Scatter winding

Winding a pickup coil by hand or on a machine that traverses the wire unevenly, so the turns are not laid in neat rows.

The result is a coil with more distributed capacitance and a slightly different inductance than a perfectly layered one, which usually means a little more high-frequency openness and a less pronounced resonant peak. Since no two hand-wound coils come out identical, individual pickups of the same model vary slightly, which is part of the appeal to players who want a specific specimen. Machine-wound coils are more consistent, and consistency is not the same as quality.

Example: two supposedly identical hand-wound single coils can differ audibly, and the one a player prefers may simply be the better specimen.

Scatter winding

See also