cheap and easy guitar pickups

so could i just get any magnet and wrap some copper wire around it and use it as a pickup? im trying to make a diddley bow and just need something really cheap to use as a pickup

I like coils from old TV sets, The older the better. If you find an old tube set in the alley, grab it before I do. There are a lot of coils in the old sets, but my favorites are on the neck of the picture tube. The adjustment (convergence) coils are the ones I'm after. They come in 3 sets of 2, 3 sets 'cos they use 3 colors. This gives you one pickup per string, which is exactly what you want for MIDI guitar. If you want hexaphonic fuzz (1 fuzz per string so the strings don't interfere with each other), this is the way. Note that the coils are mounted on ferrite cores, which are very hard, or should I say brittle. Ferrite is a kind of ceramic which will yield to a determined person with a cut off wheel in their Dremel. Just put the whole thing on a piece of magnet. I like the ceramic ones on the back of dead speakers or inside microwaves. More ceramic shaping, but at least you'll learn a new skill.

do you have any instructables?

Well, I found one out in the woods! how cool is that! :P

i beat you to it last week for that teebee

What did you put the pick up on? is it a homemade electric stick guitar or stick bass?

where can u listen to that ' im too poor to afford a real guitar blues" song

lol

Could you take a smallish speaker and use it??

The 60watt speaker is overkill

I will try out using a an old 60Watt Pioneer Car Woofer.I think that will be work because i tried with a 4Watt and the sound was very week but it work.

can you use magnet wire?

You can pick up a radio shack Piezo transducer Part # 273-073 or 273-073a. I gave a $1.99 a piece and they shipped them to my door in 5 days. Just wire 1 wire to the ground and the other to the hot side. I also imbedded mine in the neck between the neck & body. I also used silicone sealant to reduce interferance. This worked out well for me. The guy that got me started has some cool ideas at Ourwayband.com. He sells alot of his.

Hi, in the 3 string slide guitar (which i am plannin on making hopefully) you used a speaker magnet to make the pickup weell i took a magnet out of a radio speaker but the speaker wasn't large so i dont know if the magnet will be big enough to work. What kinda diameter did the magnet you used have? thanks mdog

kk the magnet i had was encased in a chunk of heavy metal but that wasn't magnet at all so i took it out, and the magnet is only about 1 cm wide so not large. And also if i can't find a coil and am goin to make one should i use about 40 gauge copper wire? thanks mdog

kk its cus thats the highest gauge wire i cu find wen browsing the internet, well on the maplins site anyway, btw just so i no, i think it wud but would a roll of 40swg wire thats 2200m long be enough, :S im sure it would be, right? mdog

kk thanks man mdog

GAH!!! what kind of guitar might this have been? it looks very much like the insides of the fake humbuckers on a heretofore unidentified japanese 335 copy that i bought recently (and yes they are the worst pickups ive ever herd) i think mines an encore.

i love parts guitars =)

I happened to have a spare electric motor sitting around, so I wired it up to a plug going into an amp I made. I hooked up a rubber band to the motor and twanged it, and I could hear the twang coming out of the speaker. This makes me wonder about issue of using metal strings. The motor itself seemed to function as a contact microphone -- if I scratched it with my finger nail, it picked up the noise as though I was scratching a microphone. Are you sure that metal strings and their relationship to the magnet in the coil has any real impact?

it responded when you scratched it because you introduced a mechanical movement into the coil winding.This is undesirable in guitar pickups and is known as microphonic feedback.This is why pickups are potted in wax : )

on second thought, I suppose the casing of the motor might be doing to the magnet what the guitar strings might typically do, which is why it's functioning like a contact microphone. I wonder if a magnetic pickup is much better than a contact microphone that's made from an electric motor.

yeah, any vibration of the coil, or surrounding metal will be picked up. And a magnetic pickup will be much more effective than the contact mic effect you're getting.

how strong does the magnet need to be? I make all kinds of instruments but have never tried to make a pickup (I recently made a lapsteel but used a acoustic guitar pickup from guitar center).

Actually I think if you looked at a humbucker setup top to bottom the coils would be wound in the same direction in relation to the strings and with the outputs connected on one side putting them in series. Then you use an output from each coil on the other side as your hot and ground. Usually doesn't matter which way you wire it but if it sounds terrible swap the hot and ground, this will change the phase shift a bit and clean up your sound. I think if your coils where wound in different directions and connected in series the frequencies would cancel each other out.

If your pickups seem to be a bit quiet, it may because they have a higher impedance than typical pickups(I'm kinda guessing here). Try building a fet buffer amp to put between the output of your homemade pickups and the input of your amp and see if that helps.

thanks it worked way better after doing that i don't know why i did not think of that

So I've never had a clue what I was doing when it came to electricity, so correct me if I'm wrong here. If your pickup has 2k ohms and the pickups from the factory have 8k, putting in 6k of resisotors somewhere along the line would fix the volume issue? Or would it make things worse?

It would make things worse. If the pickup impedance is lower than the input impedance of your amplifier, it shouldn't be too big a deal. Of course, there is maximum transfer of power when the impedance of the pickup matches the input impedance of the amplifier(doesn't matter though with voltage controlled devices like FET's and Vacuum tubes), but adding resistors to compensate doesn't really compensate at all. I think the key is to add more windings of wire. Or better yet, maybe use a booster amp between the pickup and your amplifier's input.

Okay, that makes sense.

it works quite well + you can power a small electric motor with it and make a home generator only problem is that you have to spin a piece of mettle pretty fast to get any output at all if it dose not work then try a low power led

can i use the inside of a motor for coil?

real guitar coils have 8000-10000ish turns of extremely thin wire. motors usually are going to require more current than a pickup, so they'll be less turns of thicker wire (for something of similar total size) You could probably use it, but it would be quite low output, unless you come up with a good preamp circuit for it.

any coil with a couple-few hundred turns of wire that'll sit near strings with a magnet can work. It would depend on the motor and how easy a time you have getting the coil out, but it could work.

I have used old telephone pickups with suction cups for coils, and held a strong magnet next to it. I held it up to a telephone pole guy wire, and tapped the wire. That gives the sound used in the first Start Wars movie for the "laser rifles" (How do you rifle a laser?) It sounds like a very fast sweep of high frequency to low. You can pick up vibrations in anything that is magnetic with this. The principle of a humbucker is that hum is all around, and the 2 coils both get a signal, but since they are opposite, it cancels. But 1 coil is close to the string. When the string vibrates, it affects the magnetic field, generating a voltage in the close coil, but not in the other coil. So the string must be magnetic. If you attached something magnetic to another surface, you could pick up a signal. Piezo disks are available from electronics sources. They can produce high voltages (>50V!) if tapped, so use a pair of diodes in opposite directions in parallel to the disk. Diodes don't turn on until .7 V, so the signal will not be affected unless it is very loud. Then it would clip, like a fuzz box. To avoid that, use 2 in each direction. These are ideas to experiment on.

your explanation of a humbucker is a little off. It's true, but only for a stacked humbucker, which is far less common than the conventional one. A standard humbucker just has 2 coils side by side, which both detect the string. The coils are flipped, like you described, which cancels the hum, but the second coil has its magnet reversed as well, so the actual signal you get from the strings is flipped a second time, and can be constructively added to the other coil. output combines, hum cancels.

Thanks. I got my info secondhand. It is a pretty clever design. Is there any record of who invented it? I would love to make a giant Aeolian harp with electronic pickup, wired to a small FM transmitter, all powered by solar cells. Wind makes the music, sun powers the circuits: All natural high tech music. (The electronic pickup part has been done, but I don't think the rest has been done.) But when I tried to get a pickup, I find that they are very expensive. I need to build it myself.

Yeah. the wire's not all that easy to find, or cheap, unfortunately. I've run into this problem myself. I ended up buying some 32Ga, which is way thicker than is normally used for pickups, and using an op-amp to boost it. (Since I can only get around 1/10th the number of turns on a coil.)