I found a great pickup winder.....finally!!!!

[bigdaddy]

For those in search of great guitar tone I found a winder who makes great pickups.

If you are in search of something special in tone please check him out. He keeps things simple and competitive so he's not really expensive. Plus he'll wind special stuff for you.

He just did a set of strat pickups that sing like no others and I'm not really a strat player. I love the sound of this guitar now, it quacks like crazy man. He's done Strats, Teles, P-90s, PAFs and mini hums so far for me and everything he's made is beautiful and all to my specs. His work is clean and precise. He also hand scatter winds his pickups.You have a choice of a standard or aged pickup too.

Email him if you want great natural sounds from your guitar:
http://www.kleinpickups.com/

You won't be disappointed, I promise!!!

[G._Hoffman]

Finally?  I know three - Lindy Fralin, Jason Lollar, and Seymour Duncan, all of whom do fantastic pickups.  (I'm not wild about ALL of Seymour Duncan's pickups, but but some of them are spectacular!)


Gabriel

[bigdaddy]

I tried Lollar......nope...he uses poly wire on stuff and I don't like the sound of poly that much. Plus there were other issue with one guy that worked there....attitude...don't talk at me or down to me that a huge no no. But the bottom line was I was disappointed with his mini hum and it was expensive, it's on Ebay now and I am replacing it with a much better one made by Klein. I tried a lot of guys over the years, Larry DiMarzio used to live like down the block from me on Staten Island.

MJ at the custom shop does some nice work but she's limited, she's just a winder not a designer as far as I know. Duncan has his own sound too.....he likes a lot of mids and some of his pups tend to be muddy. Some are great!!!!!

I like the sound of 42HF and 42PE, 43 poly works on humbuckers and the Duncan Custom custom and C5 gets you some nasty growling sounds I really like. I also have some Custom shop Brobuckers and those are great pickups too. I was also surprised at how good the P-rails sound and how many different sounds I can get from them.

The good thing about Klein is that he listens to you (like Lindy does) and then builds something that works for you. I always run into the same issue, the winder wrongly interprets what I want and builds what he wants. I had that with some amp guys too.

Lindy is great, he'll talk with ya for a long time. But he has his sound and he's into sparkle, lower output pups and a certain single coil sound even on his PAFs. That's not a bad thing it's just that what you get with his pups. I love some of his stuff........I have a P-92 in the neck of one guitar and it just is a great tone. I want to build another with one of his Twangmasters in the neck and no bridge pup at all. Sounds like a clean strat but very fat.

If you want a PAF get a Tom Holmes......I had them when they weren't so much money and he'd get them to you quickly, somewhat. They made my ES-335s magic....I loved them.

[tubesornothing]

Very cool - thanks for the tip.  Nothing like knowing another winder who can do custom winds and is friendly. 

On a similar note, I have had good success with Shep at Sheptone.  Not for custum winds, but just for great pickups and good service.

[bigdaddy]

I have for many years talked with a lot of winders and it's all very secret and hush hush. They don't like their secrets to get out.

One thing all winders do is tend to make all their pickups sound a certain way. It depends on their ear, their winding skills and the materials they use.

Through many years of experimentation I know what each material does for the sound/tone of the pickup. It's not hard to do. You have a bobbin with wire wrapped around it and a magnet. I learned that in science class as a youngster.

Poly wire-Darker tone  PE wire-clearer even tone HF wire- clear highs with a mid hump. I can go into magnets too. I'm not really a strat guy but Klein wound me a set of strat pups for a guitar that sounds so good I don't want to stop playing it. It took a long time of figuring out exactly what specs I wanted but he delivered.

[tubesornothing]

Yeah - my problem is I have no idea how to describe what I want.  I have been looking for a "different" bridge pickup for my LP for a year or so now.  I know I am not interested in the vintage or modern PAF sound - but that doesn't help winders too much.

[bigdaddy]

Do you want it hot or medium or low output?

Clear and clean or dirty and growling?

I have something called a Brobucker I got from the Duncan Custom shop. It's a PAF but wound to 10K with 42PE which is very hard to do. You need a lot of skill to wind that much wire on those bobbins. It has the basic quality of the PAF but has much more output and really drives the amp. The output is similar to a Custom Custom but it has a clearer sound.

So you have to kind of make a list of what you want to hear and once you do that you have a place to start. Just something different won't help at all...... ....but I know what you mean, many times I would be like when I hear it I'll know. That is a very expensive proposition.

I wanted something dirty and growling so I got a Rio Grande fat bastard. It's in pieces in my dead pickup box, one of the worst sounding pickups I ever owned. A waste of a $104.

[shortfuse]

BD can you describe your new PU's a bit better.  I built a strat 2 years ago and have tried all sorts of combination's on it mini buckers straight single coils, stacked unstacked, split parallel, ect... I just dont like any of them and just chalked it up to I am a humbucker guy.  I do have a few guitars I can split the full size bucker on and use it split on clean tones sometimes but dirty I like buckers better.
Now i did just play a strat very similar to mine with the Duncan Texas Antiquity's on it and really liked it.  Now you have my interest up a bit.
Sound clips on the net do nothing for me because i did that on the duncan site and put a lil 59 in the bridge and hate it.  Then tried a hot stack single rail and didn't like it either.  Funny thing is the out of phase sound with the lil 59 @ the bridge and the hot stack neck single rail in the middle sound real good.  I am at a loss with the single coils.

[bigdaddy]

It took a long time to figure out what sounds good in that guitar.

That's the problem, what sounds good in one guitar does not in another. I don't use pickguards so the pickups are in metal rings which sound much different then a pickguard.

With starts there are 2 ways to go, 42PE and 42HF. The Heavy formvar wire is the 50s-mid 60s thing and the enamel is the later Hendrix sound. Late and 70s strat sound, cleaner more even sounding. Formvar is like SRV with that mid hump and nasty honky sound.

I went for the Klein 61 set but with some changes. The first thing is your fretboard flat or a 7.5 radius? A staggered magnet pickup won't work on a flat board. So give me some parameters for you strat and maybe I can help. If you like humbuckers and want a strat sound honestly so far the best I have had was the Duncan P-rails....I was surprised but like everything it's a comprimise, Randy Bachman loves them.

[shortfuse]

My neck is a 10 radius.  Fender std modern fret fret wire and I used 10, 13, 17, 30, 42,52 Ernie Ball strings on it.  It does have a pick guard.  I looked at the pricing tonight and they are about the same price as the Texas Antiquity's.     

[bigdaddy]

You need a flat magnet no stagger....that's the thing that will help you get a good balance. That eliminates so many standard strat pups and that's why I turned to a custom winder. Duncan makes a flat A2 strat pup that sounds good and I tried it over the same staggered one, big difference. I had so many problems with a staggered pickup in the neck. I use a 10-16 conversion neck from warmoth. But 10 is still a pretty flat board the originals are like 7.5' and that's what they are designned for.

Do you have a swimming pool rout or individual? If you have a swimming pool rout fill the pool up with a piece of Mahogany and re-rout it or pieces if you don't have the tools and skills. Get some wood from stew mac and use a dremel to shape some pieces to glue in. If you use maple it will make the guitar very hard and brite, I've done both.

A2 in the neck eliminates some of the nasty wolf tones you can get from your wound strings and allows you to get the pickup closer to the string for more output. That also allows for less winds on the pickups and better sounding pickups. Then go with the A5 for the middle and the Bridge. if I could do it over I would have done the bridge 5/2, 5 on the wound and 2 on the unwound. The lower you drop the middle pickup the more quack you get but with the A5 I didn't have to drop the middle pickup a lot, just enough so my pick doesn't hit the pickup too much. I think the DC resistance was about 6.1k/6.9K/7.7K all 42 Formvar wire.

I also have to ask what kind of bridge. A hardtail on a strat makes it even more difficult to find the right pickup. If you have a tremolo get a Callaham bridge or at least one of his blocks.

[bigdaddy]

It took me long time to figure this stuff out. Even after many years I was trumped, I'm much more of a humbucking guy or even more so a neck pickup player and like mini hums like the firebird and P-90s more then a HB. I would ask yourself next do you want Hendrix clean like the "Cry of Love" album or a dirty sound like "Layla"? Or the dirty NASTY of SRV......no you can't have all in one guitar. I went for the Layla.

For different flavors a good strat and a good tele are cool if your a Gibson player. I went with the conversion neck because I have short fingers and huge palms. Having different guitars makes you play different and that stretches your playing. It stops it from becoming stale, like actors always wanting to play different roles. I bought a mandolin and a lap steel and they have helped my playing by expanding the way I look at phrasing. A 12 string will help with rhythm playing.......my weakness is chords and theroy......the curse of the blues player.

So you don't want to make every guitar sound like a Lespaul......but you want a certain playability not only from the setup but from the sound. When you play a note on a guitar and the natural sound rings out you look at the guitar and go wow. That's happened to me when I played this beat up stock 52 Tele a friend had refurbished(he does people's guitars like Paul McCartney, Slash, George Benson) so you know that guitar was setup right. The neck was like a baseball bat but smooth as silk and the wood was light but felt dense. That guitar started me building guitars.......but it sounded like no other tele I every heard, through a BF Deluxe it sounded PHAT......Stock pups man. I have been trying to reproduce the feel of that guitar and it's hard. IT takes years for the wood to get right. That's why I use very little finish and a wiping varnish they call tung oil(it's not real tung oil it's some mix of varnish, poly and other stuff). I have also played or owned Gibsons from that era because I was more of a Les Paul, SG, ES-335 guy those days but that Tele sent me in a different direction.

I started making hybrid guitars until I found the right formula. But each guitar need it's own voice and that took a lot of time. The guitars voice comes from the pickups. If you get everything right then it's magic.