Specialist technique
Winding your
own pickups.
Two and a half hours on the deepest rabbit hole in guitar building. Magnets, wire, turns and pattern — and what each one actually does to the output.
Watch on YouTube·Subscribe to the channel
Chapter markers coming — paste the timestamps from the video description into the chapters field in videos.py and they become clickable here.
What this covers
- Magnet types and what each contributes
- Wire gauge and insulation
- Turn counts, and the relationship between turns, output and tone
- Scatter winding versus machine winding
- Potting, and when to leave a pickup unpotted
- Testing and measuring what you have made
Why wind your own
Partly cost, mostly control. A wound pickup is a set of variables you can move deliberately — and once you have wound a few, pickup descriptions in catalogues stop being marketing language and start being specifications you can read.
Measure and write everything down. Turn count, wire gauge, magnet type, resistance. A pickup you love and cannot reproduce is a frustrating thing to own.
Written companion in progress.
Watch the builds on YouTube
Full build videos, start to finish, including the parts that went wrong.
Build series · New video most months