"Queen of Tone" Abigail Ybarra Talks Fender History and 57 Years of Pickup Winding

I think they said that she would still hand wind special orders upon request.

Hendrix might have not cared if they were hand wound or not back then either. I think the cork sniffing trend hadn't yet started at that point. I imagine he would just play a bunch of strats and pick a couple that sounded and felt best.

Machine wound was probably also marketed as preferable at that point in time.

 

You take any Strat with standard Strat pickups, and put it into a fully cranked late '60s Marshall stack you are going to get magic. It wound't make a noticeable difference who wound the pickups.

 

The set I have is hand dated 7-1-11.

 

After reading the article I find Abigail charming, but she didn’t make hand wound pickups for much of her time at Fender. But, I never cared for Fenders machine wound pickups due to ice pick highs. Even on Custom Shop models. Hand winding seems to solve much of that.

 

The strange thing is, I get this sense too, even though I'm not sure there's a technical basis for it, or that I'm not biased in thinking this. I tested the RLC values for some machine wound Fender pickups, but I didn't find them to be out of the ordinary.

Most recently I got a set in a MIM Hendrix Monterey Strat, and I feel like I have to work the tone controls more than usual to tame the high end, so Im thinking I'll pull them and see once again, if there is some explanation for it, or if I'm just biased, knowing what's under the hood. The scary thing is that for as much as things have become demystified with additional data and understanding, I still get sucked into that "mojo" type of thinking.

 

CBS only owned Fender for 20 years so if she started hand winding again with the move to Corona then she spent 37 years of her life hand winding pickups vs 20 years with an automatic winder.

 

From how it was worded, I got the impression she was only moved back to hand winding once the vintage rage came about, not immediately upon the sale from CBS. Fender still makes liberal use of machine wound pickups.