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Can you make me a single pickup?

Yes, and we will test your existing pickups, free of charge!

(For a single pickup guitar like your LP Junior this is no problem, as there are no other pickups to work with. Likewise for Humbuckers, we can make a 4 wire pickup that can be flipped in polarity to match what you have in your guitar)

If you read marketing blurbs, forums and in general, The Internet, you could be forgiven for thinking that guitar pickups have some kind of industry standard, but they don't. Every manufacturer is doing their own thing, so pickups are all over the map in terms of coil wind direction and magnetic polarity. If you have another pickup or two in your guitar and you want to drop in one of our single pickups, we need to ask some questions. 

Some folks want the convenience of a drop-in replacement taken from our shelf that "just works" and they are becoming annoyed that we have to ask these questions. "Make me a RWRP middle pickup" is a common request. Reverse to what, I ask? To reverse anything, one must know the original orientation!

With no industry standard and no gathered data on your pickups, we have a 25% chance of the making the correct pickup for you. A guess, at best. There could also be other things going on with your pickups, so we don't assume that specs from the internet actually represent what's in your guitar, instead we test your pickups. We can very quickly figure out what you need using a few specialist tools here on the bench. We do that at no charge for you.

Here are some examples of things that go wrong with mixing random pickups together.

- They're out of phase (thin nasal sound)

- They're not hum-cancelling (extra noise)

- The pickups are not what the owner thought they were, so the spec is off (often going on information obtained from the previous owner during a sale)

- The pickups were wired differently, so a polarity could be reversed from what the owner thinks it is

- The pickups have been rewound, re-magnetised, re-wired or otherwise modified from original specs (if any)

- Assumptions have been made about the spec, which turn out to be incorrect (result, out-of-phase/no hum-cancelling etc)

For our trouble, we often don't hear back from the customer. That's OK, I'd rather lose a sale than send out a problem. If you would like the job done right we can give you a postal address and it'll cost you about twelve bucks to send them in for testing (Australia only). Because we don't want you or your tech to have to attempt the install more than once, we take the extra time to make sure we absolutely nail it.

Cheers, Ben.

Posted 17 January 2025

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