Experimental Musical Instruments is an online resource for people who want to make unusual musical instruments. They have how-tos on instrument making, as well as books and CDs featuring the work of experimental instrument makers. Also they have back issues of the Experimental Musical Instruments quarterly journal.

GeoMag is a magnetic toy construction system. It connects together using short magnetic rods and little steel balls. Niels Kaagaard noticed the resemblance of the GeoMag rods to the pole pieces in a single coil pickup and proceeded to make a pickup out of them.  When you remove the plastic coating from the GeoMag rod you can see it is a steel bar with neodymium magnets at either end.

The Fender Stratocaster has three single-coil pickups (bridge, middle and neck), selectable by a five position lever switch. The lever switch originally had three positions, but guitarists used to balance the switch between positions to get an out of phase sound, and these extra positions became standard in 1977. Positions 1, 3 and 5 activate only one pickup (bridge, middle or neck respectively), while positions 2 and 4 activate a combination of two pickups (bridge and middle, or middle and neck, respectively).  

Pickup position, number of coil winds, wire types, magnets and other factors shape the tone. Pickups in the neck position usually give louder, mellower and warmer sound, while bridge pickups have lower output and produce a brighter, sharper and more harmonic-rich tone. The reason the neck pickup has the most output is that the string's vibration has a higher amplitude at the neck position. To balance the output of the three pickups, some manufacturers use different coils in each one

The original Stratocaster pickups had staggered pole pieces from 1954 to late 1974 and then flush pole pieces from 1974 to 1981. The staggering of the pole pieces was supposed to compensate for the differences in the output of the individual strings. These differences arise due to the camber of the fretboard and the fact that some of the strings have naturally higher output, the plain or unwound G string being the most significant and this calls for these magnets to be further compensated, resulting in an apparent odd looking stagger.

Sources: The Fender Stratocaster, by A. R. Duchossoir. Published by Hal Leonard Corporation

This is an ongoing project to design and build a computer controlled guitar pickup winder. Why? Because I like making machines!

Traditional guitar pickups used alnico magnets or ceramic magnets. Neodymium magnets, a form of rare-earth magnet, have not often been used in guitar pickups. These extra strong magnets are becoming more and more available, and this instructable shows how to use them in a single coil pickup.

This article is about a guy from the Netherlands who decided to build himself a MusicMan -type bass humbucker. These humbuckers differ from guitar humbuckers in that they don’t have any baseplates and don’t use a bar magnet with steel pole pieces.

Joe Hoffman made this clock in the shape of a single coil stratocaster pickup . Six nixie vacuum tubes display the time, where the pickup's magnets would be.
The top and bottom of the pickup-clock were cut out of stainless steel by the Big Blue Saw Company. You send them a design and they will cut it out using their CNC waterjet and send it back to you.