What makes a humbucker snarl?

[Stevenems]

I just installed a set of SD1 stacked humbuckers in my strat. At the same time I also installed copper shielding and removed all the normal ground loops in the wiring to prevent hum in the split mode, and that turned out to be really effective. In fact, I can barely notice a difference between humbucking mode and split mode sounds with the SD's, except that split is ever so slightly more bright sounding and a little louder.

My previous experience with humbuckers has been that they've had a sort of buzz-saw snarl to them. The SD1's just sound like quiet single coils to me, even in humcancelling mode. That's not a bad thing, but it was a little surprising - I was expecting a bigger difference in sound qualities between the split and series humcancelling modes.

So what makes for the more snarly humbucker sound in, say, an H2 - the side-by-side coil arrangement, hotter winding, or a combinanation of the two?

Also, out of curiousity, are Anderson electronics cavities shielded? I like traditional sparkly single coil sounds, but hum drives me crazy. If TAGs are well shielded, that will make my decision between whether to specify VA5's or SF1's much harder when I've saved up enough money to order a new guitar this summer...


Thanks,
Steve

[tom]

stacked humbuckers like the sd's are a completely dif animal than a side by side like the h2. in theory the bottom coil is not really hearing the string on a stack. being out of phase and hearing the string a "little" is why they have less output and less extended frequency range when in humcancelling mode. a side by side has two coils in series hearing the string in two slightly different harmonic places. when you msplit it, you lose have the pickup so you lose power but gain high and low end response.
we paint all control cavities and paint the universal pickup route with shielding paint. we also use copper tape under the controls in case something comes loose and makes a bad connection with the paint.

[Stevenems]

I figured if anyone did the right thing with the electronics it would be TAG, but I thought I'd ask. Now I'm pondering whether I really need humcancelling pickups in my next guitar. If there's no hum to cancel, why bother...

I do have to say it's unbelievably cool that Tom answers random questions from the peanut gallery himself. I've learned quite a bit just from lurking on the forums here. There's a very nice signal to noise ratio in the posts.

[John Price]

Hey Steve,
All the shielding in the world won't prevent the 60 cycle hum that you get with a traditional single coil pickup. If hum bothers you I would suggest you look into the SF series pickups. They have a great single coil vibe and gets rid of your hum. but they're still stacked!.......

[tom]

shielding can be very effective in some situations, and not in others. if you after consistent humlessness, SF's are hard to beat.

[dannopelli]

For me I just like the sound of singles. I do have two M equipped Andys and they sound very much like big singles. But I just like singles.

I just hit the tuner mute between songs. I can't stand the hum either, but I sacrifice it for the sound I like.