How To Rewind A Stingray Pickup

[@gaoyuan5220]

Hi, In the beginning of the video, you said reverse magnets does hum cancel, but it has to be reverse wound to canceling hum, magnets don’t affect phase of hum. Am I right?

[@RobMods]

Hi Yuan. Yep, the magnets have to be opposite polarity to have a hum-cancelling pickup. But the winding direction doesn't matter. You just have to make sure to have the signal of both coils is in phase. (If they are out of phase, it is very obvious. The pickup will sound very thin with low output and no bass). It is nice however, to have one coil reverse wound when you have exposed pole-pieces, because then (with signals in phase, and coils in parallel), you can have the inner windings from both coils at earth. Even though the pole pieces are insulated from the windings, due to capacitance, a signal can pass. And when you touch the pole pieces, your body is an antenna, and if the inner windings are on the hot side of the circuit, you get a buzz. This is just like touching the tip of a guitar lead that is plugged at the other end, into an amp. It has nothing to do with hum-cancelling. It will happen with any pickup, single or 'bucker, if they have exposed pole-pieces and are wired with the inner windings of the coil to the hot side of the circuit. One way to negate this is to earth the pole pieces. Another way is to use a pickup housing that covers the pole-pieces. Neither of these measures were really necessary since I rewound the pickup with one of the coils in reverse and I wired them in parallel. Now I have the inner windings of both coils on the earth side of the circuit, and if I touch either set of pole-pieces there's no buzz. However, if I decide at some stage to wire this pickup in series, then the inner windings of one coil will no longer be at earth because now it is connected to the outer windings of the other coil. And it will buzz when touched. (This happens with P bass pickups.) So I earthed the pole-pieces just in case. This is all a bit confusing at first, but once you make or mod a few pickups, your brain will make sense of it I'm sure. Thanks for watching my video mate!

[@gaoyuan5220]

Rob Mods. Thanks for the reply, watched all your videos. Great works!

[@RobMods]

@@gaoyuan5220 Thanks mate. That's kind of you to say...

[@oleksandrnovakov4295]

I love the music you played here!

[@RobMods]

Thanks Oleksandr!

[@smollande]

Brilliant. I've always wondered why my pole pieces arent making a connection to the copper tape, and how I could fix it. Thanks for the video, it's the only place on the internet with the answer!

[@user-陽朝]

You made the world more beautiful. I really admire this.

[@RobMods]

Kind words... Thank you.

[@dyhrchristoffer]

Cool MUSIC at the end

[@bassimprovjams3772]

Very cool!! I know nothing about pickups when it comes to this stuff but I love stingrays and had to watch this! Hearing that music I thought it was a stingray lol I guess I was half way right

[@hallanvaara6106]

An other worldly repair! Great playing!

[@Belman5]

What a great video! Absolutely packed with so much useful information. The bass sounds really good too, as does your playing.

[@RobMods]

Thanks mate!

[@jonathan_bass]

Well done Rob - detailed video full of educational tips!

[@RobMods]

Cheers Jon!

[@juliodifelippo]

Great video! A really good work with this pickup! Cheers.

[@MegaCoKO]

Man holy shit this is epic. I've been trying to get into pickup making for myself but don't even know where to begin... Have you any recommendations? What software were you using there for the frequency readings? What do you use for the wire spool? How does the polarity and wiring have to be with humbuckers? I'd love to see a full in depth step by step. Happy to pay for the info!!

[@javierlopez-ig5fj]

very good, could you do a tutorial on how to calibrate a bass guitar? thaks !!!!!!

[@fazendamaristela]

Hey Rob. I have an 86 stingray. I would like to make it a 4 wire out instead of a 2 so! hat I can series parallel it. Any tips on this proceedure. It looks like that the present 2 wires are coming from one coil.

[@waynegram8907]

ROB, can you make a separate video showing what type of dummy coil, like just removed the pole pieces and just kept the coil around the bobbin and then injected 20hz to 20Khz sweep function generator? The main question is how can you TUNE a pickup to "shift" the resonance frequency to the right or left? It would be nice to see your test setup when measuring a pickups frequency response profile curves but not sure how you can TUNE the pickups by shifting the resonance frequency to the right or left by the windings capacitance and inductance

[@danrubenstein2898]

How bout a stock vs modded A/B?

[@RobMods]

Nice idea Dan. I'm planning a series of pedal mod videos where I leave one pedal stock and mod the other. Definitely some A/B testing will happen in those...

[@davidtennyson-m2m]

Great video! One question: what is the software you use in the video to analyze the pickups?

[@myhapylife]

Excellent and informative video. I have an question: Is it a good idea to unwound the cheap pickup until hit this 3k dc goal? Instead of unwound and rewind. I have an old stingray cheap pickup and I can just unwound wire, to make it underwound.

[@RobMods]

You could certainly try to unwind a pickup. I did this as a teenager actually. It would be quite time consuming for sure. And if you break or lose the wire, that would mean rewinding from scratch of course.

[@myhapylife]

@@RobMods Thanks for the reply. Actually, I tried this last night it took me a few mins to underwound from 3.5k to 3k dc. How this will sound I will see. Interesting experiment.

[@drumcrazy5866]

Magnets don't contribute to hum cancelling. The direction of current in the two coils does. The principle is that of a common-mode choke. Coil wind direction does not matter for this. Two coils, wound in the same direction, wired in reverse, in the absence of any external magnetic field, will still cancel hum. This can be confirmed with any standard humbucker with the magnet removed.

[@GalihWSwana]

Btw how to increase the output of the pickup in the passive one? Im using a single coil jazz pickup and i want the sound is closer to the geddy lee's jazz bass which he is using rewinded 70's jazz single coil by tom brentley.

[@RobMods]

Here's a few ways to increase the output of a passive bass. 1: Try different strings. Make sure they are genuine (buy from a reputable retailer). Some string alloys are more ferrous than others. 2: Adjust the pickups closer to the strings. 3: Try an EQ pedal for a little boost and some tone shaping. 4: Make the magnets stronger. You can experiment by adding some small neo magnets to the bottom of the bobbin. This is a cheap and easily reversable mod to try. 5: You can have the pickup "over-wound". This means simply adding more windings over what is there, if possible. If there's not enough room for at least 10% more wraps, then I'd say don't bother. 6: You can have the pickups "re-wound". This means cutting off the existing windings and replacing them, most likely with narrower gauge wire so you can get more output from the pickups. This will also give more inductance, so the tone will most likely be darker.

[@GalihWSwana]

Thank you man much appreciate

[@mashilmy]

The easiest way to increase the output is by wiring them in series