"Its no secret that over the past 20 years I have had some of the best people in the business making great pickups to my specifications. In 2006, I finally decided it was time to start making my own pickups at Tyler Guitars. I spent about a year purchasing machines, equipment and materials and got the project rolling with single coils. At the end of 2006, we started on humbuckers and now have about a dozen different models of pickups developed.
I have found that this is a lot of fun, and early in 2007 purchased more winding machines. I will continue to develop additional models of pickups and later this year they will be available at dealers.
Recently, there has been a lot of talk about scatter winding, and hand-wound pickups. The principle of trying to duplicate the sound of the old fifties and sixties pickups is admirable, but the truth is that all those old pickups didnt sound great. They were very inconsistent. Some of them sounded good and a lot of them were just kind of dull.
We have spent time analyzing the winding patterns of pickups and we have developed a pattern for our single coils that sounds great. There is full range of tone with good presence on the top. This pattern is programmed into computer controlled winding machines so that every pickup will come out the same.
The secret to a great sounding pickup isnt just in some magic winding pattern, but also in the quality of the components. In my opinion, the lead wires (or hook-up wires) are just as important as any other single thing on the pickup. I have my wire custom made incorporating the best materials.
It is popular to use that old vintage cloth covered wire on single coil pickups. If you take a look at it, it has about 7 strands of tin plated industry standard copper wire. My wire is made of 18 strands of individually silver plated oxygen free copper wire, and then insulated with Teflon not cloth or crappy vinyl/plastic that melts when you solder to it. And the wires dont hum when you touch them either
If you look closely at the end of the black wire, you will notice that the wire is braided much like high-end audio cable.
You can hear the difference when you use the best wire. We wire our guitars completely with this wire, and the improvement in sound quality is remarkable.
The 4 conductor wire used on the humbuckers is made to the same specs. Also, the 4 wires inside the jacket are a larger gauge than industry standard.
My interest isnt in making the perfect vintage pickup. My goal is to make some of the best sounding pickups you can buy.
Check back from time to time as we get more information and pickup specifications up on this site."