 1/64" between each example would be audible, as half or twice the distance is a ~6dBV change.

I'm very surprised. I started this video with a confirmation bias favoring Plain Enamel, ended up favoring the Formvar by quite a margin. Go figure.

I like the formvar most

Pure merchandising only

What do you mean by aggressive that is not a technical term . That sounds more subjective. You should have used the same exact turns on all the coils

Bottom line is market value. If your pickup sounds the same as my pickups, but I use wire that costs 1/3 of what you use in your pickups does not mean I can charge 3 times what you charge for pickups. If someone pays me an over inflated price, that's fine and dandy, but that doesn't mean that I am being fair does it?

I like the thick coated wire best sound

1 min into your video, I have to say, the theory that same thickness insulator will yield the same characteristics is wrong. The dialectric constant of the insulating will influence the capacitance of the coil, so they'll only be the same if the dialectric property of the insulating material is the same on all 3 .... I hope you're gonna show us measurements of the 3 coils

Hello, very good test. Formvar if you need little more bottom, enamel if sparkle, poly sounded somehow dead?

Formvar is the best !

In a crowded bar, deep in the mix.....none of this matters.

The capacitance measurements are way off. Pickups have capacitance in the picofarad range. That's not a suitable LCR meter for measuring guitar pickups. Get something like a DE 5000 and look online for how to use it with guitar pickups. The primary difference between them will be capacitance, so it's very very important to have accurate values there.

Great Guitar, Pickup All. thx~ enjoy~

Formvar difference may be due to larger dimension of cool due to thicker insulation. I wonder how single build formar would compare to the enamel coated wire.

I think it would be interesting to make a voice coil to act as a surrogate string. You could then use software like Room EQ Wizard, usually used to characterise the frequency response of speakers and do a frequency sweep. You would be able to measure the relative EQ of each pickup - ie linearity of the frequency response, distortion, etc in a way that’s independent to guitar setup.

What year did fender go to enamel? I've heard some 64-66 strats with a FAT ASS sounding neck pickup like I've never heard in my life. Maybe that has to do with wire construction?

Are noiseless tele pickups just stacked humbuckers?

You have a pickup testing guitar. Praise BOB!

Great video man thanks

Poly sounded kinda cheap to my ear. PE would be my choice FWIW

Given amps, pedals, and chords used in pop music I doubt anyone but Mel Bay could tell the difference. I'm struggling with winding given the wire breaking. (Getting good at soldering hair) i insulate repairs with poly. Liked your comment re just enough tension to hold wire. Question: the small sleeve where wire connects to bobbin came out. Can I just wrap wire in hole and solder it or do I need that sleeve?

The vintage fenders now probably have a Loose coil? Right? So of you like the tone of them now, wouldn't it make sense to build a repro with a looser coil as well? If you have any insight into that, how would you describe mid 60s strat pickups? Is decharging poles necessary to get a vintage equivalent

Hi, what kind of magnets did you use to build the pickups? Very interesting explanation for beginners. Thank you

So, I'm really trying to make an exact PAF vintage like 50's Lp type deL

Thanks graet video. Some day can you flip a magnet and build an out of phase Humbucker?

I agree

Would you do another video but with wax potting?

A question about potting. Some say that only potting the bobbins and not the winding is the best way to keep tone. Thoughts? I had someone build a lot of pickups for me and I requested all unpotted. They sound awesome! However I can't play live with them. No way. So my question is basically what's the LEAST intrusive potting method?

nice comparison

What is the thickest gauge you can wind a coil with? I wonder what it would sound like.

Thanks for your time video is really amazing

Question: Within these three pickups, there is a variance of 60Ω, 70mH and 0.0008µf. What is the typical range of these variances when you wind 3 'identical' pickups?

Onde posso comprar essas bobinas de fios ? Algum site específico ?.

And you could wind 3 pickups all with the same wire and have just as much difference, pretty much none. In a band mix even more none.

Interesting video, but slightest touch of an eq of any kind will have a much much bigger effect in sound than this.

Is each pickup wound thousands of revolutions?

This would have been a really good comparison, but these are handwound pickups, then all the comparison is nonsense

Hi, Formvar is a norwegian word ? Thanks in advance, you a have a great great channel!

I liked formvar better than the others

I don’t think that capacitance your mesure is real. Calculated capacitance is below 200pf

Where do you buy the wire

Witch wire yo think is better and recommend for bass guitar pickups? Any video of winding stacked bass humbucker?

What kind of lacquer do you use to dip bobbins in, to insulate poles?

I can´t hear any difference between Enamel and Poly