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Electric Alchemy: The Complete Craftsman's Guide to Building Better Guitar Pickups
Paperback
Music Instruction: GuitarMusic Recording & Reproduction
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Apr 20 2026
Pages: 154
Weight: 0.61
Height: 0.33 Width: 7.00 Depth: 10.00
Language: English
Every guitarist has felt it. One pickup sings. Another just sits there. The difference isn't magic - it's physics, materials, and the decisions made at the winding bench.
Electric Alchemy: Second Edition is a complete technical guide to understanding, building, and refining guitar pickups from the ground up. Written in plain bench language by a working pickup builder, it covers everything from the invisible forces that make a pickup work to the hands-on decisions that shape its final voice.
Inside you will find magnetism and electromagnetic induction explained clearly, coil winding theory and practice, magnet materials and their tonal signatures, inductance resistance capacitance and resonance, pickup geometry and field design, series parallel out-of-phase and coil-split wiring, measurement and validation techniques, and troubleshooting and refinement.
No engineering background required. Only curiosity and a willingness to understand what is actually happening under the strings.
The components shape the pickup. The builder shapes its voice.
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