Official Luthiers Forum!

I have a couple of electrics to build in the near future, and I have a couple other cheap old electrics that could use pickup upgrade. I've been thinking about winding my own.

So here's my question. If I take the plunge into the tooling and roll my own, how good of pickups can a newbie expect to turn out without years of experience? I don't need them to be great right off the bat, but if there's a long and steep learning curve before you can make a quality pickup, then maybe I'll avoid it.

Bump

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Give me 50 cents worth of regular.
Check my oil too, if you don`t mind,,,

Wind my own pickup.... no it has a key and starter.

Sorry, I just couldn't resist!

Yes, I've been winding pickups since 1969.

There's a lot of science to it, and it's also a dark art. Most of the explanations I see for how they work are incomplete at best as pickups work on two or three levels/theories at the same time. The big thing is to understand the 3 dimensional nature of how they sense string motion in space...that is far less easily grasped and is probably more important in the long run than how many turns of what gauge wire.

There is a huge amount of utter nonsense out there about pickups, and then there is a lot of stuff that is very hard to explain, yet is important like the use of nickel silver for humbucker covers vs. plated brass, the use of wood rather than plastic for humbucker spacers, the use of vulcanized fiber vs. plastic for Fender-style bobbins, the aging of the magnets, etc., etc.


I could not possibly cover a tutorial in less than about forty hours of writing.   Find all of Seymour Duncan's columns in Vintage Guitar, go on line and search via Google, look at the StewMac winder and I think they have a couple of books. Get some Strat pickup parts and wind one and just see what you hear.

Rick, not to put you on the spot publicly, but what do you think of Jason Lollar's book?

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Brock Poling
Columbus, Ohio
http://www.polingguitars.com

I haven't read it, but I know Jason, and he knows what he's doing. Most of his work that I know of is in that same territory that my partner Seymour Duncan covers..."traditional" designs...Strat, Tele, Humbucker, etc., and certainly in that niche, Jason is very, very good.

My own work has tended to be a bit afield of all that; even my repro of the Rickenbacker horseshoe pickup is visually similar, but magnetically "inside out". I haven't been terribly interested in near perfect repro pickups; that's not where I started (I designed all the early Alembic pickups), and now that there are several folks like Seymour and Jason out there, there's little point in doing that kind of thing. It's been done, it's being done, and the folks who do it nail it very well.

It all starts with three basic things:

1) A moving string made with ferrous material,
2) A magnetic field in which the string moves, and
3) A coil in the vicinity of the strings and the magnetic field into which is induced a current.

That's all there is to it.

The devil is in the details...