Right now, good friend of mine in Houston, Texas is in the process of tooling up for an eventual foray into the market of affordable, custom, made-to-your-specifications electric guitars. Designs are done and templates are being made so all he needs is a little extra time to do the work.

Part of building and selling guitars involves sourcing the parts and perhaps the most important components are the pickups. With that in mind, he’s asked me to wind up some custom humbuckers and single coils, which will be installed on the guitars he plans to sell. The deal is, if he buys me a better winder, I make ten sets of pups for him free of charge.

This creates a potential opportunity for me to sell custom, hand-wound pickups. I would offer three different models of humbuckers, single coils and P90s. Each type would be available in three different levels of power output; low, medium or high. By matching the right magnet to the level of output would result in tailor-made tone. For example, the low power design would feature the clearest and widest range of tone, which would be perfect for the studio. The medium power would have slightly less tonal range, but would be great for the stage. And last, but not least, the high power would be for harder rock/any style of metal where tonal range takes a backseat to driving an amp instantly into distortion.

Of course, this is all just pie-in-the-sky thinking right now. There are a lot of custom winders out there already, but what they charge for pups seems a little out of line especially in this economy. Unfortunately, many builders have to cut corners on pickup selection in order to keep their projects within a preset budget. That’s a shame since the pickups can make or break a guitar’s tone.

Feel free to chime in and let me know your thoughts about doing this.