FAQ

All of our pickups are wound by hand after you place your order, we don’t have any stock. We do our absolute best to have a very fast turnaround on our orders and usually ship within a few days of you placing your order, however; that being said, we are a small shop, and if we have a lot of orders it could take us a week or more. Please give us at least 3 or 4 weeks tops, but expect to receive your order way sooner if we aren’t swamped.

Quite simply it stands for Reverse Wind Reverse Polarity which means the middle pickup (in reference to Strats which have 3 pickups) has its copper wound in the opposite direction (clockwise or counter clockwise) to the other pickups in the set, and it has its magnets poles flipped to be opposite to the other pickups as well. The effect this gives is that on a 5 way selector switch the in-between positions 2 and 4 will have a humbucker effect of removing the 60hz hum you typically hear on single coil pickups. This modification can also be done with Telecasters if the neck or bridge is wound opposite to its other pickup in the set.

When the middle single coil of a Strat or Tele Set is wound the same direction as the other pickups in the set you end up with more mid range in the in-between positions on each guitars selector switches. You’ll get a bit more volume as well across all pickup positions, however; you will also have 60hz hum as well. When Leo Fender started making Tele’s and Strats in the 1950’s all of his guitars had sets of pickups which were wound the same direction and polarity and in fact even though the 5-way selector switch was introduced in the mid 1970’s it wasn’t until the 1980’s before Fender started factory installing Reverse Wound Reverse Polarity middle pickups into their Strats and Tele’s. (many guitarists had been installing RWRP pickups as a “mod” since the mid 70’s

Staggering of magnet poles has been a “Strat thing” since the very early days of its introduction when fretboards had a radius of 7.25″. Leo had determined that by changing the height of the magnet poles it created a better sounding string balance, but the reality however is that it may not entirely be the case. A good example of this is that all the original Telecaster guitars up until about 1956 (after the Strat was introduced) had flat magnet poles and nobody is complaining about how those guitars sounded. Technically speaking flat magnet poles will offer you a bit more presence a bit more bass and output than vintage stagger pickups but everyone’s preference is different. We offer our pickups with the vintage stagger by default because its period correct however you can request flat magnets at the time of your order if you prefer it.

To put it simply DC resistance is only a very basic indication of how much power a pickup has. The thickness of wire plus the amount of turns of wire a pickup is only 1 part of formula which determines what the DC resistance will be, the other part is ambient temperature. You can technically hold a pickup in your hand for a short time and warm up the coil a little just from your skin contact and the DC resistance will change. SoulTone Pickups wind our pickups to specific turn counts using specific AWG thickness this is a much more accurate way to make pickups, so as a result the DC resistance reading itself is always an approximation.

Wax Potting is the process where pickups are dipped into a heated liquid mixture of paraffin and bees wax which coats and saturates the coil and solidify’s when cool which prevents sound vibrations from creating microphonic feedback at loud volumes.