How I Built My First Guitar Pickup
- January 19th, 2012
- By admin
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Being a keen guitarist and someone who has dabbled in making various guitars for countless years, the urge to make my very first guitar pickup was too much to handle. For those who don’t know, guitar pickups are to a guitar exactly what a microphone is to a singer. In other words, it’s a method of enabling the guitar to be electronically amplified.
I gathered everything I possibly could from the web and many different publications, and with my history in customising various guitars I was prepared to take on the task. As my guitar is a Les Paul type I will be building a humbucker style pickup in contrast to the single coil pickups found on most Fender guitars.
The first thing I had to do was to put together each of the guitar pickup parts required for the building procedure. Thankfully a UK pickup company offered for sale every part I needed for my task. Lovely! The second thing I needed to do was to build a simple pickup winding system. Basically anything that electronically rotates and enables control of the speed might be utilised at the heart of your pickup winder. An elementary motor or your old electric powered drill will be sufficient with some customisation. I went for the drill method which I postioned in a wooden structure. It’s also vital that you include some kind of digital or mechanical counter to count the rotations as how many turns is vital to the output of the completed pickup. I used a simple reed switch attached to a digital counter which functioned flawlessly.
I am unable to get into the building of the machine here but suffice to state that it was quite easy. There are lots of articles and videos online on the subject.
In the centre of the pickup are two plastic bobbins which may carry 5000 turns each of 42 AWG wire. This bobbin wire is as fine as a human hair and consequently requires practice to handle and spin. Once the bobbins are spun they require thin jump leads to be soldered to the beginning and end of each coil. One of the bobbins has 6 steel slugs hard pressed inside the holes and the other has 6 pole screws added. The finished bobbins are then installed on a metal baseplate and soldered where needed. There’s an Alnico 5 magnet inserted between the bobbins and the base along with a maple spacer and keeper bar.
Once everything is screwed and soldered in place it was time to test my pickup, and to my amazement, I had an excellent sounding pickup.
I’ve clearly whizzed through the progression and yes, I did make a few mistakes that required correction, but I must say how rewarding it was. Now I’m completely ready for my 2nd effort.