Getting Started With Coil Winding

Welcome back, readers. This blog is going to focus on a bit of a history lesson about guitar pickups and provide links to resources if you want to try this for yourself.

My definition of a guitar pickup is this, a coil of wire around magnets that create an electromagnetic field.  These electromagnets then translate the vibration of metal strings into an electronic signal. I know that is not 100% accurate, but so what, and companies like Fishman have innovated on the concept a lot over the last 15+ years. I know there are more than magnetic pickups too. Wikipedia has a broader definition here, and I’m linking to it again below the images. Read it. Understand it. It will help you understand your equipment better.

How many different types of pickups are there? A lot. I am going to bucket these into the most popular categories

• Single Coils – As the name says, one single-coil pickup typically produces a 60 cycle hum and susceptible to microphonic interference. Mostly a moot point with modern construction.
• Humbuckers – Two coils wired with the poles are in opposite directions, the north pole on one coil and south on another.
• Active – More a category, but requires a power source
• Passive – Do not require a power source, Jeff Owens wrote a great quick article describing the difference between active and passive electronics
• Piezo – uses piezoelectric transducers (all pickups are transducers by the way) to capture string vibrations and convert to sound.

I am a fan of humbuckers and here is a pretty neat site, PAF Humbuckers, that has some history of humbucker guitar pickups. And of course, the obligatory Wikipedia entry on pickups (musical technology)

Stepping back a bit, sometime in 2012 or so, I was figuring out what some new hobbies should be. I narrowed it down to two. Both much more expensive than I anticipated, my two options were home brewing, because, why not and yes, I’m that guy or pickup winding, again, aforementioned “I’m that guy.” Anyway, I decided to go with homebrewing as my hobby of choice. I figured after the initial investment; it wouldn’t be such an expensive hobby. What I discovered, though, was, homebrewing is a costly hobby. The other homebrewing truth I learned quickly is this; everyone wants to drink the product, but not will to give up most of a Saturday to help.

Fast forward five years to 2017, I finally started amassing all the components to build a coil winder. I quickly realized I don’t have the patience to get everything to work as it should. Undeterred I tried to come up with plans to get the winder together while consuming as much information as I could until I made the time to build my winder. Ultimately, I found a Schatten winder clone, and it cost about half the price.

Now that I am in business, so to speak, it is just a matter of figuring out the best process to build and practice. Rather than showing all those steps, here are what I’ve found helpful on my journey.

Video Courtesy of Seymour Duncan  the full series can be found here

Check out Seymour’s Studio from famed pickup builder Seymour Duncan. In this series of videos, Mr. Ducan recounts how he started winding guitar pickups. His stories are an awesome oral history of one company, but I suspect a lot of other builders began this way.

Probably the definitive guide to building pickup winders and winding your own pickups. Written by the great Jason Lollar, I highly recommend.

Another StewMac resource, featuring Erik Coleman, and in the above video, he shows some cool tips and fixes a “dead” vintage guitar pickups. The video is courtesy of StewMac and their trade secrets series more greate content can be found here

There are plenty of other resources out throughout the web, search “guitar pickup winding” and you can find a lot of great resources.

No matter how you or I get started, the key is to practice. I read or saw this advice somewhere; when you first start winding coils, and that is all a pickup is, an electromagnetic coil, practice with thread. Learning to wind and create patterns this way will help you develop the muscle memory and control necessary to work with such fine gauge wire.

Thanks for reading, and I hope this helps you start to chase your tone.