Ebay Pickups for a DIY Pedal build

Ron Wendler · From: Southern Minnesota, USA

The pickups offered on Ebay most likely come from that place in the far East. The price certainly indicates it. Has anyone had any experience using either a single coil or humbucker pickup offered? Looking at how one is made, they seem to all use the same parts basically. What sets them apart from a high dollar one?
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A fine instrument is like a lady. Treat it nice and it will make lovely music.

Tim Toberer · From: Nebraska, USA

This forum has gone a bit quiet! I am probably in a minority here, but I think you will be just fine with less expensive pickups. Pickups are just wire and magnets the magic of the boutique pickups is lost on me. I was able to get very close to my ideal jazz tone on archtop guitar by winding a very simple pickup. 4000 turns of 40g wire around a 1/2 in steel bar with a 3 in Neo magnet underneath. They work great for steel as well. I think it is more of a choice of what style of pickup. String spacing may dictate that you use some type of blade pickup. For 6 strings you have very many choices!! 8 strings is much tougher and you are limited to Bass pickups if you want to go cheap. They work fine. Tuners are worth spending a little more money on, but I have found the cheap ones to be adequate. You can always upgrade later. The mechanics of the pedal steel guitar are the hard part. What kind of changer are you using? Good luck and keep us posted on your progress, post some pictures!

Ron Wendler · From: Southern Minnesota, USA

Thank you Tim for responding. I am on a tight fixed budget but love to build things. I look for less expensive when I get parts. Some things you can't skimp on but when there isn't a difference, I save where I can. And like you say I can always switch things out. I'd like to attempt making a pickup sometime.
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A fine instrument is like a lady. Treat it nice and it will make lovely music.

Tim Toberer · From: Nebraska, USA

Carl Mayer · From: Richmond, Virginia, USA

I’m also very pro cheap pickups, physically theres really nothing complicated about them that would merit spending big bucks on one. Assuming the same wiring and pickup position, your amp setup accounts for most of your ‘tone’, guitar side setup (string selection, string height off pickup, etc) makes some difference, and barring broken wires or something that makes it not work altogether the actual pickup itself is pretty negligible in my opinion.
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-1930 Bacon and Day tenor banjo
-a whole lot of homemade nonsense

Javier Schulenburg · From: Austria

A lot of the soap bar pickups sold for 6 string bass guitars have the correct width to accomodate 10 strings and with full width magnet bars there shouldn't be a problem with different presence of different strings. I've bought a belcat Belcat BJ-80-6 for my current build but I don't yet know hoe well it sounds since I'm not very close to finishing it yet. Generally any properly resin potted pickup should work, no matter the price (Although a fancy name can certainly increase the perceived value)

Frank Leppert · From: Portugal

I can´t complain about the Chinese pickups I ordered to build my lap steel 3 years ago. I also chose low budget stuff from the hardware store for the nut and bridge. It took them a couple of month to arrive, but IMO they have a reasonable sound, but I don´t have a comparison. As I wanted a 8 string instrument I had to put 2 pickups in a line, and it worked.

Recently I added tone and volume controls, I am still struggeling with the right cap value.

Another thing that improved the sustain was getting a roller bridge. Luckyly there was an offer for a roller nut for a 5-string bass and it had the exact string spacing for my lap steel. The roller nuts for guitars were too narrow.

Conclusion, if you are not too demanding for your instrument, and don´t want to spend too much money you can build a low budget instrument with parts from the hardware store and from chineese stuff. A good option for beginners.

Steven Black · From: Gahanna, Ohio, USA

My Friend Shane Larson builds pickups he even does the TrueTone's like Jerry Wallace use to build, he is owner of Larson Artison.

Frank Leppert · From: Portugal

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