David Schwab

Hmmmm. I made a winder from a sewing machine motor once and ran the motor at near full speed. It ran pretty fast. Maybe it's the big pulley you are using on the top? That will reduce the speed of the small motor pulley. The motor pulley is moving faster than the axle pulley. You need to reduce the size of the top pulley. Either make them the same size, or close to it. You can also make the motor pulley larger and the axle smaller to get more speed. I have a Schatten winder (which I think was over priced, but it works well). It's gets a top speed of about 800 RPM, and I can wind a pickup in about 5 minutes.

Mahogany makes a great neck wood. Gibson uses it on a lot of their guitars. It's a really nice wood to work with, carves easily. The classic Les Paul tone is a mahogany body with male cap and mahogany neck. SG's are all mahogany, and the Explorers and V's are limba (korina), which is very much like mahogany in weight and tone.

The boards from LMII are excellent. I've used them on about 5 basses. Both companies cut the slots on a table saw. You want the slots deeper than your fret tang. Stew-Mac slots are cut for their wire. I use Stew-Mac wire with LMII boards. You can't get 5 string bass boards from Stew-Mac. I had some problems with a Stew-Mac guitar fingerboard not being all that flat, but that was just one board. You need to bend the fret wire on an arc. I use the Stew-Mac fret bender. If you are going to press them in, you need a proper caul. You should use some glue... some people use titebond. I like to use CA. Then hold the fret down for a bit to ket the wood settle. You get the best seat that way. SS fret wire is hard to level without the proper tools. You are better to learn on nickel silver wire.

Those are actually bass pickups. They are humbuckers. My usual bass pickups are similar but wider, the size of an EMG-40... I made these for a guy that built his own bass and wanted them as thin as possible, so they are 3/4" wide... just slightly wider than a Strat pickup. They sound a bit like Ric pickups. On my regular bass pickups the neos sound really good.. they have a bright top end and a strong midrange. Here's the neo bridge pickup. What are you trying to achieve with the polarity switch? Hum cancelation? For that you want each pickup to be opposite, one north up, one south up. Then either wind one backwards, or just wire it out of phase. The 1/8" magnets have their poles on the flat surface... one side is north and the other south. You should have them all facing the same way. You can tell using a compass or even just by which way they stick together. The bars I'm using have their poles on one 1/4" side, like the magnets in P-90's or humbuckers. The poles are facing the blades in each coil. Normally for a P-90 you want two magnets on the keeper bar, with both facing the bar the same way... both North for instance.

How about this.. I'd rather get my sound, and let Jimmy keep his.

I agree. Sanding sealer is bad news. I used some once and after a few weeks the lacquer started pealing and chipping. Sanding sealer is soft by nature, and it has stearate soaps in it to make it easy to sand. Putting a hard finish over a soft finish is a recipe for disaster! Just use the lacquer as a sealer, and use pore filler if you need it.

That's not really why the bridge is adjustable. Commercial fingerboards are slotted on CNC machines. And before that, gang saws where used, where there is a saw blade for each fret slot. Even when you slot by hand you are generally using a table saw, or keyed miter box and a template to locate each fret slot. So unless someone is using a ruler and making a mark with a pencil and sawing the slot freehand, we can safely assume the board is pretty dead on, and the frets are in the correct locations. I can buy five fingerboards and they will all be the same. The reason for compensation at the bridge is two fold. Firstly, when you fret a string, you are bending it down toward the fret. And just as bending the string sideways while playing, it will sharpen the pitch of the note. The higher up the neck you go, the more of a distance the string must stretch, and the notes get sharper still. Low action requires less compensation than high action. The other reason is that at the fixed ends of the string, it is much stiffer than in the middle. A stiff string acts more like a rod, and the harmonics tend to be sharp. This is also a problem on pianos, and they use "stretch tuning" to make the notes sound in tune across the keyboard. So we compensate for these things by making the string longer than it's theoretical scale length. Another trend is to do this at the nut end, which helps with the first couple of fretted notes, which can tend to be sharp. This is also from the string being stiff, and from having a nut that's cut too high. I often use zero frets to eliminate that problem. But getting back to the topic. Equal temperament is intrinsically out of tune on certain intervals. But it allows us to transpose from one key to another, and all keys sound the same. As I pointed out, pianos are de-tuned from equal temperament to make them sound more in tune. The fretboard you see on that site is attempting to do the same thing. The true temperament system is a compromise of equal and just intonation systems. So it makes the intervals more in tune on the guitar.

I had two vintage Mosrite Ventures basses... I sold one. I don't think they have tilt back headstocks. I'll have to look at it tomorrow when I'm, at the workshop.

Hey, don't laugh! I once bent rosewood binding on a curling iron! It was for a neck on a bass, and I needed a small radius for the corners at the end of the fingerboard.

Which Jimmy Page sound? He used his Tele on a lot of things, like the solo on Stairway... I guess you mean his "blues" tone?

The latest stacked designs use a smaller lower coil with no magnets and high inductance, as with the DiMarzio example I posted. As Mike points out with the high permeability ferrite pole pieces, you are getting a high inductance with a small number of turns. And with the bottom coil shielded from the magnets it doesn't really pick up too much of the strings, while the top coil is shielded from the hum. So the top coil is the string sensing coil, and the bottom is being used to pick up noise. Kevin Beller from Duncan has an interesting design where the top coil's shield extends into the core of the bottom coil, thus bringing the noise flux with it. After my experiment I'm convinced that identical coils is not the way to do it. My pickup doesn't sound bad, but it wasn't the sound I was going for. I'm going to start on a new design this week for the Tele and a Strat style guitar I'm making. There have been designs where the one coil is bypassed with a cap, and some have trim pots across the bottom coil. I agree... using battery powered circuits would simplify the whole thing immensely. EMG make a bouzouki pickup that uses two hearing aid or camera batteries. EMG-B Well of course pickups like EMG's are buffered right in the pickup. They are running each coil into the differential inputs of an op amp, with the other end of the coils grounded. Doing it actively is probably the best way to go. Some people don't care for the tone of buffered pickups because they can sound brighter, and guitar players seem to dig the warmer tone of having the pickup loaded down a bit, and even weaker magnets, like Alnico II. But you can of course make a buffer with the right load to simulate a passive pickup, and then actively sum the dummy coil to buck the hum. EMG's sound pretty passive, and they use a whole butt load of wire on them there coils! Plus a brass screen shield. They are very quiet, but I think what's lacking in them is the design of the pickup itself. Seymour Duncan seem to have a new active pickup design. With the "Blackouts" they write: They also claim they offer reduced hum around fluorescent lighting and computer monitors. Hope they apply for a patent! I'm curious to see what they are doing. I've been working on a balanced DC coupled buffer design myself. Hope they didn't do the same thing!

I'm always trying to learn things, like every one else here. My brain is like a sponge... I tend to remember a whole bunch of stuff I've read over the years, but then forget where I read it! So I save a lot of stuff to my computer now. I'm a graphic artist, so I like seeing pictures. I save pictures of cool 60's guitars and stuff for inspiration. Patents are a great way to learn new ideas. Some of the pickup patents, especially from Bill Lawrence (Wili Stich) are very detailed and practically tell you how many turns and what gauge wire to use for a given example. Lately I've been enamored with the DiMarzio Virtual Solo Pro stacked pickup. I have a regular customer that puts them in the neck position on a lot of his guitars. It's a great sounding pickup for a stack. It's real easy to see what they are doing both by taking the pickup apart (within reason... I have to put it back in the guitar!) and looking at the two patents used for that pickup. Then you can think of new ways to do the same thing. I have always loved taking things apart. That's how I started repairing guitars! I took a couple of mine apart when I was young, and broke the wiring. I accidentally wired the pickup out of phase, liked the effect, and then put a toggle switch in my Segovia Les Paul copy, and then started installing them in friend's guitars. That's when I was about 14. I'm board just making copies of existing pickups, so I'm always trying new things. Lately I'm taking a Zen approach.... I just pull a number out of thin air... let me wind this many turns... There have been interesting pickup designs in the past that aren't used anymore. Everything is Gibson and Fender now. Really boring. It's constricting having to work with those pickup shapes too. Phil, I have read in a few web sites 10,000 turns on each coil for a P-bass pickup, so that error has been around for a while. Obviously they meant total.

You can get neo bar magnets. I've been using some that are 1" X 1/4" X 1/4" and they are amazingly strong. I made these pickups with 1 neo bar between the blades on each one, but I think I'm going to use 2. My wider pickups have 2 neos stuck together to make them 1/2" wide. Here's one pickup with a ceramic and the bottom has a neo. The neo is more than twice the power of the ceramic.

No it wont. The output impedance of an EMG is already very low, so the difference between a 25K and 250K is negligible. You will not hear any difference in tone, but the action of the pot will work a bit more like an on off switch. They might be ever so slightly louder with the 250K's. Duncan uses 100K pots, and I've always found EMG's to sound better with 100K pots also. They seem punchier. Duncan preamps will work with either kind of pot, since they work with either passive pickups or active pickups. I sold a customer some active pickups I made that normally use 25K pots. He was using it with a Basslines preamp, and he tried 250K pots because he had them (this was for pickup volume controls) and he said it was much fuller sounding with the 250K pots. Didn't make sense to me, but he's a good builder so I tried it on one of my basses, which has an EMG BTC preamp, and I couldn't hear any difference at all. I have a guitar with two EMG pickups and 250K pots in it. Sounds fine, doesn't sound broken or shrill at all. That being said, you should use 25 or 50K pots with EMG's, but nothing bad will happen if you use a larger value.

you sure? and what is a 'common' ? You only have two wires on a single coil pickup. None of them are actually ground, or hot. But it's each end of the coil. One end has to connect to the "hot" and the other side is the "common" which must connect to ground. If you do not connect the other end to ground, you are going to have an open circuit... it would be like having a very long piece of wire attached to your hot connection, and not going anywhere. It's the same effect as disconnecting the ground from your jack. You have an open circuit, no sound from the strings, and it hums like crazy.

Robert Fripp uses the Fernandes Sustainer in his Les Pauls. He puts one of those and a Strat size dual rail pickup in the neck position.

I doubt those magnets are strong enough. I have a bunch of those little things and they are pretty useless for pickups.

Pots load down the pickups. So between the volume and tone pots, and the tone cap, (plus your cable, etc.) you end up with a 2nd order low pass filter. Generally, the higher the resistance of the pickups, the higher the resistance of the pot. This is why Fender guitars will use 250K while humbuckers use 500k. This is not to say you can't put 250K pots in a Les Paul. It will make the tone darker. If you want the most possible volume and highs, go with a large value pot like 1M. Remember that two pots connected in parallel also add up the loading. Large value pots sometimes are somewhat muddier when turned half way down, but brighter when full on. Full on is full on, but a 250K pot is always putting 250K between the signal and ground.

You wont get any signal if only the hot wire is connected and not the common. Just a lot of hum.

I have a customer that installs Basslines ceramic MM pickups in all his Jazz Basses. He also installs the Baselines MM preamp. They sound great if you like a bright punchy tone.

According to Jason Lollar the height is .531 between the flanges Hi Dasve.So you finally found us? I wondered when we were gonna se you here as I have seen you at the pickup maker’s forum and at MIMF. Welcome I have been here in the past.... just not in a long while! Same with TalkBass. I'm trying to not be on the computer all day!

Hey Phil, I believe that's 10,000 turns total for the split pickup, 5,000 per coil. I don't think you can fit 10,000 turns on one of those bobbins.

I'm coming in very late to this discussion, and I haven't read everything yet... but I wanted to comment on this... That's one way to increase the inductance, but another way is to use more ferromagnetic material within the body of the bobbin. If you have a big steel bar for a core, you have increased the inductance. You can then use less wire so the resistance is not increased. This is the common arrangement of some recent stacked pickup designs. The bottom coils have high inductance and low resistance as compared to the upper coil. I made a stacked Tele lead pickup last year. My intention was to wind it on the hot side since it was replacing a newer LawrenceUSA pickup, which was on the thin side. I made it with an 1/8" steel blade for a core, and used to ceramic magnets on the bottom arraigned in the same manner as a P-90. I wound it with 43 gauge wire, to about 12K total. I probably wound both coils in the same direction, but I don't remember. I wired it with 4 conductor cable. The resulting tone was far different than I would expect for a pickup wound to this resistance. It was very bright and clean, and at about the same level as the two original Bill Lawrence L-250's in the neck and middle positions. It makes a nice sounding vintage Tele pickup, but that wasn't my intention! I decided to try a few things, so the first was to listen to each coil separately. The top coil sounded like you would expect, bright clean and punchy, and of course it hummed. The bottom coil was a real surprise, it was dark and mellow sounding. So clearly that half of the coil is not sensing what the top half is. Keep in mind that with this pickup the magnets are on the bottom. Lastly I wired it in phase, and got a big loud P-90 type roar. This is what Seymour Duncan calls the boost switch wiring. I wired a push-pull volume pot to accomplish this. So, the question is why do stacked pickups of this type sound thin? I think it's clearly phase cancelation, since the highs were intact, but the low end suffered. Obviously this is not a standard stack configuration. And the older style stacks always have over wound coils to compensate for the thin tone. The original Duncan stacks have the magnets running through both coils, so at least the opposite poles are kind of far from each other. The original Dimarzio stacks have dummy bottom coils, and a magnetic shield. Both coils are wound close to the same resistance (12.51 top, 13.06 bottom). The newer DiMarzio stacks, like the Virtual Vintage Solo Pro, have a fairly normal top coil, wound to 8.53K with Alnico II rods. Beneath that is a U shaped magnetic shield. The bottom coil is different. It has 10 steel slugs, 6 where the magnets would go, and 4 between them. In the middle is a steel screw to hold the top and bottom coil together. The bottom coil is wound to 2.447K. The coil appears to be full, so the inside of the bobbin might be a larger diameter than what one would expect. The two coils are wired in series. This has to be the best stacked pickup I've heard so far. So by increasing the inductance of the bottom coil, it can be wound to a lower resistance, and this prevents the low frequency cancelation.