How I Wind Low and Medium-Z Pickups On the Cheap

CAUTION: I do not wish to pretend I know what I am doing. But this is what I am doing...

You can hear them on my videos.

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Three brand new lessons for playing the Blues, tasteful slide guitar & getting the best tones from your cigar box guitars.

NEW TODAY:  Quick Blues Lick of the Week:  The T-Shape Riff   A seriously badass…

We recently posted this Instructable describing how to install a Cortado balanced-out pickup in a banjolele. This pickup runs into a little circuit that balances the signal and matches the impedance to a mixing console -- similar to a preamp or active DI. The instrument plugs…

I'm releasing this under the Creative Commons License - Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike (CC BY-NC-SA) …

Finished this custom build for a customer. Used a My Father's Cigars Box, which I have come to like very much. It has a lot of tone. The neck is aspen and the fingerboard is curly maple. Finished in tung oil. Pick up wound to 9.5 ohms.…

This was my 10th guitar, and my first serious attempt at a 4 stringer:

I was never really happy with it: the box I had made (out of 6mm ply and 3mm sapele for the soundboard) was big and a bit unwieldy, I had also originally intended to have only 9 holes on either…

If you haven't read the last instalment:

http://www.cigarboxnation.com/profiles/blogs/my-first-2-weeks-of-pickup-building

...so, the problem I was left with was that I hadn't grounded the strings and both my tailpiece and bridge…

I decided before Christmas I wanted to have a go at making my own magnetic pickups, and put it on my to-do list for the new year. I studied this guide http://www.instructables.com/id/Make-A-Guitar-Pickup/ extensively and ended up taking inspiration from a few other sources to come up with a design, here is the process:…

Besides CBGs, I have taken to buying el-cheapo plywood Les Paul Jr. copies on Craigslist and modding them up.  They're easy to work on because the wiring's simple and they have a bolt-on neck.  Here's one I got for $80 including the case:

First thing to do is properly route the pickup cavity for a full-size P90:…