Quote:
Originally Posted by Danhole  Hey all,
I did a search and I couldnt find any relevant threads. I'm making a bit of a frankenstein guitar for cheap. I spent today making a pick-up for it. What I did was wrap a lot of copper wire around magnets set up in a pick-up formation. i attached the wires to a female quarter inch jack.
The magnets make a noise when touched but not when a string is played near them. Any idea what I might have done wrong?
Does it matter what end of copper wire is attached to the grounds? Does it need grounded? |
Frankenstein pickups CAN have life breathed into them! Here's how to make one.
1. glue small magents (one for each string) to end plates. (It's best if you can run a ground wire out that connects to all magnets but it isn't totally essential)
2. Wind a coil of as many turns as you can of as fine a wire as you can find around the magnets.
3. Connect the wire from the CENTER of the coil to ground on the jack. Connect the wire from the outside of the coil to (tip) hot.
4. Test the pickup by tapping on the magnet ends with a steel object like a screwdriver or allen wrench. You should hear a loudish clunk etc.
Note: Since you didn't say what kind of wire you used, I presume it's wrong! REAL pickups use EXTREMELY fine 44 Ga. wire. The kind of "fine" wire you find laying around is not NEARLY fine enough. So what that does is make a low impedance pickup. To make that useable, you need to get a "mic to line" transformer. Even better is a "Mic to grid" transformer if you can find one. They are old. Radio Shack has the mic to line transformers. They have a 1/4" plug on one side and a XLR on the other. Your pickup wires go to the two "hot" XLR terminals and the magnet ground to the third ground terminal. That's it. Should work great.
Many years ago I had my junk "Kingston" bass pickup die and I rewound it with the finest wire I could find (stripped from an old radio). It looked pretty fine to me, but had next to no output. So I got the mic to line transformer and installed it. Used that crappy bass that way for YEARS! This is in fact, the RIGHT way to build a bass or guitar. Use the low impedance pickup to drive a long wire without loss! However you have to remember that the volume and tone circuits are HIGH impedance so they have to go on the FAR side of the transformer. So if the transformer is at the amp, you can't have controls on the bass. So I put the transformer on the bass and while I lost the line driving thing, it pretty much worked like any other bass.
Good luck!
