I’ve been repairing a few pickups recently and I thought I’d share this one with you. It’s a Fender Lead I Pickup that was sent to me by guitar repairer Jeff Baker from Oamaru.
The Fender Lead I was one of those obscure models that never really caught on and the pickup reflects that. It’s a little unusual and that’s what makes it interesting.
It even looks different with those square topped bobbins.
Not only is it unusual looking from the top but turn it over and it shows what it’s really all about. Those are 12 big adjustable poles screwed into substantial steel blocks and coupled to a powerful ceramic magnet.
This is clearly not a typical Fender pickup, this was designed to ROCK.
It came to me because it wasn’t working and typically one coil was showing ‘open circuit’ on the test meter. In these cases I can use the good coil as a reference to what the faulty coil should be. It had a dc resistance of 7.61 KOhms. Wiki told me the final dc resistance of the whole pickup is approx. 13KOhms so that gave me a pretty good indication of how I should wind it. That’s a powerful set of coils to go with that magnet.
A bit of maths, plenty of experience and some intuition and I had a plan for winding it. Detailed information just isn’t available for this kind of job.
I stripped the bobbin and wound the coil.
I potted it very lightly because these bobbins are made of butyrate that has a lower melting point than most modern ABS bobbins – I didn’t want it to deform with the heat, I wasn’t going to be able to get another bobbin.
Here you can see the chunky pole pieces, they’ll guide a fair bit of that ceramic magnet’s strength up to the strings.
If you have a faulty pickup or are interested in my range of handmade pickups have a look at the website
The Musicman Stingray bass is for me one of the top 3 basses ever – the Precision, the Jazz and the Stingray cover pretty much everything between them. A big part of what makes the Stingray so good is the Musicman Stingray Bass pickup
It has such a distinctive sound. Once you’re tuned into it you can hear it on so many recordings.
This pickup is from 1978 (they started in 1976) and was sent to me from a customer in Christchurch. I thought I’d show you around inside it – these are really interesting pickups.
‘78 Musicman Stingray Bass pickup
The Musicman Stingray Bass pickup is by the look of it a big fat humbucker but there’s more to it.
The magnets are big alnicoV’s, 3/8” diameter and 5/8” deep so a lot of the power and grunt comes from them. The 2 coils are wound with awg 42 wire and are around 4KOhms each (they vary). The poles on each coil have opposite polarity and the coils are wired out of phase electrically so they act as a humbucker. The really interesting part is the coils are wired in parallel, not in series like most humbuckers.
The sound of 2 coils in parallel is the sound of a Jazz bass with both pickups on or a Strat on switch position 2 or 4. It’s a very distinctive, clear tone with a very clear midrange and chimney bass.
So the distinctive Stingray sound comprises of fairly low powered coils in parallel to give plenty of clarity but with exceptionally fat magnets to give bass and grunty mids.
I haven’t mentioned the active circuit the signal goes through yet but that’s another story.
‘78 Musicman Stingray Bass pickup
As you can see, under the cover it looks very similar to ‘Fender’ pickups.
‘78 Musicman Stingray Bass pickup
One coil was open circuit so I cut the windings out. There was tape wrapped around the magnets to protect the coil. I left that in. I love the way they staggered the pole pieces but kept the magnets the same size.
pickup re-wind
The original winding wire is insulated with red poly. Unfortunately I only had Poly insulation in the natural colour – that’s my coil on the right.
I’ve wound a lot of Strat pickups since I started in 1995. I started off re-winding cheap pickups and then moved on to repairing old dead Fender pickups. Every experiment was written down in a notebook with tone comments. Back when I started there wasn’t much information available so there was a lot of reverse engineering and a lot of trying things out. That learning time was invaluable to developing instinct for how to change the sound of a pickup. I’ve still got the note book and I’m still adding to it.
In, I think, 2014 a customer of mine approached me wanting a set of Strat pickups. He’s a great blues player and had recently moved from using a Les Paul to a Strat. He described the sound he was after and it seemed to me it was the same as I’d been after myself so I put some time in to designing a pickup set for him.
The “Tui”- hot Strat pickups needed to be most definitely a Strat sound – I hear plenty of Strat replacement pickups that are fine but just not Strat-ish. Secondly I wanted a bit more power, just a bit, enough to make a good old valve amp clip a bit easier than a “vintage” pickup would. And there needed to be dynamics – tickle it and it’s clean, dig in and it grits up. As I was making the original version of this set for a player used to humbuckers I wanted to reduce the ”ping” of the attack. I’ve added steel base plated as standard to this set. This changes the shape of the magnetic field, broadening the harmonic window. They add a wee bit of power, a wee bit of bass and reduce that pesky ping.
The neck pickup needed to have “that” Strat sound with fullness and clarity. It’s the ‘go to’ sound for most Strat players. The middle pickup needed to have some ‘quack’ to it with its own distinctive personality. The bridge pickup shouldn’t be too thin, it needs to have plenty of highs but not too much of that ‘ping’ or it’s almost useless. Then there are the other sounds – positions 2 and 4, mistakenly referred to as ‘out of phase’. They are really just 2 pickups in parallel. It’s hard to predict what those sounds will be, there was a lot of experimenting.
So I consulted my old note book and wound a lot of pickups and fitted them in a few test Strats. I’ve been lucky enough to have some great players as repair customers and so I was able to get quite a few opinions.
Eventually I was happy and I fitted a set for my ex Les Paul customer and he loved them straight away. A few months later he contacted me to say he was still loving them. I love it when players do that.
I’ve fitted resulting sets into a lot of instruments and it turns out that not only blues players like them, they seem to work for everyone. I shouldn’t be surprised, the Stratocaster is such a versatile guitar, of course they do.
I make two flavors of Telecaster Pickups. Here’s the low powered “Silver Lady in the hands of Jason Herbert.
To hear the “Cruel Mistress” Tele set and lots more demos go to my YouTube channel.
Telecasters are brutally honest guitars. There’s no hiding behind fat
mushy tones – if you can do it on a Tele then you really can do it.
I wanted to make a Telecaster Pickups set that would reflect the
clear honest tone of an old Tele. It’s a delicate balance to get enough
treble and for the top end to have sufficient warmth to be usable, but
with no hint of woof or boom in the bottom. The bottom needs to be full
and clear with no hint of muddiness. The bridge needs a twang but it has
to be a warm twang without being over harsh. I’ve used Alnico III
magnets with a vintage style wind on both these pickups
Through my repair work I’ve re-wound a lot of old Tele pickups. This
is invaluable experience for designing my own version. I enlisted the
help of a couple of experienced Telecaster players as test pilots. I
really needed plenty of opinions and testing through a variety of
amplifiers to get this one right.
I’m really happy with the warm classic tone of this set, clear and
chiming with just the right twang. So I have given them a classic name –
“Silver Lady”.
There is nothing like the high end snarl of a good Tele bridge
pickup. However, Tele Pickups are complicated. It’s a sound that needs
to be just right – too much treble and it can sound grating and
obnoxious, too little and it just isn’t a Tele. The treble needs warmth
while still cutting through a mix like a zombie banjo.
With the “Cruel Mistress” -hot Tele wanted to make a pickup with a
bit more power to drive an amp harder while keeping the Tele character.
My biggest concern was not losing what a Tele is all about. In my repair
work I come across quite a few replacement Tele pickups that just don’t
sound like Teles. Bridge pickups need grit and the neck a chimey
clarity and together they should be full and open and matched well
enough to create almost a reverb sound with the switch in the middle
position.
The “Cruel Mistress” -hot Tele uses AlnicoV magnets to help with the attack and AWG43 wire to help with the snarl.
The neck pickup on a Tele needs to be smooth and warm and have a
great balance with the bridge pickup so that the middle position rings
with an almost reverb-like tone. The difficulty with Telecaster neck
pickups is there just isn’t much space under that cover. As a result it
can be a hard pickup to get right and there were a lot of experiments
and disappointments on the way. Eventually I came on a design that has
enough bottom end to sound full but not so much to sound boomy. And the
final pickup was a great match to the bridge.
I had help from the ears of a couple of my regular customers who were
generous enough to let me load their guitars with prototypes. The whole
process takes time and only after many road tests and versions did I
fix on a design. As a result, each of my designs have been developed
over many years of subtle changes and road tests. Having help like this
means my pickups are trialed through many different amps and playing
styles. The neck/bridge balance as well as dynamics/compression need to
be tested in as many situations as possible to find a pickup that will
work for most players.
So if you need some grit and aggression from your Tele this is the set for you.
Thinking of a 7 String Humbucker for modern metal/fusion?
MrGlyn’s “Attitude” humbucker (6 or 7 string) was developed in collaboration with Graham Young in the UK. He’s a pretty demanding player with an amazing ear for detail.
For the full story of how we did it and for more demos go to my blog:
For a while I’ve been working on extending my range of humbucking
pickups for rock players. The Cloud Nine will do just about anything but
I wanted to offer a more specific pickup for modern rock/metal.
I decided to start with a 7 string which is a slightly unorthodox way
of going about it but I was concerned with getting the bottom end
right. If there was any sogginess in the bottom end a 7 string would
show it up more than a 6 string.
7 string pickups are not like others. The low bass string reacts so
differently, there’s a lot of string deflection and low harmonics. My
mission was to tame this bass and keep it tight but not to sacrifice the
sound quality of the treble strings. The treble still needed to be
sweet and singing. The mids needed to be balanced and noticeable. I
didn’t want this pickup scooped; the mids had to stand out from the mix
when needed to.
So in October 2019 I got back in touch with my old mate Graham Young
in Yorkshire. He’s an amazing player and really knows his gear.
Back in 1998 I wound a 6 string humbucker for Graham. In those days I
had a guitar shop and repair business in Leeds in the North of England
and he wanted a bridge pickup to suit his style for a parts caster.
Years passed and he became a 7 string player, so when I decided to
develop a 7 string pickup Graham was the person I asked to be test
pilot. We’d very loosely kept in touch over the years and it turned out
he was still using the 6 string pickup I’d made for him back in the
90’s.
We had a chat via messenger and it turned out he’d tried a lot of
pickups but none quite did it for him. So I listened to his thoughts,
came up with a design and went away and made a prototype.
The first one wasn’t quite right, so he sent it back and I changed a
few things and returned it. I don’t know how many adjustments I made but
that pickup accumulated quite a few air miles between NZ and the UK
over the next few months.
Every time we got closer, every adjustment less than the one before.
When you get that close you know you’ve got a good pickup. I was at the
point when I felt we really had something great but I just needed that
confirmation.
Then Covid 19 happened, the mail got too unreliable to send stuff
overseas with any confidence of it arriving and the process was put on
hold.
At the end of June 2020 I got a call from Gabe Dovaston in Papamoa.
He’d done some demos for me with some of my other pickups and was asking
if I did a 7 string, just in case, for an Ibanez of his. Well, this
seemed like a chance to test my new pickup on fresh ears. I made a copy
of the last one I’d sent Graham, the one I was happy with, and got it
off in the post. I sat back and waited. It only took a few days and I
got a very happy call, he loved it and he’d already made a demo that
he’d put on YouTube.
Great news, but what was I going to call it? The pickup was already
on YouTube, it wasn’t on my website yet and it didn’t even have a name!
I got on Facebook and asked people to come up with a name; there were
so many excellent suggestions but nothing quite did it. In the end this
pickup that had taken so much work to develop, traveled so far and
refused to go away I called the “Attitude”.
The Attitude is available in 6 and 7 string, for neck and bridge positions.
New Zealand Music Month is here and to celebrate MrGlyn’s Pickups wants to help you look good.
With every pickup set bought from the website in May we’re going to give you a free “Robo Aotearoa” T-Shirt.
If you buy a single pickup we’ll give you a treble bleed and a pick
holder as usual but if you get a pickup set you get a T-Shirt too.
Here I am modelling (luckily not my chosen career)
And here’s the choice of colours and sizes.
When you order your pickup set just write in ‘Order Notes” at the
checkout to let us know which size and colour you’d like. Don’t order it
from the “Merchandise” page, it will try and charge you and then it’s
not free.
This is only for New Zealand retail customers, only for full sets of pickups and only in May, simple.
If you just want the T-Shirt and no pickups you can buy one from the “Merchandise “ page.
Rod Capper has been making classical guitars near Auckland for 35 years. I was interested in discussing the conflict between tradition and innovation in the classical guitar making world.
I got way more than I bargained for.
Rod's constant experimentation has led him to some interesting conclusions and caused me to re-think my view of how guitars work.
