Size Does Matter

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Filtertron with skinny bobbins	Humbucker bobbins are noticeably wider
	Mini Humbucker bobbins. The difference is obvious and so too is the sound.

Size Does Matter with pickups …. and the coils of Mini Humbuckers & Filtertrons are too darn small.  UPDATE December-2024:  we have solved the problems with these types of pickups, check out our fabulous new Mini-Bucker's and our Humbucker-Tron in the humbucker section.

Here's what we previously observed/believed: Cramming small gauge wire into small bobbins inevitable results in excessive Parasitic Coil Capacitance***. In these pickups Parasitic Coil Capacitance acts like an eq circuit and singles out certain harmonic frequencies most audibly on the low wound strings robbing them of important midrange frequencies which impacts severely on definition and attack.

The Gretsch Filtertron from some accounts produces a twangy sound but when I played one recently I immediately heard the low E and A string sounded muffled and very indistinct, more like a Thud.  This suited Chet Atkins style of playing where he wanted a convincing Bass accompaniment on the same instrument he was playing.  But not for those moderns who expect the tonal characteristics to prevail on all 6 strings like on a good Strat pickup. I have since read an interview with Ray Butts and it seems Chet Atkins wanted that dull, thuddy wound string sound for his finger picking style where his thumb would play bass lines and his fingers played the melody lines on the other strings. Well that's fine if you play Chet Atkins style.  And BTW Ray Butts was something of a genius in figuring out how to give Chet what he wanted.

Only the D & G strings have any kind of focus and twang, and even then it wasn’t quality twang but more the product of upper midrange spikes that are the precursors to ear piercing harshness. I wondered if the pickups I tested were somehow faulty but on every sound clip on the Internet I heard the same thing, and then I read on some forums players complaining about the very same thing.

Players complain about the indistinct sound of the low wounds with humbuckers but Mini-buckers and Filtertrons are far worse simply because their coils are too darn small.

Compact (economy) pickups such as dimarzio Area (Strat) series suffer from the same problem.

Kinman in the past has refused to make these types of pickups because we know there is no way to improve their sound because of the limited dimensions, in other words it’s against our religion to use flawed designs (and the Sidewinder is another one).

UPDATE 20-Oct-2017: Boss Chris is a tireless innovator always looking for solutions to problems. Kinman is very pleased to announce that we have found a solution to improve the sound of Filtertrons and Mini-humbuckers outta sight. We expect a sound with greater clarity much like a single coil and a fair degree of twang from the low wound strings. We hope to bring out a range of products late 2019.  And we did with our range of Mini-Buckers and Humbucker-Tron.

Parasitic Coil Capacitance*** Parasitic capacitance (C_s) limits the self-resonant frequency of the coil, above which the coil will not behave as an inductor any more. In a first-order approximation, the parasitic capacitance of a planar coil usually has two major components: the capacitance between turns and the capacitance between layers. Courtesy of https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/parasitic-capacitance