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A relatively easy, winding-free way to make a pickup.

Hi all,

I came across a YouTube vid by a guy who made his own pick up by scavenging a coil out of a 12 volt wall-wart transformer, so I thought I'd try it out, and it works great! I thought I share a quick how to here (sorry, no photos right now since it's all finished and mounted in my axe!).

Basically, you crack the plastic housing of the wall wart and pull the transformer out. Then you have pry out all the metal slats that encompass the primary and secondary winding coils (the "iron" of the transformer). Once you get the coils free, you have to separate them. They are usually wound on two halves of a joined plastic spool. I *carefully* cut these apart using a swiss army knife. Don't ruin the spool! You want to keep the wires wound on it! You will want to use the secondary windings (it will have thinner wire and more wounds). Once you have them apart, trim up and excess plastic tabs and such and trim the cut ends of the spool flat (you want it to fit snugly in the smallest hole you cut out of your cbg's neck). Now, you have to remove the tape that covers the windings and find the two ends of the wire. It's thin stuff and breaks easily, so be careful! Solder on a lead to either end, and secure it all back by wrapping the whole coil in electrical tape. Check that there is an electrical connection through the coil with your multimeter! Now is the time to find if you have a short, not later! Then, I sealed off one end of the hole in the middle of the spool by taping a thin but wide washer to one side of the spool. The use of a steel washer lets you stick the magnets to it. As for the magnets, I used 4 really strong little .5cm diameter by 1cm length cylinder-shaped Neodymium magnets. Make sure that the polarity of all four match! Then I wrapped the whole shebang up in a couple layers of duct tape. I wired it up so that it is in parallel with a piezo pickup I already had, and each gets mixed to the output jack through it's own independent pot. I can dial the piezo to 0, and only hear the coil, or vice versa, or I can turn them both all the way up. Adding the piezo in adds brightness, and the coil is much darker.

Anyway, it has plenty strong output. It drives my Valve Jr. really well, as well as my Vintager. Sounds great through my solid state amps as well. I've also used with my Rp155 effects processor with great results! It was fairly easy, and turned out very well. You can do it!

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Permalink Reply by Isaac on July 24, 2010 at 5:35pm

Rev. Nix said:

The video I first saw was by a guy calling himself "jerryrig240".

Hes a member http://www.cigarboxnation.com/profile/Sam

Hey! Thanks for that! I'd added him as a YouTube friend, so it's cool to see he's on here too!

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Permalink Reply by Jerryrig240 on July 25, 2010 at 11:07pm

Yep.....that's me....that is the type of pickup I have in my main LPG I use on "My Last Ride" and other vids. I also have a transducer tied into that pickup for a added lo-fi sound.

Isaac said:

Rev. Nix said:

The video I first saw was by a guy calling himself "jerryrig240".

Hes a member http://www.cigarboxnation.com/profile/Sam

Hey! Thanks for that! I'd added him as a YouTube friend, so it's cool to see he's on here too!

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Permalink Reply by Paulmusic37 on April 24, 2014 at 2:22am

I have so many questions about this. What kind of magnets do you use? I guess you should get really strong ones but can you use one big bar magnet, or do you have to use a bunch of little ones? What kind of pots do you use? Technically these are single coil pickups but they sound pretty dark. Should one use a higher value to let some of the higher end in? Also, if you keep both coils together it seems a tick away from a humbucker. Has anyone tried to put some magnets on the bottom and wire them to some slug metal near the top? I'm not really clear about how humbuckers work but I think it's 2 coils with opposite direction and magnets with reversed polarity wired together. Speaking of humbuckers, I once heard that you can remove the slug screws from a standard humbucker and get a single coil sound with no hum. Can you just stick a magnet behind a single coil to remove the hum? If anyone can take on all these questions I'd have a whole lot of respect for your knowledge. Thanks.

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Permalink Reply by The Phrygian Kid on April 24, 2014 at 3:02am

What kind of magnets do you use?
- you can just snap different ones on and see for yourself :)
- when I've done this I've just snapped on one of the weird shaped ones you get from busting open a dead harddrive

Should one use (a pot) of higher value to get more sparkle?
- yes, but take care to put a treb bypass cap across volume controls, otherwise pots of higher value (1meg +) can cut back the highs dramatically as you roll the volume off.

Is it like a humbucker if you use both coils?
- not really, because the primary and secondary coils will be considerably different from each other. You might be able to achieve some degree of noise cancellation but I expect it'd be difficult to stick a second magnet out of phase on that smaller coil.

Can you silence a single coil by slapping a second magnet on the bottom?
- no the magnet will just jump off. what you'd need is a second (dummy) coil, wired out of phase and tucked away inside somewhere. This is how most 'noiseless' singles work.