Winding your
own pickups.

The short version

Winding pickups is easy to learn and hard to master. But the design side is simpler than it looks, because you only have three things to adjust:

1. The wire. How thick it is
2. The magnet, what type, and how strongly charged
3. The turns, how many times you go round

The numbers, in one place

Item	Figure	Note
Standard wire	42 AWG	Roughly 75% of all pickups. Fuller, warmer.
High output wire	43 AWG	Thinner, so more turns fit. Darker, hotter.
Vintage PAF recipe	42 AWG, Alnico 2, 5,000 to 5,500 turns per bobbin	Around 8 to 8.2 kΩ for the pair
Hotter version	Same, but 6,500 to 7,000 turns	More output, fewer highs
Metal / hard rock	43 AWG, Alnico 5, ~7,500 turns
Pole spacing, standard	50 mm	Always used at the neck
Pole spacing, F-spaced	53 mm	Wider bridges, Floyd Rose
Smallest audible change	~250 to 500 turns	100 turns is not worth worrying about
Home built winder	Cheap	A bought one runs many times the price
Turn counter	Inexpensive	Comes with the reed switch
Expect to break a wire	~1 pickup in 10	Even when you know what you're doing

How a pickup makes a sound

A pickup is a bobbin holding two things: magnets and a lot of very fine wire.

The magnets create a magnetic field that surrounds the whole pickup. Pluck a steel string above it and the string's movement changes the shape of that field. A changing magnetic field pushes the electrons in the coil back and forth, and that movement is your signal.

Pluck the open A string and it vibrates 110 times a second. The electrons in the coil move back and forth 110 times a second. The amp makes that bigger, and you hear an A.

Every bobbin has a start and an end, the first bit of wire you attach and the last. By convention the start is your positive and the end is your ground.

The wire

You'll use 42 or 43 gauge magnet wire. Both are about as thick as a human hair and both break easily. They're coated in a very thin layer of enamel, and that coating is the only thing stopping the coil shorting against itself.

	42 AWG	43 AWG
Thickness	Thicker	Thinner
Turns that fit	Fewer	More
Sound	Fuller spectrum, warmer, good mids and highs	Darker, more output
Used for	Vintage and most standard pickups	Metal and hard rock

Roughly three quarters of all pickups, guitar and bass, use 42 gauge. If you're copying anything vintage, that's your wire.

And if you're worried the wire looks too thin to carry your sound, it isn't. You could wire an entire guitar with hair thin wire and it would work perfectly well.

Resonant peak, in plain terms

Every pickup has one frequency it handles best. That's its resonant peak. Frequencies below it come through well. Frequencies above it drop away quickly.

• Low resonant peak = warmer, darker pickup
• High resonant peak = brighter pickup

The more wire you put on a bobbin, the lower the resonant peak goes. That's the trade off in one sentence: winding for more output always costs you highs.

A pickup with an 8 kHz peak passes everything under 8,000 Hz well, shines right around there, and rolls off sharply above it.

Magnets

Alnico is an alloy of aluminium, nickel and cobalt. It comes in numbered grades, and the two you'll actually use are Alnico 2 and Alnico 5.

Magnet	Character	Usually found in
Alnico 2	Softer, warmer, lower output. Cannot be charged hard enough to sound harsh.	Vintage pickups, neck position
Alnico 5	Stronger, brighter, more output, and can be charged lightly to behave like an Alnico 2	Bridge position, higher output
Ceramic	Very strong. Can sound brittle and harsh if overcharged.	Cheap stock pickups, and some good high output ones

On ceramics: they can be charged and demagnetized like any magnet, but they need a far stronger field than a home built charger will produce. In practice, what you buy is what you get, so buy the right strength to begin with.

Ceramic magnets are also why so many cheap guitars come with pickups people dislike. Overcharged ceramic sounds shrill, with too much top end and no warmth. That isn't ceramic's fault, you can build an excellent ceramic pickup, but you have to know the magnet's strength going in.

Rough versus polished magnets

Alnico bars come polished or rough. Polished ones are more consistent and more predictable. Rough ones vary from piece to piece, and the shape of the magnetic field around them is slightly stranger.

Which means: if you want the vintage sound, use the rough ones. The inconsistency is part of what you're chasing.

Recipes: start from a known pickup

The most useful thing you can do is pick one pickup as your baseline and learn it properly. Then every other design is a change from something you already understand.

Now move from it:

You want	Change
Blues, jazz, classic tones	The baseline, unchanged
A bit more output and brightness	Swap to Alnico 5
70s and 80s rock	Wind to 6,500 to 7,000 turns
90s rock, grunge, metal	43 gauge, Alnico 5, around 7,500 turns

That's the whole design process. Know one pickup, then ask what each change will do.

Break the rules on purpose

The two bobbins don't have to match. Put 5,500 turns on one and 4,300 on the other. Use 42 gauge on one and 43 on the other. Both are perfectly valid, and this is where interesting pickups come from.

I made one pickup this way once, 43 gauge on one bobbin, 42 on the other, with different turn counts. Ended up with heavy low end from the 43 side and clear highs from the 42 side at the same time.

How much difference does a change make?

100 turns either way is nothing. If you aim for 5,500 and land on 5,450, nobody on earth will hear it. You need 250 to 500 turns before the difference becomes obvious.

Phase and polarity

A humbucker is two coils that cancel hum. For that to work, two things must be reversed between them:

• The magnetic polarity, one coil north up, the other south up
• The winding direction. The end of one coil connects to the start of the other

Reverse both and the hum cancels while the string signal adds. Reverse only one and you cancel the signal instead.

Why Strat positions 2 and 4 are quiet

On a modern Strat the pickups are usually north, south, north. Any pickup on its own hums. But turn on two together and the opposite polarities cancel. Which is why the in between positions are the quiet ones.

Older Strats often had all three the same way round, so every position hummed.

Matched sets, and why they matter for coil splits

If you build two humbuckers and both have their magnets the same way round, they work fine together. But split them both to single coil mode and they will hum, or sound out of phase, because the two live coils are no longer opposite.

The fix is simple: flip the magnet in one of them. Now they cancel in split mode too. That's a real part of what "matched set" means.

For a three single coil set, you can also wind them slightly differently on purpose, say bridge at 6.5 k, middle at 6.25 k, neck at 6 k, so they balance against each other in use.

The winder

You don't need to buy one. A perfectly good winder can be built cheaply, for a fraction of what a bought one costs.

Mine is a cheap cordless drill with the handle cut off, its trigger switch wired to a toggle, and a low voltage garden lighting transformer for power. Because the transformer puts out AC and the drill needs DC, it runs through a rectifier, four diodes, with a capacitor smoothing the output.

Onto the chuck goes a rod with a flat plate welded on, and the plate must be perfectly square to the shaft. Any tilt and everything downstream fights you.

Counting turns

A magnet on the back of the plate and a reed switch beside it. Every time the magnet passes, the switch closes and the counter increments. Counters like this are inexpensive and come with the reed switch included.

Other approaches work too. Some people fit the counter to a sewing machine and use the foot pedal to control speed. What matters is only that you can count turns, lay the wire evenly, and run at a sensible speed.

One more detail: check the wire guide for rust or roughness before you start. Any snag can grab the wire and stretch or break it.

What comes in a kit

Kits from the usual luthier suppliers save real time. A humbucker kit gives you:

• Two bobbins, one screw side (with holes) and one slug side (without)
• Pole screws and slugs, note the chamfered edge on the slugs goes into the bobbin
• A magnet, usually already charged, in your choice of Alnico 2 or 5
• A nonmagnetic baseplate. Brass or nickel silver
• Two spacers, one for each side
• Small brass screws, four conductor lead wire, and short internal wires

Single coil kits come with the magnets already installed at staggered heights. That stagger follows the fretboard radius, with the B string pole deliberately lowered so it doesn't dominate. You can push the poles up or down to fine tune the balance.

Check new bobbins for molding flash, little sharp ridges of plastic left over from manufacture. Scrape them off with a knife before winding, or they'll cut through your wire's insulation.

Winding, step by step

Anchoring the start

1. Tape over the pole pieces so the coil can't touch bare metal
2. Thread the wire through the eyelet, then back through two or three more times so it cannot pull loose
3. Wind a few turns on by hand
4. Double sided tape the bobbin to the winder plate, centerd

Guiding the wire

Let the wire drop to the floor directly beneath the guide, then hold it lightly between your fingers. You're doing two jobs at once: moving the wire back and forth across the bobbin, and controlling tension by how hard you pinch.

Not too tight, not too loose, and consistent throughout.

Scatter winding

Moving the wire back and forth in no fixed pattern is called scatter winding, and it's how nearly every vintage pickup was made, because they were wound by hand.

Because it's random, no two pickups come out identical, even at the same turn count and resistance. That variation is a large part of why certain winders became famous: people asked for that person specifically, because their technique had a sound.

Reading what the wire is telling you

Two ways to tell how it's going:

• Look, using the strobe light
• Feel, if the wire keeps getting pulled toward one area, that's a low spot. If it resists going somewhere, that's a high spot.

Stop the winder every so often and turn the bobbin by hand to check. Watch particularly for the wire catching on the eyelets. Once it snags, you get stray strands running across the coil.

Finishing the coil

Getting the wire from the coil to the far eyelet without crossing the coil is fiddly. Some people tie a knot; that risks kinking and breaking the wire.

Better: a small drop of superglue to hold the wire exactly where you want it, hit with accelerant, and then route it round. Then wrap it several times through the eyelet, the more turns, the easier soldering will be.

Soldering the leads

Then check continuity with a multimeter before you go any further, at the eyelet and at the base of the lead wire, so you know both the coil and the joint are good.

When it goes wrong

It will. Roughly one pickup in ten, even with practice.

The commonest disaster: the tape holding the bobbin grabs the fine start wire and snaps it as you peel it off. That can mean cutting off thousands of turns and starting again.

Splicing midwind

Run out of wire halfway through? Splice it. Twist the two ends together, a little moisture on your fingers gives you enough grip to twist wire this fine, solder quickly without dwelling, and carry on winding. It doesn't affect the sound.

Stripping a bobbin to start over

If a coil is beyond saving, there's nothing wrong with the bobbin or the magnets. Desolder the leads, cut the coil away with a knife or snips, pull the wire off, and rewind. Wax potting makes this harder but not impossible.

Baseplates and eddy currents

The baseplate is nonmagnetic, but it still changes the sound, through something called eddy currents.

• Nickel silver. Slightly more mids and highs
• Brass, slightly warmer

The difference is real but small. It isn't a reason to lose sleep, and it's worth knowing when you're chasing a specific character.

On the other hand: some makers use maple shims as spacers and suggest it improves the tone. It doesn't. Plastic works exactly as well.

Charging and degaussing magnets

A charger is two very strong magnets epoxied into a frame, facing each other so they attract but cannot meet, with a sliding wooden carrier between them.

To charge: tape the Alnico bar to the carrier with the face you want to be north on the north side, and run it through the field several times, around ten passes.

To degauss: the same thing, reversed. One pass the other way weakens it slightly. That's how you get a "vintage" magnet.

It also works the other way: a very old pickup that has gone dull and weak may simply need recharging.

Don't let the magnet being charged touch the charging magnets. A very small gap actually increases the charge it takes.

Assembly

1. Fit the pole screws or slugs. Screws take real torque. Use a driver in a block of wood to keep it from slipping and chewing the heads. They get hot; keep your fingers clear.
2. Set the pole heights to a radius matching the fretboard, outer poles barely proud, rising toward the middle. Sight along it from the side. Some makers leave them flat and expect the customer to adjust; setting them properly is a courtesy.
3. Assemble bobbins, spacers, magnet and baseplate, feeding the lead wire through its hole.
4. Solder the internal connections and tape every joint so nothing can short against the coil or the baseplate.
5. Tuck the wires between or under the bobbins, checking nothing is pinched. A pinched wire is a problem waiting months to appear.
6. Check continuity again before taping.
7. Wrap the outer tape, two turns, under gentle tension.
8. A drop of superglue on the tape end, wax potting will otherwise lift it.
9. Check continuity one final time.

Label each finished pickup with its position, DC resistance and date. You'll want that information later, and you won't remember it.

Lead wire length

The neck pickup needs a longer lead. It's further from the controls, and the wire has to route up and around. The bridge pickup sits almost on top of the cavity and needs very little. Cut them to suit before potting.

The thing about DC resistance

How to actually get good at this

Wind a single coil. Don't even bother potting it. Put it in a guitar, play it, and write down what you hear. Then cut the coil off, wind it again with one thing changed, and compare.

Do that half a dozen times and the relationships stop being theory. You'll know what 500 more turns does, what swapping to an Alnico 5 does, and what happens when you push it too far, because you'll have heard all of it.

Easy to learn. Hard to master. There's no way to shortcut the middle part.