the heretic recants

[Zhangliqun]

I had pretty good success on my first try, just ADDING about 1300 turns to an existing Fat 50's bridge when I was home sick from work one day. Went from 6.6 to about 7.6k and -- in spite of the rat's nest look (or I think because of it), the difficulty getting the cover back on, the terror as it scraped the outer winds and nearly guillotined the start lead wire (wasn't sitting flat on the flatwork), just an all around engineering nightmare -- it sounded great and I was hooked.

[Possum]

...

I built Lollar's winder so I had a head start I guess. The first one I wound was rewinding my Texas Special tele bridge pickup in my Nashville Tele. I overwound it and put it in, same thing, I was blown away by how much better it sounded than that machine wound cheap plastic pickup straight from a factory winder. I had to learn to cut forbon into strat shapes before I could actually make my own, no one sold ready made anything in those days except covers. P90s I had to do them from Jason's book, forbon plates and a plastic core drilled and tapped, what a bitch those things were to make. They sounded pretty good though...

[ShannonH]

only 7?

I remember my first winding experience. Broke the wire about 7 times, I wonder if they'll last that long

I almost quit, but I'm half german, thus determined (aka. stubborn, pigheaded, etc.) I think I cut off the start three times because of the breaks, and finally got one with only 3 splices. I still have it. It sounds great.

[StarryNight]

there seems to be a sub-set of pickup buyers from the usual aftermarket pickup customer cohort. These are the folks that seek that personal touch, need to talk about their gear, value 'custom' products, and are impressed by the artisan aspect to building. Many of my customers would never buy a SD or Dimarzio pickup from the music store as they don't get to consult with anyone knowledgeable enough to help them decide which from the massive selection to choose from. If you offer free information to someone asking about pickups you imediately become part of their decision making process and most often you become a strong candidate for them to try your pickups. Customer service is key...

[ken]

This is a really interesting thread.

From Magnut -

Ahhh,, you have hit on a subject I have wanted to bring up. Selling at the local shop.. I have thought of doing this and in fact talked to a few. Most say they don't sell very many or are mostly interested in carrying "big brands".

I tried this myself once. I went to some stores with my pickups, sold to them at 40% off retail, generated all the necessary brochures and other ads by myself, and even supplied them with demo guitars with preinstalled pickups. Unfortunately, boutique pickups are not impulse items like picks or straps, so the salespeople have to be very knowledgeable and motivated indeed to sell your pickups in competition with SD or Dimarzio at sometimes half your price. Frankly, no motivation... no sales.

Things were different when I owned my own store... I had a wall of guitars with every different pickup model I made preinstalled in them, and some vintage amps to play them through too. I didn't have to spend a lot of time explaining to potential customers why my pickups were cool - I just handed them a guitar like theirs and pointed them at the Marshall in the corner. If they brought their own guitars along, so much the better.

I also put a winder right in the retail area so customers could visit and watch while I wound, and of course offering free installation and controls cleanings 'while I'm in there' helped too. <G>

Customer 'instant' feedback was great, since not only did people get to hear my work up front but I got ideas that helped me improve my products too.

From Possum -

I think the way it works is you may have international recognition for your work but in your own home town....how could your stuff be any good since they never heard of you. They WILL want your stuff at half off too, its not worth it, we put way more time into what we do than any of the bigger companies, and thats our strength

I had a customer come in one day and tell me that he wanted to buy his pickups at half price because nobody knew who I am and using my pickups could damage his reputation. Seriously. I told him sure... and I was having an outdoor party behind my house that Friday night and I wanted his whole six piece band to play it complete with PA, lighting and smoke machines (!) for five bucks entire because given his reputation I was afraid that nobody would show up.
Don't even think about getting me started about 'musician's discounts'...

There seems to be a sub-set of pickup buyers from the usual aftermarket pickup customer cohort. These are the folks that seek that personal touch, need to talk about their gear, value 'custom' products, and are impressed by the artisan aspect to building. Many of my customers would never buy a SD or Dimarzio pickup from the music store as they don't get to consult with anyone knowledgeable enough to help them decide which from the massive selection to choose from. If you offer free information to someone asking about pickups you imediately become part of their decision making process and most often you become a strong candidate for them to try your pickups. Customer service is key...

I live for these people! Once a player figures out that their guitar's volume control also turns down, they also realize that a good quality solid wood instrument with a good set of pickups can really increase their playing enjoyment, not to mention their chances of getting shows. I look at it like this - There are some who enjoy and appreciate fine whiskeys and custom made suits, and others who are happy with what they can find at Walmart.
We are just as much artisans as the people who play our pickups, and it makes me feel good to know that someone enjoys my work enough to want to use it to make their own art better.

Rant over - you can breathe now. <G>

Happy Holidays,
Ken

[Billy Bones]

Super interesting thread. Anyone out there with a positive experience placing pups in retail environments they didn't own themselves? Totall agree with what Funkykikuchew said about retail. For the most part, retails a hard game and you're dealing a public that is uniformed and a sales staff only slightly (maybe) more informed. You have to take a big hit on the price you're going to get per pickup, so now you're interested in volume. Maybe if you have a champion working in a particular store who wil steer every customer towards your pickups.

I'd think a good website and craigslist would do more than retail shelf space.

The other comment about big name players playing big name brands is really true. A huge percentage of gear buyers buy what they buy based on who plays it. I would think it's 99 to one - sheep to tone connaiseurs. And the stores gotta sell to the sheep. All the tone connaiseurs know they know more than the pimply dude behind the counter at Brad's House Of Guitars.

Billy

[kevinT]

I can understand the retailers standpoint. Why would a retailer buy a product from a company that no one knows about. Retailers are in business to move product, not let stuff sit in the glass cabinet for years. That is why they buy DiMarzios and Duncans because they been around and already made a name and pretty much sell themselves...it also doesn't make it as tough a job, for the retailer, selling these brands to customers as opposed to no name pickups. You gotta put yourself in thier shoes.

On the other side of the coin, you gotta give retailers a reason to buy from you and carry your product.

--Do you have a good product? --as a retailer I would first want to know does the pickupmaker even have a quality product to sell. (bring your guitar(s) and do some demos in the store. Explain what a pickup is and how it works....most sales folks don't know this.
---Show the retail your own marketing efforts? ...This is where it would be a good idea to show retailers what you're doing to sell your own product...Are you running ads in magazines, do you have a good word-of-mouth reputation on forums, are you selling with other retailers that they can use for reference. What famous players are using your product?
--dependability--can you deliver when you say you will
--warranty-- do you back up your product with a full warranty.

Look at it as applying for a job.

From my experience, most stores want to do a cosignment arrangement because it's less risk for them.

Endorsements are a good and a bad thing...some customers look at whether famous players use your stuff, and other customers could care less. You might have to give some stuff away or deeply discount it to well known musicians.

A few endorsements from different players supporting your company would not hurt as I look at it.

[frankfalbo]

Believe it or not, this is one area where company like Seymour Duncan and good boutique winders share the same kinds of concerns. We're really on the same page with this one.

Seymour got his start in the same way most of you here. He was also fortunate enough to get started when there were more vintage examples, he could ask questions of people who were alive, who still worked for various companies at the time, etc. He took apart everything, analyzed everything, etc. and really today the Seymour Duncan Custom Shop is just a higher octane version of a lot of what you guys are doing. We can all bicker and poke fun at what each other thinks is the "truth" about vintage stuff, or how we have a lot of winders and employees, and others have one of each, you can call and talk to the winder, etc. But that's just normal, more friendly stuff. It doesn't really cause unfriendly relationships.

What I think is bad for the business is a LOT of small winders (not the good kind) each contributing to misinformation, and/or each winding mediocre pickups, charging more, contributing to the myth that something that isn't "repeatable" is somehow bad. Each of us here, whether hand traverse/tension or machine, is probably at least attempting to develop repeatable success.

The marketing copy in Stew Mac's catalog is disturbing to me. Here are a couple highlights:
"A pickup winder is a great way to make money in your shop. If you can fix a stock pickup there is no better way to maintain an instrument’s vintage value...."
What?!! Do any of us really want the guy that bought the Stew Mac kit last month even TOUCHING a truly vintage pickup? Not to mention, how could it possibly "maintain vintage value" if you had to tell someone "yeah some guy who practiced on 5 el cheapo pickups rewound this '57 neck pickup for me...He has a nice guitar store though...He does it for extra money..."
Rewinding dead pickups
• Rewind an entire pickup to original specs.-Original specs? You're such an expert that you know how to match tension, gauge, coating, traverse, etc?"
• Peel a pickup to find the problem, then rewind from the problem out."
That's nice, so only the LAST 500 turns will have crappy amateur hand tension/traverse/etc?
Then way at the bottom:

"Pickup rewinding requires patience and study. Don’t dive into rewinding vintage pickups until you’ve repaired and wound some el Cheapo pickups. Most repair shops have collected a pile of dead pickups over the years—they’re perfect for practicing. (Remember the luthier’s golden rule: Practice On Scrap!)"

Don't wind a vintage pickup until you've repaired and wound "SOME" el cheapo pickups?! How about just send it to someone who knows what they're doing?

To me it's the same as fretwork. I'm a fretting veteran, and I've seen DIY fretwork ruin instruments, I've seen people charge good money for fretwork that left the instrument in worse shape than when it needed fretwork.

[Possum]

....

The bane of this field are the amateurs who really don't have enough experience and shouldn't be selling to the public. If you want to see the worst of the worst cruise Ebay and watch for the new winders that show up there practically every week now. "Authentic PAF tone...$35." What it really should say is "authentic StewMac kit, fully assembled, using completely unique offshore pickup design with long track record for good tone. I started winding last week after school, and I don't know what a PAF is."

Almost every time I post anything there to keep some cash coming in, they all start copying my pricing and try to copy my relic techniques, people buy this stuff and end up getting crap made with no understanding of what they are trying to copy, so next time I try to sell my identical product, the interest has gone down, possibly because people get burned with paying high prices for junk. Worse yet, I see alot of my technical informational text being not so slyly copied and mangled by not knowing whats being said. Some things I've seen there have been incredibly ridiculous. A strat set literally globbed all over with "pure beeswax like Leo used" I about peed my pants when I saw that one :-)

When I started out with Jason's help, you couldn't buy most pickup parts at all and I had to make all my own parts out of Forbon on the router, which was excellent training and it kept the number of winders getting into the field down because you really had to be driven to get past the hurdles of not having these parts which are so easily available to anyone now.

The hack amateurs don't last though, but they damage the credability of the rest of us by selling garbage and ripping people off, those guys will probably never buy a boutique pickup again. On the other hand, the ones who stick with it, seek out knowledge of the physics of coils and magnets and never stop learning eventually start making good pickups. Lately, I've quit talking about what I'm actually doing and learning all the time, and I don't put all the technical details in my rare Ebay buy it now sales or it bites me in the butt down the line.

This is not an easy way to make money, I'm still not doing much more than treading water at this point, but I love the technical side of this, learn something new almost every day, and love finely crafting good sounding pickups. Don't have much choice really at my age, sure don't want to go back to the "art whore" career I gleefully abandoned...... I managed to build a reputation which supports me in the post-Bush economy.

I suppose it was inevitable this phenomenom of new winders popping up every week, we're seeing. Jason's book sold pretty well, StewMac and others started selling parts and kits etc. Whats happening is identical to what happened in my design career. I went to school to learn graphic design, while apprenticing at a studio, and learned most of what I know on the job in design studios and agencies, knowledge that is taught nowhere. Along came the Macintosh. Suddenly almost overnite, anyone who could afford a Mac had the capability to set type, retouch photos, and put together "design." People with zero training calling themselves "desktop publishers" clogged the field with mediocre design, doing newsletters and "logos" for cheap, and the bottom dropped out of the design field, overall quality hit the bottom and the field was flooded with impostor designers. CD's came along and super star album designers disappeared. Yet there are still good designers out there and good pickup makers, but its real hard for the players to figure out who the BS'ers are and who really knows their stuff. Worse yet, the big pickup makers aren't truthful in what they sell either. Gibson lately has some copywriter who knows zip about anything, embellishing ad copy with nonsense. In the genre of PAF repros the BS is at all levels, the big makers try to "improve" the design but they say nothing about that, the amateurs think all you do is wind unequal coils and that makes them dead authentic. Anyway, we just have to deal with it and stay ahead of the pack I guess. Seymour has a long reputation, and I seem to hopefully have gotten into this as the "door" was closing on an era where pickup makers had to be real hands on in every aspect to succeed. The truth is that this stuff is HARD if you really want to make an excellent product, the hacks think its easy and probably quit when they have problems they can't figure out.....

[bfhoo]

I suppose it was inevitable this phenomenom of new winders popping up every week, we're seeing. Jason's book sold pretty well, StewMac and others started selling parts and kits etc. Whats happening is identical to what happened in my design career. I went to school to learn graphic design, while apprenticing at a studio, and learned most of what I know on the job in design studios and agencies, knowledge that is taught nowhere. Along came the Macintosh. Suddenly almost overnite, anyone who could afford a Mac had the capability to set type, retouch photos, and put together "design."

Desktop publishing made graphic production really faster and easier. I don't think that readymade bobbins can make same thing for boutique pickup building. They are still made same tradtional way, there is no automation that has not been around 50 years ago. Only thing is that parts are easier to find.

I think that bigger problem, as always has been is that people don't still really know that well-made "handwound" pickups sound lot better than bulk big brand pickups. And if there are more boutique pickup makers around, probably more people are using boutique pu's and there are more people who are aware of their "superior" quality.
Other thing is that the Brand is a king. People are not willing to buy no-name pickup because they have no idea of its resale value.

[Possum]

...

The computer was a godsend for real designers, well at least the ones who made the switch, one of my friends took 7 years to become computer knowledgeable, meanwhile she starved because she didn't know how to run a Mac. What the computer DIDN"T do was create MORE professional designers, in fact the number went down because bread and butter jobs like newsletters and menus went to lowest bidder DTP people who had basically no skills in design. It didn't make DESIGN easier, it made it faster to crank out more ideas sometimes, but not always. A computer can't create a design by itself.

Before StewMac if you wanted to make a Fender pickup you had to pay a laser cutter big bucks and buy a boat load of Forbon, or cut your own one at a time on a router, Jason-style.

In a similar vein, buying a StewMac humbucker kit, anyone can wind and put it together and it will sound pretty good, but it teaches you nothing about pickup design theory, because it is a "pre-designed" product, all the engineering has already been done and you can't alter anything about it except the magnet and how you wind it. So there are alot of new winders who only know how to wind pre-designed pickups and haven't a clue why they sound like they do or how to significantly alter its parts to take it down another road. They are like the desktop publishers in a way, they can put something together but aren't "creators."

[bfhoo]

So there are alot of new winders who only know how to wind pre-designed pickups and haven't a clue why they sound like they do or how to significantly alter its parts to take it down another road. They are like the desktop publishers in a way, they can put something together but aren't "creators."

Are there really lots of them? I am pretty much noob myself and have not intentions of beginning doing this thing wholeday (or to sell generic sets as boutique PAFs...)
What was striking when surfing around: There are zillions of active forums and sites for amp , stompbox and guitar builders, but this is the only place for pickup makers. IMHO Stewmac kits haven't changed the basic situation that pu making is still considered as some kind of witchcraft that very few are willing to dwell into?
BTW I am european and of course I have no idea how things are in States...

[David Schwab]

Desktop publishing made graphic production really faster and easier. I don't think that readymade bobbins can make same thing for boutique pickup building.

Sure they do. I have to make my own bobbins, and that's a lot of work.

Back before you could buy pickup parts, the only way you could make a pickup was to make your own parts, or take a factory pickup and rewind it.

Now you can get all the parts and only need the skill.

[FunkyKikuchiyo]

On the ready-made parts, the jury is still out with me about pickups. I mean, no one is going to enamel their own wire. And asking someone to do their own injection molding is also a bit of a tall order. But, it does tend to annoy me with "guitar builders" that put together warmoth guitars and throw their name on it. A lot of guitar building out there seems like someone is just playing Mr. Potato Head... I look forward to more opinions.

[Possum]

....

Well, if there was a war in Korea and China and you couldn't get any parts anymore, I'd be ok as long as I could get magnets and wire. You can make humbucker bobbins out of any kind of flatwork same as you can strat stuff, in fact I think Anderson or one of those guys makes them that way for their commercial products. There really are alot of these kit assembler winders out there, but Eric at StewMac told me they don't do alot of business with their pickup parts, so I don't know what the real picture looks like. I imagine most of them hit a problem they can't solve and quit. Some get better but are one trick pony winders, they only know how to do humbuckers and have no knowledge how to do strat pickups etc. I think if one wants to be a real pickup maker they should first learn how to do single coils, because the variations you can do are alot less than with humbuckers, and they are easier to understand. They aren't easy to master though, a good strat pickup is a challenge to really make sound exceptional.