Q&A With Lindy fralin 4/14/26

Added: 2026-05-04

[00:00:00]First part we have your origin story.

[00:00:02]People One of the questions is how you got started in music and how that led you to making pickups, rewinding pickups, and Good lord, that's a song.

[00:00:13]That's a long [laughter] story.

[00:00:15]There's some highlights.

[00:00:16]I was attracted to guitar, I'm sure, cuz my dad had one.

[00:00:20]>> [snorts] >> And uh of course, he was listening to jazz. He had a classical Yeah. nylon guitar.

[00:00:28]And I was listening to Hanky Panky and Gloria and that stuff. Yeah.

[00:00:33]And I liked the guitar. I had an acoustic Yeah.

[00:00:35]playing.

[00:00:37]But uh when I heard Hendrix, it all changed. Yeah. And I decided then I had to have an electric guitar. Do you remember what record it was? Do you remember what record it was?

[00:00:46]Well, first it I was too young. I was 11 when he came on the radio.

[00:00:51]So I was too young to buy records. I didn't have any money.

[00:00:56]But you would hear a Foxy Lady and Wind Cries Mary and all that cool songs off the first two records all over them. So that just had had all the power that I you know never heard in music before.

[00:01:10]I guess before that I thought I was going to be a race car driver, motorcycle driver. Again, I didn't have a license yet. Yeah. It's just what attracted me, going fast.

[00:01:18]And the pickups I literally just got into pickups cuz a friend here in Richmond You were mentioning him recently when you brought the your original winder. Yeah. Uh Keith Grass, who's winding he had made himself a homemade pickup winder and he let me use it for two pickups and neither turned out good, but I loved the idea, so I kind of made my own little machine so I could experiment.

[00:01:40]>> [snorts] >> And um it's crude. It was a sewing machine motor bolted to a board.

[00:01:46]You had held the wire in your fingers and couldn't count turns. You just kind of filled it up. Wound coils for a while. Yeah, we we have a video People watching, we have a video on that winder on our channel.

[00:01:58]If you look up the original Yeah, I was captain, of course.

[00:02:02]And later I met Paul Reed Smith who gave me my first one of these, George Stevens winding machines, and that made everything easier cuz now instead of holding the wire with our fingers we guide it with a door knob and the tension's all done with these felt pads, so it's much more consistent than trying to hold it with your fingers. Another question is what is something that you now know about pickup winding that you wish you knew when you started?

[00:02:30]Mhm.

[00:02:32]I learn stuff very, very slowly.

[00:02:35]Truth is you know, like before the internet, I didn't have very many customers in town.

[00:02:43]So I was mostly just winding for myself, trying to get a rich pickup on a strat that I liked. That was the reason I got into it. Strats sounded so good in neck and middle and those rich pickups would cut your head off. At least on the amps I had.

[00:02:58]A gentleman now passed, named uh Steve Melkisethian at Angelo Instruments, and he had a catalog that he sent all over with parts.

[00:03:09]And I had found a few local guitars and sold it to him.

[00:03:13]So he let me advertise on the back page.

[00:03:16]I I just got a bunch of pickups and took a picture of them and said I wind coils.

[00:03:21]Every single one that came I had to learn how it was put together, what made it work, what wire it I needed to get.

[00:03:28]So it was a very slow process. Actually, there was never breakthrough moment Yeah. that I decided I now know everything, but I'm still learning. Doing all these different rewinds gave me an exposure to every different way you can make a pickup. And I had time then to just listen to them all and see which way what I liked better.

[00:03:47]Yeah.

[00:03:48]Cuz you know, there's a whole different family of pickups when there's when the coil's wrapped around steel like a blade or magnets than when the coil's wrapped around Alnico. Fender's or Melody Maker's is a Gibson that it's got just a Alnico bar magnet in it. Another question is if you have a nightmare repair story, which on the phone you were just talking about. The worst nightmare was uh uh 35 years ago we had a Charlie Christian in here.

[00:04:16]And one of my guys was trying to wrap that very thin piece of nitrocellulose plastic around the coil like tape. That's That's what they had done. Just wrapped it around and glued it.

[00:04:27]And he was heating it with a blow dryer, I mean a heat gun, and it caught on fire and we couldn't put it out.

[00:04:34]Nitrocellulose you can put it in a vacuum or underwater and it still burns. That whole pickup was gone.

[00:04:41]It was just a naked coil and a blade sitting there when it was all done.

[00:04:45]So I had to buy the guitar from the from the person who owned it. Took me a couple of years to find a replacement pickup and luckily we had the whole magnet harness and the height adjustment stuff was all intact cuz when we were winding the pickup that wasn't attached.

[00:05:05]So I found a lap steel Charlie Christian that looked exactly right and bolted up to the same mounting apparatus and it all I got to sell the guitar 5 years later, 2 years later, whatever it was. Yeah.

[00:05:18]That's a nightmare. Oh, sometimes there's little nightmares like you know, you get done with a pickup and realize you did something wrong, you got to completely start over. Sometimes you just waste a lot of time. The other day I was peeling a coil from a for a humbucker, peeling one of the two coils.

[00:05:35]And finally got it working.

[00:05:37]Put it all back together.

[00:05:39]And the customer had told me it was going to be a neck pickup, so I thought you know, mid sixes, he might like it as a neck pickup cuz he wanted it original.

[00:05:47]Yeah. He didn't call me and changed his mind. He wanted it just to sell.

[00:05:53]So there was no way a mid sixes was going to sell, so we had to take it all back apart.

[00:05:58]Cut the coil off. Mhm. Rewind it. I couldn't charge him for my time wasted.

[00:06:03]So had that whole humbucker back together and then back apart. Yeah.

[00:06:09]That stuff happens. But you just live with it, you know, you take the good with the bad. Next group of questions is kind of like fundamentals of pickup. So Someone has asked, can you explain simply how a P bass pickup works?

[00:06:22]The earliest ones a single coil or the later ones? I think probably the the double one. They did that to get hum canceling.

[00:06:29]You need two coils to make hum canceling. It can be like a Gibson humbucker.

[00:06:34]Left and right like a P bass.

[00:06:36]Stacked. And was that after the PAF?

[00:06:40]Yeah.

[00:06:41]Almost the same time.

[00:06:44]It's funny with in '57 both Gretsch Filter'Trons came out.

[00:06:50]You know, PAFs came out, P bass came out. Yeah. So maybe they knew what each other was doing. I have no idea how it all happened in '57. That's interesting.

[00:06:59]You know, I feel like sometimes good ideas just permeate like that at the same time. Well the inter- the term inductance bucking involves two coils and it goes back to a book I read that was published in 1908.

[00:07:14]So probably Tesla came up with that. He He made so many innovations.

[00:07:20]He He brought the science of electronics into the future like no one else ever.

[00:07:25]But they knew that you could have the same inductance. What you I don't know what you were bucking when you had an inductance bucking, but it was coils wound opposite direction. Yeah.

[00:07:37]Which are inductors.

[00:07:39]And it's something. Maybe it's noise, maybe it's capacitance. What they were bucking I don't even know. I never It's not even It's not even my book. I just read it when I was at my in-laws.

[00:07:49]But also if you look at if you ever take apart those screw cap microphones and headsets that they wore in World War II airplanes, there's a steel disc and behind it's literally a humbucker. Yeah. It's a U magnet with a coil here and a coil here and they're wound opposite directions cuz one is north, one is south, so they hum cancel.

[00:08:08]And that's like the very crude microphone.

[00:08:12]Or it could be a head- headphone. I think it was the exact same thing.

[00:08:15]Whether it was a microphone or a or on your ears, it was the exact same guts.

[00:08:20]And I've taken those apart. Seth Lover did not invent the whole idea of hum bucking. He He applied it to a pickup that's a classic. It sounded so good.

[00:08:29]They're still making them.

[00:08:30]Someone's asking why isn't DCR a reliable indicator of output or tone? And what specs >> question. And what specs do matter? It's a good question. Well the main reason is because the wire diameter is not consistent. 42 gauge as an example is bare copper is anywhere from 2.1 thousandths to 2.4 thousandths.

[00:08:53]And so you're going to have different ohm readings when you count 8,000 turns.

[00:08:58]Um we buy all ours min to nom, which means we're in the bottom half of that.

[00:09:04]And they're fairly consistent, but yeah, the number of turns is where the power comes from.

[00:09:09]Not the ohm reading.

[00:09:11]Cuz a Tele neck might read 7.4 and has 8,000 turns.

[00:09:16]A Tele bridge reads 6K and it also has 8,000 turns.

[00:09:21]The Tele neck is not hotter than the bridge.

[00:09:23]Yeah. It just has a higher ohm reading, so it's the It's a number of turns times the magnet density, magnet flux density, or whatever my some term like that that gives you your output. Do vintage pickups truly sound different from modern recreations?

[00:09:41]Not necessarily. I think the guitars may have been better chosen wood and light and thin finish, nitrocellulose.

[00:09:50]And Fender did keep them literally hand wound even after he had a whole machine shop full of really cool tools, he still had the girls winding by hand till 64 cuz he thought the random layering sounded better, which is true. That's why we we do random layering here because you just let the machine wind it.

[00:10:12]You get 125 turns every layer. Yeah.

[00:10:15]That repeats that same kind of capacitance over and over again.

[00:10:19]Random layering definitely [clears throat] gives a better sounding Fender pickup. Yeah, so another question was machine verse scatter winding, which is Well, this machine will go back and forth by itself with these gears.

[00:10:31]And that that heart cam, you can see how this stuff works if you want to hold it back there.

[00:10:37]The gears determine how many turns per layer. The heart cam determines how far it goes back and forth. So, we have heart cams for every different pickup back there. See all those? But the machine will go back and forth by itself, but we don't let it.

[00:10:51]Because of the random layering. Here's another another interesting one. Does pickup count affect tone like having more pickups in a guitar and more magnetic fields along the string versus one pickup affect >> does much, but certainly the position of the pickup is drastically important. You know, it's you know, a lot of old Strats have three pickups were the exact same pickup. They just sound so different because the string vibrates differently at each position.

[00:11:20]You know, in theory a reverse middle would charge the string a little bit north and the other two pickups south, it would make it louder. I've just never heard it. They may be too far from each other to have that effect. Do different pole pieces change tone like screws versus slugs?

[00:11:35]Oh, very much so.

[00:11:38]You get twice the inductance from a steel screw or blade because it's almost all iron.

[00:11:45]And Alnico's only half iron.

[00:11:48]So, you know, you get a Strat pickup with a Henry's of 3.2 and a humbucker with 6.something.

[00:11:55]Uh so, they're anything with screws or steel blades is going to have basically louder, thicker, quicker to distort. And anything with Alnico has this more open airy sound.

[00:12:07]It's It's a lot to do with that in inductance.

[00:12:11]And is there a scenario where you would not pot a pickup tonally or is there any reason not to do that?

[00:12:18]>> We use a wax that doesn't change the capacitance.

[00:12:22]I found years ago before the internet that there was something called a Thomas Register in a library.

[00:12:28]It was basically like the yellow pages to the whole country. And I found wax companies and looked up I found a chart that told you the dielectric constant of every wax available.

[00:12:40]And the one and the one with the lowest is what we use. So, it changes the capacitance the least.

[00:12:46]Beeswax had a dielectric of three something and the wax we use is 125 or something. One being no effect whatsoever, a vacuum. If you thought waxing was going to darken a pickup, listen to ours. They're not dark. Yeah.

[00:13:02]We also know how to wind for it, so waxing mostly helps to keep away vibration, microphonics, and to protect the pickup from oxygen.

[00:13:11]It's going to just last longer if it's waxed.

[00:13:14]It also can be repaired. You can peel it if you get you know, pickup gets a ding and then you can peel it. Whereas lacquer or glue, you really can't.

[00:13:22]Yeah.

[00:13:23]So, we like wax. We use it cuz it does protect our stuff.

[00:13:28]And someone asked, is it possible to make a true noiseless single coil that still sounds like a Strat? I think the closest is the left and right split design like the P bass. Yeah. But in a Strat, you just can't do it. Yeah.

[00:13:43]They're too close to each other and if three poles are north and three poles are south, instead of the magnetic field being one big one, it looks like this.

[00:13:54]Because the north and south are attracted to each other. They're less attracted to the actual string. Yeah.

[00:14:00]So, our split blade is pretty close to a Fender, but you can hear differences.

[00:14:05]Some of which I think are improvements.

[00:14:07]I get a thicker high E string. Yeah. But it's it's it's a good Strat replacement, but it you can't fake out Alnico. You just can't do it any other way.

[00:14:16]>> And stacked coils is also not I just never liked the sound of or the feel of stacked pickups. So, for us, we've never really experimented with them. The dummy coil elsewhere in the guitar, you're still running your signal through a big resistor, inductor, capacitor.

[00:14:32]So, you're losing power and tone. Our Twang Master is basically a Strat cut in half. Yeah.

[00:14:38]>> But they had to be offset far away from each other to not have that problem that if you bend your G, you would hear it weak in that middle section.

[00:14:47]Someone asked if you can confirm early Fender or Champion 600 pickup specs.

[00:14:52]That's difficult because before 1964, Fender really didn't have specs. Just fill it up.

[00:15:01]They were all over the place. Matter of fact, no no company had a turn counter like this one.

[00:15:07]This turn counter can be set for 8,000 turns and it shuts itself off. I don't have to be looking at it.

[00:15:14]They had turn counters you had to be watching and they weren't They were watching the coil.

[00:15:19]They could just Pickups got all kinds of different numbers in the in all the early stuff.

[00:15:24]Somebody had to stay with the winder.

[00:15:27]Once this came around in about 1964 or winder turn counters like it, the machine you could walk away. It was winding fine. It would stop itself.

[00:15:37]That made a big difference and pickups got much more consistent starting right then in 1964 cuz basically everybody bought them.

[00:15:46]It It was a labor saver cuz the winder didn't have to just sit there till it was done. Yeah.

[00:15:52]Like you like prep other stuff and I I typically stop a coil six to eight times because you always have to adjust this.

[00:15:59]It builds up on the left or it builds up on the right or does something and you have to constantly adjust for it.

[00:16:06]So, they probably did that and and knew when it was near the end, but it never got exactly the same turns.

[00:16:12]Two pickups in a row. So, someone asked, what is the tonal difference between a treble bleed circuit wired in parallel versus series?

[00:16:19]Well, I don't know. I've always put them in parallel just cuz it's easier to to mount. Yeah. It may not have any difference cuz they're both in play. You know, if you put two capacitors in series, you get exactly the same result as if you put those same two capacitors in parallel.

[00:16:37]In both cases, the capacitance doubles.

[00:16:41]Yeah. So, it doesn't matter for two capacitors. I don't know No, I think in series it halves.

[00:16:48]But I I haven't experimented with because I just know what works.

[00:16:52]Someone told me those values we use on our volume kit was taken right out of a DeArmond volume pedal that all the steel players used to use.

[00:17:03]>> Mhm. I tried it. It worked. Yeah.

[00:17:06]We've experimented up and down with those values a little bit. Like in a Gibson, they don't work as well. You have to fudge those numbers.

[00:17:15]And then someone asked, what's happening electrically when adding your resistor for a coil splitting?

[00:17:23]Ah, well, you're not fully splitting it.

[00:17:26]Since you're sending that center where the two coils goes in series, the normal tap, you send that to ground.

[00:17:33]You literally are putting a ground on both sides of the slug coil.

[00:17:38]You get exactly half a pickup.

[00:17:41]You put that same uh center wire through resistor to ground, instead of half a pickup, you get more like 2/3 of the pickup.

[00:17:52]And you still get a bright wound string.

[00:17:54]So, that just works.

[00:17:56]I learned that from putting a gradual split on a guitar. With our high output humbuckers and I just put a pot, blender pot.

[00:18:06]So, as I ran it down, you could gradually get everything from 100% of the pickup to 50, but all the way was gradual.

[00:18:14]Tried it with pure PAS and it really didn't sound good except for one small area. Yeah. All the way down, it was too weak.

[00:18:21]There was barely any change until you got down to somewhere on the pot. But I did was just on the pot made it sound the best. Took it apart, measured the resistance, and just started buying them by the thousand. Yeah, this is a pretty interesting one. Said, how do envelope related or dynamic behaviors, um if applicable to pickups or electronics, affect response? So, I guess like does amplitude I don't know those what those terms mean to me. Envelope?

[00:18:49]Yeah, I think it just means like if you if you hit the pickup harder or not as hard, if a string is has higher or lower amplitude, does anything change electrically?

[00:19:00]>> is in its own way like a microphone. It doesn't make sound. It picks up sound.

[00:19:06]So, if you strike hit the string harder, it's going to be louder.

[00:19:10]And if your action's higher, you're going to get a better result. If you have too low of action, you hit the string harder, it actually gets quieter cuz it's losing all its energy fretting out. Yeah. But uh there the same thing applies to why the pickups in different positions sound so different. The the string moves farther at the neck position, a little bit less in the middle, and and even less at the bridge. So, you get a very different tone, different harmonics of the string. You know, remember that say a you got a 2-ft string, 24-in scale.

[00:19:42]When you hit it, you're also not just getting the big sine wave. You're getting every fraction of it.

[00:19:50]It's moving in all these different wavelengths.

[00:19:52]If you wanted a sine wave, you would pluck it very softly dead center.

[00:20:00]And now maybe it's doing this.

[00:20:03]Yeah.

[00:20:03]>> When you hit it here, you get a whole different sound.

[00:20:09]Yeah, you know, that's why harmonics work.

[00:20:12]Right. That literally you just cut the string in half. Yeah.

[00:20:15]>> doing this.

[00:20:18]Of course, I'd have to pick it right on that node. But uh yeah, a guitar string is is making all kinds of frequencies, thirds, fifths, every fraction of it is present somewhere in there and Yeah, the math is pretty heavy involved with all that.

[00:20:33]>> If you wanted a true sine wave, you really would have to pluck it very accurately at the dead octave, you know, dead center that string. And even then you're not going to get a true sine wave. Yeah, someone asked neck versus bridge jazz bass like why it's different beyond pole spacing. I feel like that that summarizes that pretty well.

[00:20:52]>> that's just the string cuz the pickup's the same. Right.

[00:20:55]>> different everywhere you locate it on the neck.

[00:20:58]I have a funny story. I had a guy make me that fretless short scale jazz bass hanging right there.

[00:21:05]Sunburst.

[00:21:07]Tommy Rodriguez made that for me.

[00:21:09]And uh we decided since we made it shorter scale, we'd listen to the pickups.

[00:21:16]And so he held the pickups while I played in about 5 minutes, we had marked the body where we wanted them. He called me back and said we're within a 16th of an inch of where Fender would have put them. The scale doesn't matter.

[00:21:30]Because every time you fret it, you change the scale anyway. Right.

[00:21:33]>> So the distance from the bridge is what makes such a huge difference in the how the pickup sounds. Mhm. It's all about what's how the string is vibrating at that point. And uh someone asked how designs will compensate for different positions like your like your vintage hot. We do wind bridges a little hotter because on any pickup you get more mids and less high end the higher you wind it.

[00:21:58]And in a bridge pickup you can afford to have less high end and more mids, but you don't want to do that to a neck pickup. You want that really open airy sound. Cuz that note on the string is quieter closer to the bridge, right?

[00:22:10]>> Yeah, it's just the string just moving less. It's restricted. Yeah. But uh we do wind them a little different. I mean, some people will mix single single humbucker.

[00:22:20]And you put a totally different pickup at the bridge. If you're playing dirty, that makes perfect sense. Yeah.

[00:22:27]Yeah, but I I like single single single.

[00:22:30]But I do wind them about 10% hotter on almost every model we make.

[00:22:34]>> Some people have some specific product questions now. They're asking how your hum canceling P90s compare to a vintage P90 or your regular non hum hum canceling P90s.

[00:22:47]>> Well, the reason our hum canceling P90 sounds like a P90 is cuz basically the magnet structure is exactly the same.

[00:22:56]You got screws, steel, magnets.

[00:23:00]And the difference is on a real P90, the coil's just around the screws only.

[00:23:07]On ours, the coils are sideways, but they're picking up the same exact magnet structure. Yeah. And so they're both two coils in series and they sound really like P90s. You know, if you try to change it from those same screws, it would change everything.

[00:23:23]If you did it without an Alnico, it would be it would become our hum canceling Jazzmaster.

[00:23:28]The same sideways coils how we make hum canceling Jazzmasters, but they have short Alnico 5 magnets between the coils. Yeah. And it sounds like a Fender then instead of a screw.

[00:23:40]I feel a lot of the challenge in humbucking design is you know, if you do series versus parallel, the different parameters inductance, capacitance, resis- all changes in different ways that you can't, you know, it's not doesn't all change the same direction. That's true. Um someone asked uh do you prefer toaster top uh or high gain style pickups?

[00:24:03]I think the toaster top is my personal taste. They have Alnico and I just love that sound. Yeah.

[00:24:10]And then someone asked what your favorite strat pickups are and your favorite original designs.

[00:24:16]In strats, I like the blues specials.

[00:24:19]Because they're pretty much as loud as you can get without getting too much mids and too much loss of high end on the wound strings. Cuz I do want bright wound strings. So that you know, the blues special strat set is 6363 and 7. And you you still have a Fender sounding pickup.

[00:24:36]You wind them much hotter, you get too much mids and not enough highs and it just starts to sound lifeless, boring.

[00:24:42]Yeah. And in pickups in general, I really think it may well be my favorite pickup we make is hum canceling Jazzmaster which is actually exactly the same guts as the Dynasonic.

[00:25:00]That's our Dynasonic in this Chinese Gretch. That's my favorite pickup we make cuz it's clean enough to play something like the Wind Cries Mary, but also thick enough to do Chuck Berry.

[00:25:15]I just use our magic cap, nothing but a.002 microfarad, just smaller. But it tends to make a Fender sound a little more like a Gibson. Just on bridge pickups.

[00:25:26]And so I can do anything with those DeArmonds.

[00:25:30]And they can come in a soap bar, a dog ear, Jazzmaster, Dynasonic, or even a humbucker cover. It's all the same guts.

[00:25:38]Someone asked what the progress is on the dual split blade humbucker sized humbucker. We're still prototyping that because it's going to be a very difficult pickup to build. Four coils and eight solder joints. We're trying to figure out how to make sure it's the easiest [clears throat] way to build. So we use rapid prototyping and and this is about maybe third generation.

[00:26:06]We've been doing this in Where is that good? Oh, right there.

[00:26:11]But that's literally two strat pickups. That won't go into a Gibson.

[00:26:17]So we're just having to have new injection molds and a new base plate and it's going to be These are 3D printed.

[00:26:23]It's going to be amazing pickup because you can have totally mismatched coils and it's still quiet. It's even quiet when it's coil split. So this pickup is full strength, that one's only half output.

[00:26:37]So when you add that in, it doesn't go over the top dirty.

[00:26:41]It sounds like a low output humbucker and this sounds like a nice output Fender.

[00:26:46]But we're going to have this together.

[00:26:48]It's just a matter of keep prototyping um until we're absolutely sure we've got everything thought of cuz these injection molds cost 24,000.

[00:26:58]You don't want to have anything wrong.

[00:27:00]You really have to have it well thought out.

[00:27:03]And then you get parts for dirt cheap.

[00:27:05]It An injection mold pays for itself in the long run. I've had that now for like 15 years or something. But it won't go into a Gibson. Yeah.

[00:27:14]>> That's literally the size of two strat pickups. It's bigger this way, wider this way. Yeah. If that thing didn't have a universal route, I wouldn't have done it. Right.

[00:27:23]>> Cuz I took a rat tail file and just turned a regular single single humbucker pickguard >> Right.

[00:27:30]>> into the first one of those.

[00:27:33]Then we had WD make us a template. So we could buy them, but you still have to have the swimming pool route.

[00:27:41]>> [snorts] >> Or be willing to butcher your guitar.

[00:27:43]You ever seen that blue guitar over there? Uh >> On the ground?

[00:27:46]>> Oh, yeah. How it gets butchered.

[00:27:49]I haven't >> pickups still on it. I haven't seen how it's butchered, but I'll show you. The route's just >> how I bought it.

[00:27:57]>> [snorts] >> Oh, boy.

[00:28:02]>> [laughter] >> I didn't do that.

[00:28:04]>> Someone's first time with the router or something.

[00:28:06]>> single coils and I think it's a hammer and chisel.

[00:28:10]But I got this on Craigslist for 30 bucks and it it sounded tremendous. It didn't like these pickups. It's too bright a guitar.

[00:28:18]It loved our P90T tubes.

[00:28:21]So at some point I'm going to put the P90T tubes back in there. That's this pickup.

[00:28:26]These sound like as bright as a Fender in that guitar. Yeah. And otherwise they're P90 sounding.

[00:28:31]>> That's one of my favorite models after learning about everything here.

[00:28:36]That's [snorts] my first design of my own that we spent money tooling up. Got the covers made, the bobbins, the base plate.

[00:28:44]And um it's still just a great pickup if you got a humbucker size but you want it to sound like a single coil. Yeah.

[00:28:51]>> It's the same left and right design like a P bass.

[00:28:54]Cool. We got a We got just a few more.

[00:28:56]Um someone asked what pickups you'd recommend for a balanced HSS setup um with no volume drop. Well, there's that's a difficult one cuz humbuckers are much louder than single coils.

[00:29:11]There's really three or even four different ways to do that. And one of course is to put your favorite single coils in, favorite humbuckers, and let them not match. Yeah. They're not going to.

[00:29:23]You could have much stronger single coils to match the output of the humbucker like our high output split blades can keep up with humbucker just fine.

[00:29:31]But they're thicker than Fenders, a little louder, quicker to get dirty.

[00:29:36]You can even put a a lower output humbucker or plan to split it. Yeah.

[00:29:43]>> And only have it try to match the output of the single coils when split. The humbucker is great for that.

[00:29:48]>> You know, but if you had >> [snorts] >> a low output one of these, like a neck output in the bridge of a Fender with two single coils instead of a humbucker, that might be closer to the output of the single coils. It's a difficult thing to do cuz the normal Fenders want 250K pots and the humbucker wants 500.

[00:30:09]When we sell a loaded pickguard single single humbucker we usually use like blues specials or split blades for the single coils and a low output humbucker, like 8K.

[00:30:23]Use it with a resistor.

[00:30:26]But we have to put 500K master volume and then two 500K resistors literally across the two single coils so that they see a 250K pot and the humbucker sees a 500.

[00:30:39]It can be done and there's even humbuckers that are you know, low enough output like like our big single with a 42 gauge wire that'll work on a 250K pot, but it doesn't sound like a humbucker. It sounds like a single coil.

[00:30:54]Yeah.

[00:30:56]And that's the same sideways coil design.

[00:30:58]It's just a bar magnet between them instead of Alnico rods or screws.

[00:31:05]That sideways coils was done first by Gibson in the EBOs of the bass pickups in the '50s. They never tried it in the guitar for whatever reasons.

[00:31:15]Few people asking for suggestions like this um for a PV power slide lap steel what pickups to suggest? PV power slide?

[00:31:27]>> I never I've heard of this. I don't know anything about it. My only knowledge about lap steel since I only own one is the same pickup in a lap steel is going to be louder and more solid sounding because the guitar has a 2x4 for a neck instead of a skinny little neck.

[00:31:46]There's just no energy lost whatsoever.

[00:31:48]And that's the That's the PV. Okay, you're meant to be standing up.

[00:31:53]Um Yeah, you see that neck is much bigger than a guitar neck and there's a slide a big bar is much heavier than a fret. So you just don't have any energy lost. So my opinion, if you don't need a louder pickup, it's going to be thicker and bigger sounding and longer sustain cuz it's just everything's more dense. Yeah.

[00:32:16]I guess it it depends on if the pickup works or not or if they're trying to up like modify or if they're just trying to get something similar, who knows. And then someone was asking for um for Les Paul style blues tone like Elmore James that's less harsh.

[00:32:32]What pickups for that?

[00:32:35]Well, Elmore James played acoustic guitars with like a DeArmond in the sound hole.

[00:32:41]He didn't use a humbucker that I can remember. Yeah.

[00:32:44]>> Um Yeah, everyone's familiar with like Duane Allman. Duane Allman playing [clears throat] on Les Pauls, but I have no idea what he used. There's rumors that he had 13K pickups.

[00:32:55]He had to have at least started out with the stock original humbuckers.

[00:33:00]I'm not I don't have knowledge of what gear he used. Yeah.

[00:33:05]>> stories like they lined their Marshall cabinets with mahogany and took all the foam and stuff out. I don't know if it's true.

[00:33:13]Sounds heavy. You hear this stuff.

[00:33:16]Yeah.

[00:33:17]Yeah.

[00:33:17]>> And then they didn't like Celestions, they put JBLs in there. But this is all just stories. No, the JB the JBL thing is true.

[00:33:25]How do people know?

[00:33:27]And when? Did he Did he play it at his last concert or the >> you know, there's a picture of it or was that his whole career?

[00:33:34]>> career did he Yeah. switch his Cuz I mean those guys were kind of poor when they did their first album. They were all living in one house. Right.

[00:33:41]Yeah. But still they managed to find real Les Pauls and Marshalls, didn't they?

[00:33:46]>> [laughter] >> There's um people are asking how they can identify real Fralin pickups in different eras. I know now they're stamped, but the way to identify. We didn't stamp them for the longest time, so there's no way with absolute certainty.

[00:34:04]There is a mark on my early tools that make the Strat pickup.

[00:34:08]Um in the very dead center of the back was a little there's a bump in the tool, so it it cuts out a teeny bit of the fiberboard.

[00:34:17]The other thing is early my first like 10 or 15 years my magnet diameters were 194.

[00:34:24]If you have a micrometer.

[00:34:27]And we switched about 25 years ago to 189. But real Fenders are 187.

[00:34:34]So if you have a micrometer, that might tell you something, but Yeah.

[00:34:38]>> wasn't on them for the longest time.

[00:34:40]And um Why the magnet switch? Is my own question.

[00:34:44]>> Um I had measured some rewinds and they were 194, so I just got that.

[00:34:51]And then I realized that that was kind of an anomaly. That was a rare one. Hm.

[00:34:56]Fender very likely Fender was buying some kind of surplus magnets in the '50s.

[00:35:01]And you know, things just would change.

[00:35:05]Because in the early before 1955 every magnet was just 3/16 by 5/8 whether it was a bass a lap steel or a Tele. Neck bridge, all the same magnets. He's probably getting World War II surplus cuz he also in those old pickups they randomly would be Alnico III or V. Sometimes mixed in the same pickup.

[00:35:29]There's no good explanation for that except he was just getting these magnets cheaply somehow. Someone asked if um you have a really old pickup with old magnets um or like rusty pole pieces and is there any benefit of like lacquering them to have it last longer? Can you seal it somehow? The magnets don't seem to be hurt by the rust.

[00:35:53]The coil gets eaten up as soon as it's exposed to the rust. So the copper's what's fragile. Those magnets I wire wheel them off and they haven't lost a half a thousandth of material. Yeah. So they're they're not being damaged by the rust like you'd think.

[00:36:08]It like they might look bad, but I literally clean up all the magnets when we get in old rewinds cuz they're almost always rusty now. Yeah. And they fit right back in the same bobbins.

[00:36:19]Everything's fine.

[00:36:20]But you >> that rust is what's so bad for the copper though. And once you get the rust off, you don't need to like seal those old magnets again. They won't start eating the coil again. What I've noticed is the magnets can still be We can get all the rust off and they're still they're still a black. They're like they're stained black.

[00:36:37]That doesn't seem to hurt anything. Oh, I think >> We don't polish them to a shine again.

[00:36:42]We just get the rust itself off.

[00:36:44]>> Yeah.

[00:36:45]I learned that that that tarnish someone commented that that might actually help.

[00:36:49]You know, you'd rather it tarnish that way. It might be sealing it.

[00:36:53]>> Yeah, than to have a just raw magnet that the iron itself can you know, rust.

[00:36:59]>> Yeah, that does make sense. It's a patina. You know, it's it's not Alnico is what's called an alloy.

[00:37:06]It's not a new molecule. They have not combined into a different molecule.

[00:37:10]You've just mixed these metals together and metals are something insanely interesting that you can create alloys that do such different things like frets are nickel silver.

[00:37:24]There's no silver in it, but it looks like silver.

[00:37:27]It's German silver. You can make jewelry out of it.

[00:37:30]You can use it for frets. It's what all our metal covers are.

[00:37:34]Yeah.

[00:37:35]>> mostly copper.

[00:37:36]But it doesn't look like copper at all.

[00:37:39]Somehow you mix a little bit of nickel, maybe some other stuff in with the copper and you get nickel silver.

[00:37:46]And you know, well Alnico is a mixture of these things. They're not a new molecule and so that's why it's when it rusts it's spotty.

[00:37:54]Or when it turns black, it's not absolutely even.

[00:37:58]Cuz it's it may be just the iron or just the whatever.

[00:38:03]What is aluminum, nickel, cobalt iron Most of them are about 50% iron.

[00:38:08]Those magnets.

[00:38:10]Cuz iron is the only really magnetic material around, but it's not a good permanent magnet. Adds these things to it.

[00:38:18]And I don't even know what neodymium is or samarium.

[00:38:22]But all these things added to iron every magnet material does have iron in it, it seems like. Yeah.

[00:38:30]Someone asked when are you going to play again? I I'd have to go look at a calendar. We just played last Thursday, but I don't know >> acoustic set?

[00:38:37]And it was acoustic.

[00:38:38]>> Yeah.

[00:38:39]I don't know when our next one is.

[00:38:41]We do We do have something coming up at Mayline Hardywood private party, another Northside Grill all places we like to play. It's not this weekend or I would know.

[00:38:55]>> [laughter] >> Don't worry about one week at a time.

[00:38:57]Someone said uh last but not least, what is your soldering iron temperature?

[00:39:03]700.

[00:39:06]Unless I'm doing a base plate I'll put it to 800 for like the back of a pot or a Tele base plate or a humbucker cover. I need the extra heat.

[00:39:17]These are wonderful machines. We also have at least 10 welders. The top of the line welders are also wonderful.

[00:39:26]Just work and work. Don't fail on you.

[00:39:28]The thing about soldering, always use real electrical solder.

[00:39:34]It's got a rosin in it. And it's it's just it's Any other solder is just not going to work. And it's leaded solder. Well, we use lead tin.

[00:39:45]Um there's there's lead-free solder.

[00:39:48]It's harder to work with and I think it's fine, but you just got to have it made for electrical purposes.

[00:39:54]It has to have this rosin. Yeah. And >> doing gutter work, you you know, your solder doesn't have that.

[00:40:00]What lead it welding pipes together, but they put the rosin on separately.

[00:40:06]Awesome.

[00:40:08]So, if you have more questions, you can comment and we'll do one of these every every once in a while. Thanks for your time, Lindy. Thank you.