JASON LOLLAR
The Pickup Artist
Jazzmaster pickup
I could go on about this for some time but let
me start by saying I was once adamant about
not potting anything I made, but that attitude
has been tempered through experience. For
instance, on Fender style pickups—Strats,
Teles and any variation using that type of
construction—the wax actually helps hold the
pickup together, preserving it from becoming
more microphonic over time. If your guitar
gets bumped, the coil can shift and become
loose if the pickup is not potted. This happens
on vintage pickups quite often. I get calls all
the time from people complaining about how
their vintage pickup all of a sudden became
too microphonic to use.
I use the Crock-Pot you mentioned, actually I
have two and they are outfitted with a gasket
so I can hook them up to a vacuum pump.
Each pickup design I make is put under vacuum for a specific amount of time at a particular wax temperature. The time varies from ten
seconds to two minutes, depending on the
results I want. I like to have a particular level
of microphonics for each pickup design—too
much microphonics makes the pickup difficult
to use for most players and too little makes
Strat pickup (white) and ES-300 (tortoise) for
1940s-style Gibson lap steels
the pickup less lively sounding—so at the
least ten seconds if only to hold the outer layers of coil in place. Potting a pickup longer
than two minutes can make it sound dull.
Often on imported pickups you’ll see so much
wax they can’t clean it all off. If you don’t
allow the excess wax to drain out before it
cools, then if your guitar gets left in the car
on a hot day the wax will come out and wind
up all over the guitar. A well-cleaned potting
job should look like the pickup hasn’t been
potted at all.
“Scatter wound” shows up frequently on
your website, and is a frequently used
buzzword in the boutique arena. Could you
define that technique for our readers and
how it affects the sound of a pickup?
There are different definitions of what scatterwound means. I think most people use it
as a term to differentiate between winding by
hand, which means guiding the wire back and
forth by hand in a more random pattern while
the pickup is spun with a machine, versus a
machine that automatically traverses the wire
across the pickup for you. It’s argued that the
machine lays the coil with each layer of the
wire parallel to the next which increases the
way the coil acts like a capacitor and makes
it bleed off treble as capacitance increases. In
practice, auto traverse machines don’t really
work like that.
Scatterwound can also mean that you are
using more pitch to the traverse; this means
rather than going across from side to side of
the coil, traversing the distance once for each
100 times the coil rotates, you go across 20
or more times per 100 rotations. Another way
to look at it is if you unwind a pickup with one
traverse per 100 rotations, you would unwind
100 turns before the wire changes direction
across the coil and in the latter you would
unwind 20 turns before the wire changes
direction. Less turns per layer makes a bulkier
coil with more air space in it, which normally
translates to a clearer tone that can also
sound fatter at the same time.
Does age have a discernable effect
on a pickup’s tone? Can your pickups
sound as good, or better, than true
vintage examples?
I have a feeling the wire in the coil does
change a little with age, but I have no way to
prove that. The old magnets do have some
different impurities than new ones—I have
sent parts off to be vaporized and run through
a spectrum analysis machine. Also, magnets
will discharge to various levels after they are
put into most types of pickup assemblies.
Most old pickups, if you recharge them, will
read noticeably higher than before. On most
of my pickups, I discharge the magnets partially—various levels of magnetic strength do
sound noticeably different. I try to make each
pickup design I sell sound as best as it can.
I developed all of my line over time, making
changes and comparisons to previous versions
to really polish the results.
Lollar Concert Archtop Guitar
I listen to countless vintage instruments and
compare them to my pickups as well. Often
there is some difference, but even old pickups
sound different from each other. I am not
completely concerned if mine sound exactly
like some vintage example. My concern is that
if you were to compare mine, would it sound
favorably similar? Even to the point where the
difference it has is considered a strong point,
worthy of getting a comment that it may even
sound better than the best vintage example.
There are so many esoteric claims and theo-
