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making your own electric guitar pickups


Li10

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hey can someone describe to me how pickups are made and what makes good pickups good? Humbuckers are just two single coils next to each other, right...?

 

Yeah, I'm thinking about making my own electric guitar. It would be awesome to have my own instument.

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Stew mac sells guitar building parts but does has some how to info. The short answer is that a double coil is basically two single coil wired together in a way that lets them canceel the huming form the cycling of electricity. There are construction differences even between different type of double coils.

 

More info below form people that know a heck of a lot more than I do about it.

 

http://www.stewmac.com/freeinfo/I-4000.html -Everything you most likely wanted to know about guitar wiring.

 

http://www.stewmac.com/freeinfo/I-1465.html -Here is specific about making pickups.

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I posted this in the other thread.

You can use #42, #42, or #44 wire, The bigger the wire the fewer winds you can get on the bobbin and the brighter the coil will sound. If you are doing only one or two, you can use a cordless drill for the winding motor. the start of coil A is connected to the start of coil B and both coils are wound in the same direction. Here is a link to stewmac's instructions

http://www.stewmac.com/shop/Electron...1.html#details

Here's how I do it, minus a few steps.

http://mysticpickups.com/MysticPickups/Assembly.html

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Read About magnetism , mettallurgy, and simple electronics theres an iron yolk surrounded by a plastick and the plastick is wraped with copper wire(silver wire would be better as it has less resistance making it a more accurate conducter).

The more wire thats wrapped around the coil the heavyer the sound ,the less wire will give more of a telecaster sound.Wire comes in different thickness I dont know whats best but as long as its above 0.5 mm thick

If you make a humbucker ,both yolks have to be Exactly the same size And the wire coil has to be Exactly the same legnth.In order that they are perfectly balanced.

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hmm maybe I should make single coils... thanks for the tip about less wire giving a more telecaster sound, that'll come in useful, as I'm aiming for a sort of custom tele/random guitar. Sort of with the tele sound, but with better.... uh, stuff.

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Humbuckers are not just two coils next to each other. The coils are wound in the opposite direction, so that any signal induced in them electrically is reverse polarity, cancelling itself out. The same thing would happen with string vibrations, except that the magnets are also reversed, so that the signal induced in the coils by the strings are therefore reversed as well. As a result, the electrical noise is reversed once, and gets cancelled out. String vibrations get reversed twice, and so come out in polarity. Pretty damn clever, I say.

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