Introduction: Cheap and Easy Guitar Pickups

About: i am a photolab technician and an incurable packrat. i have made swords ,chainmail, crossbows.cameras,bike trailers,kayaks,guitars{slide and electric},knives,various film winders and vacum easels for the phot…

here is a little tutorial about improvised guitar pickups
made from easy to find junk

Step 1: Pickup Basics

simply a guitar pickup is just a coil of insulated copper wire with a magnet in the center.
most things that seem simple dont always turn out this way but here is an exception(sort of).
now im not recomending that you rip the pickups out of your strat and replace them with the herein mentioned contraptions. but if your building a diddly bow or a frankenstein guitar or just looking to make a new noise then thise is for you

Step 2: First a Real Pickup

here are 3 pictures of a very broken ( and very crappy before it was broken) fake humbucker pick up. it came out of a 1 dollar yard sale guitar nuff said.
if you look closely you can see the basic parts a copper coil of #43 magnet wire wrapped around a plastic bobbin with a steel bar that slides up inside it and a bar magnet that attaches to that.
when a steel guitar string is vibrated near the poles { screws that screw into the steel bar} it generates a very small electric current in the copper coil {similar principle to how a generator/ motor works... hmmm i wonder if you can use a motor...heh heh ill have to try that one later} this small current is what is fed into your amplifier and pumped out the other end greatly amplified.

Step 3: Experiments Ive Tried and Rough Results

now before we start none of the following pickups have as good {loud} an output as even a mediocre real guitar pickup but some of them are surprisingly good.
now pictured here is the solenoid pickup i made for the 3 string slide guitar thats been featured on this site a while back.( i didnt remove it for a closer look as its hotglued in place and i dont want to break it)but it is a coil that was found in the filter paddles of an old one hour photo printer{i know thats not common junk but copper coils are everywhere} a magnet from an old car stereo speaker has been positioned in the centre{wrapped with a bit of vinyl tape to make a nice tight fit}
the two leads from it run through the back of the guitar to a 1/8 phono jack near the end .
plug it into your amp and get it within about half an inch of a vibrating guitar string and you will hear it .
its a little quieter than a real pickup but it works

Step 4: Circuit Breaker Coil

this one came out of a old circuit breaker from a large 220 volt machine
the coil as you can see is covered with a hard plastic{bakelite} casing and screw on contacts for the wires.
when in use an iron core fits into it as you see in picture 2.
flip it over and add a hard drive magnet in the center and it acts as a pickup not as good as the first one but it does work.
it also looks like you could fit it into a regular guitar easier too {not that you want too of course}

Step 5: Water Valve Solenoid

this coil is another plastic covered one and it comes from a solenoid that opens a water valve{ washing machines and dishwashers maybe likely sources}.
in it i have glued a section of a steel bolt because i didnt have a magnet of the proper diameter to put in it but to magnetize it i just slapped a hard drive magnet onto the bottom end(it doesnt matter which one but then it becomes bottom}.
your getting the idea now plug it into the amp and twang away.

Step 6: Buzzer Coil

this coil came from a ordinary buzzer such as you might find on a dryer or washing machine or used as an alarm on industrial equipment.
as you can see i have it wired to a cord to test and yes it did work but only one way.
again the magnet is from a hard drive{gotta love 40 meg drives}
the third picture here is of a coil that did work but very faint and thats because theres just not enough copper wire in it.
length of the wire is the deciding factor a suitable coil can be made from any thickness wire but the bigger the wire the larger the coil needs to be{house wire pickup would be is as big as a volkswagen}.

Step 7: Yet Another Solenoid

if you notice most of the coils i have tried have come from solenoids.while im not sure where this one comes from it works too but its kind of tall for use as a guitar pick up
you would have to have one of this type centered beneath each string because its so narrow
the wider fat coils like the first one i showed covers two or three string easily
but you can wire multiples together to form a pickup to cover most any arrangement of strings. reversing the coil directions between one coil and the next is how a humburcker works .

Step 8: Last But Not Least

this little number is the guts of one of those old snooper coils that you used to be able to get at radio shack in the 70s . the idea was to attach this to the earpiece of your phone with a suction cup and you could record the conversation on an ordinary tape recorder . it wasn`t a mic that used sound waves it was a coil and magnet and picked up the signal from the wires and coils in the receiver.

Step 9: End

i hope you all have fun trying out different coils and please be careful to use junk only and dont spoil your moms washing machine lookin for coils an stuff
any questions just ask away
lenny

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