How to build a Strat Pickup

Thawing the Ice-Pick

getting a warmer tone from your Strat bridge pickup

For many players, the Strat has one good pickup in the neck.  The middle is simply there to occasionally get a weird two-pickups-in-parallel sound or to cancel 60-cycle hum, and the bridge is there only... ONLY for use with a fuzz pedal.  God forbid you would want to play your bridge pickup through a clean Fender Twin, you might ruin the hearing of everyone in the first row!

Here are a few tips to warm up the tone of that pickup in order of cost and simplicity.

1. Adjust pickup height $0- Make sure your bridge pickup is not too close to the strings.  Depress the high and low E at the last fret and measure from the top of the two poles to the bottom of the string.  Make sure the pickup is no closer than 1/16" and adjust the rest of the pickups to match the volume of the bridge.

2. Wire the bridge pickup into the middle tone $0- The classic wiring of Strats is to have a tone control for the neck and a tone control for the middle, and the bridge is left out of the tone circuit.  Most modern Strats have the bridge wired in with the middle control.  If your bridge pickup has no tone control, here is a wiring diagram to help you:

3.  Affix a baseplate to the bridge pickup $4- This mod is cheap, easy, and completely reversible, so why not give it a try?  Tele bridge pickups sound amazing because they have a baseplate to raise the inductance, lows, and volume, the same technique can be applied to Strat pickups.  Buy a baseplate from a guitar parts supplier and either apply glue or melt some wax to adhere it to the bottom of the pickup (wax is my preferred method as it is easier to remove later).  Any metal plating on the guitar should always be grounded.  Use a file or course sandpaper to scratch up a section of the baseplate and apply some solder.  Then solder a lead from the baseplate to the back of a potentiometer.

4. Replace the bridge pickup with a higher output pickup $85- single coils with a greater resistance (measured in ohms) with have more output, more lows, and less highs.  There is a wide variety of drop-in replacements out there that require no modification to the body.  Here is one of my Blue Dog pickups that measures 8.1K ohms in the bridge and uses steel poles and bar magnets like a P-90 for a fat, warm tone.

What is 'scatter-winding' anyway??

Many high-end pickup manufacturers like to boast (myself included) that their pickups are "scatter-wound," but many people don't really understand what this term means.  In fact the whole art of winding pickups is quite foreign to a lot of people, even if they play guitar.  Quite simply, scatter winding is a method of making pickups that results in a unique and beautiful sound.  In this post I'll take a stab at trying to explain the principles of this method.

All electric guitar pickups use the same basic design, they are simply magnetic polepieces wrapped in very thin copper wire.  The polepieces generate a magnetic field that the string vibrates in, and the copper coils turn that vibration into an electric signal. 

In the '50s, electric guitars started getting extremely popular.  Humbuckers, used primarily in Gibson guitars, used a uniform wind made on a machine; and single-coils, used primarily in Fender guitars, used a scatter-wound coil made by hand.  Technically you could use either method for either type of pickup, but it is widely believed that single-coils sound better scatter-wound.  Tension also matters when winding a pickup, looser winds typically sound clearer and better.

When I first started winding pickups I didn't understand that the way in which you wind the pickups actually has an effect on the tone.  It made sense to me that the quality of wire you use, the number of turns, the quality of the magnets, and the strength of the magnets all played a part in the overall tone.  But I figured you would need some sort of ultra sensitive computer to hear if they were scatter-wound or not.  I made a couple of pickups by just guiding the wire back and fourth in a very even manner.  I made a couple variations of these and tested them, then I made a set of pickups using a scatter-winding technique.  The first thing I noticed was that the resistance (electrical output measured in ohms) of the pickup had dropped significantly.  When I installed them and tried them out I was amazed!  I was hearing details that I had never heard before, there was more treble and harmonics than I had heard from my earlier pickups.  The video below shows me scatter winding a pickup.  The wire is as thin as a human hair so you can't really see it, but you can see how my hand is moving to get an idea of how it's done.  It also helps to be blasting Pink Floyd while you're doing this for 15-20 minutes per coil.

When coils are wound on a machine, each consecutive wind is very close to the last wind.  when you scatter-wind a pickup the idea is to put lots of space between each consecutive wind, this lowers the distributed capacitance of a pickup so that more treble and detail get through.  Your tone control on your guitar has a capacitor on it, as you turn that control counter-cockwise it uses more and more of that capacitor to bleed off highs to the ground, and the result is you hear a darker guitar tone.  Scatter-winding does just the opposite, it gives the pickup more treble.  This sounds really good on single coils because they have a very open sound to begin with, extreme highs and extreme lows, a lot of the guitar's natural tone and character comes through.

When I'm scatter-winding a pickup, I try not to follow any sort of pattern and I move the wire randomly across the bobbin.  Machines are not good at this because they are programmed to do things very neatly.  I suppose you could program a robot to mimic the motion of the human hand, but that wouldn't exactly be cost-effective.  The human hand is a really good tool for this because it's hard for us to do things in a consecutive pattern.

Update 08/04/2010

You can also scatter-wind by simply guiding the wire back and fourth faster across the bobbin, thus putting more distance between each wind.

Scatter-wound pickups are more expensive because they have to be made by hand.  It also makes the pickup more unique because you can never exactly replicate what you did before, so each pickup has its own tonal character.  When Fender first started out as a company, all of their pickups were wound by hand, they are considered by many to be some of the best sounding pickups in the world.  Today they make thousands of guitars a year so naturally it doesn't make sense for them to hand-wind each pickup, but there are a few other winders out there like myself who still hand-wind every single pickup.

Be a Smart Consumer

Avoid falling victim to marketing ploys

Do you ever notice when you're in a store or shopping online that products seem to be organized by good, better, best? There always seems to be a clear line between one product and the more expensive one. I used to work for a major chain of musical instrument stores specializing in electric guitars. While I was working there I noticed a certain trend in the kind of guitars that we would sell the most of, they were typically midrange guitars in the 500-600 dollar range.

If you were to put all of the guitars in our store into three brackets, you would have "Bracket C" being guitars cheaper than $299, these are guitars like Squier and Dean (no relation) that are usually made in China or Indonesia and are made of the cheapest components possible. Midrange guitars in "Bracket B" for $300-$999 are still not made in the United States but incorporate better components and carry the same name as their more expensive counterparts, names like Stratocaster, Telecaster, and Les Paul. And finally we have high-end guitars in "Bracket A" selling for $1000 or more. These are your standard series Strats and Teles, American made Gibson SGs, and Ibanez guitars that are made in the big factories in Japan. Everything in this final bracket I would consider "pro" gear, and depending on options prices can go well beyond $5,000. Out of all these brackets, Bracket B by far outsold everything else in the store.

The reasoning for this is very simple and is no secret. When faced with three different product choices at different prices, consumers will usually choose the middle of the road. They think to themselves, "I don't wanna buy the cheapest piece of crap, but I also don't want to go outside my budget, I'm not a professional anyway. So I'll choose the second-best choice." Retailers have known this for a long time and they do this with everything from microwaves to TVs to cars. It's called "price pointing".

The pros are obvious; the system works, retailers make a lot of money when they use this system. But the cons are pretty serious. First of all you have a major decrease in quality when you manufacture something to be "good enough". This is usually where "Bracket C" resides, products here are the cheapest and are usually just built to be good enough to get by. You can pretty much take all the products in this bracket straight from the store shelf and throw then directly in the local landfill. Realistically it might be six months or it might be two years or it might be ten years, but eventually that microwave for $29.99, that TV for $69.99, or that car for $9999.99 will end up in a landfill somewhere. I'm sure you have fallen victim to Bracket C before, I know I did. You needed a toaster for your new apartment, went to Bed, Bath, and Beyond and saw that sweet deal for $29.99 and thought, "perfect, I'll take it!" One year later, where is that toaster now? It became trash.




Ever notice how people rave about antiques and how good the quality is? I'm sure you've heard the expression, "They don't build 'em like they used to." Well its true, things like kitchen appliances, cars and musical instruments from the 50s are fucking fantastic. The Sunbeam Mixmaster you see to your right is over 50 years old, and it is the best appliance in my kitchen. They didn't have price pointing back then, or at least they didn't use it the same way as we do now. Leo Fender built some of his best guitars in the 50's. He was a skilled Luthier, a genius when it came to building guitars. In 1950 Fender built and released the first solid-body electric Telecaster and it was perfect. He built it with all the right components and sold it for what he though was fair, only a few hundred bucks. Today his guitars from this era are considered the "Holy Grail" of great tone, and are auctioned for tens of thousands of dollars.

Just to give you another example, acoustic guitars are really expensive to make, unless you make them with laminated wood and shitty components. before price pointing nobody could afford an acoustic guitar, but that was okay because back then nobody really wanted one, they weren't popular. As soon as something becomes popular the manufacturers find ways to get it out to the public as fast as possible. You don't see grand pianos selling for $129.99 do you? Well maybe not yet, but when you do you can be sure that the quality will be reflected in the price.

In the center of it all we have Bracket B, the middle of the road, the middle child, half-baked, not really a full commitment but more of a half-hearted compromise. Some sort of mutated twin of the Beautiful American Standard, shunned and cast out into the forest to live in exile. I once bought a used Fender Telecaster. It was the Mexican made version that originally sold for about $400. When I got it, she was a wounded bird, a two-tone sunburst that someone had sanded down with a bench grinder to give it that "road-worn" look. The pickups were a fucking joke. The neck pickup was made of plastic, and when I took apart the controls I noticed the electronics looked like they had been soldered together by a blind gorilla with Parkinson's Disease. It had been sitting in the store for quite some time and nobody really took much notice in her, but after playing it a little I could see the potential this guitar had: a straight neck, good tuners, and a lightweight, resonant body.

I took her in a nursed her back to health. I stripped off all the old paint and refinished her in powder blue. Then I took apart all of the electronics and replaced everything including the pickups with american standard gear. I put it all back together and slapped a white pickguard on her to offset the powder blue body, a fresh set of strings and I was ready to go. The second I plugged it in I knew I had done something right because it sang like never before, since then this guitar has become part of my regular gear that I play on stage, and it all started out as an inexpensive half-mutant.

So I guess my point to all this is that when you're out in the world making your purchases, be an informed buyer. You should know what you're looking for before you go into the store or start surfing the online businesses, especially when it comes to musical instruments. Bracket C is for the cheap-skate who thinks he's getting a great deal, Bracket B is the one that usually everyone falls into because it's halfway between quality and suckage, and Bracket A is the real deal. Bracket A will probably end up saving you money in the long run because you don't have to go through a bunch of Bracket C's before you finally settle on the good one, and it's better for the environment because you won't be filling up all those landfills. You pay for what you get in this world. If you are an informed buyer and you know about the stuff you are looking at, then maybe a Bracket B is good for you and will suit your needs just fine. Just don't be a sucker and fall victim to price pointing the second you walk in the store.