Pickup, Basics

I decided pretty early in the project to go for an electrical pickup. Not piezo or something like that. I'm not sure why, but probably because all electric guitars use one. Maybe it's also the look of it and because I would have to make one (or more as you will see) my own.

There is lots to think about. First the parts you need.

If you look at the standard guitar pickup it consists of magnets and insulated copperwire hold together with plastic or Forbon basically. 

For the magnets i just bought some old pickups and tore them apart. You can also buy  magnets for $ 1.00 a piece at Lollar guitars by the way.

The wire is another story altogether. You cannot just go to a shop and say you want some copperwire. First you need to know what wire gauge (american, AWG) you need. 42 is pretty normal (that is 0.063 mm). It needs to be isolated and solderable. You cannot buy that in an electrics shop in the Netherlands. 0.10 mm is the thinnest I could get. So after an extensive internet and phonebook search somebody pointed me to a company in Utrecht who sold the stuff, but really only to companies. I phoned them, and they told me to hop by, which I did.
When i came in and asked for the 63 AWG, the pointed me to an empty shelf. Tough luck. The coils next to it were either to thick or too thin. Besides that, they looked like they weighed over 30 pounds. That is miles and miles of wire. Enough to make thousands of coils. I was not planning on making that many. After somebody asked around they found loads of small coils in a little corner covered in dust. Exactly the right stuff and not in an enormous quantity. Lucky me. For people living in the Netherlands and want this copperwire I can point them to this company.

Anyways, having the goods is not all. > some pickup theory