Ready for pickup

By Rick Sinnett

Whether he’s working with a local garage band or a rock legend like Tommy Shaw of Styx, Wolfe MacLeod has spent nearly three decades perfecting the pulse of the electric guitar: the pickup. If you don’t play guitar, you may not be familiar with pickups, which provide the guitar’s tone – it means everything to guitarists – and are essentially the guitar’s microphone.

Without getting buried in the weeds too much, a pickup is essentially a copper wire wrapped around magnets attached to the guitar. It captures a guitar string’s vibrations, converts them into an electrical signal, and passes that signal through a cable to an amplifier.

Pickups make guitars louder, and performing guitarists who need to bump the volume need good pickups. That’s why MacLeod’s Wolfetone Pickups has been a popular spot for musicians in south Snohomish County for more than 28 years.

While his client list includes heavyweights like Shaw (and previously the late Rick Derringer), MacLeod has maintained a speed that rivals his craftsmanship – operating as one of the rare custom shops capable of turning around a customer’s order in a single day.

His day starts at 5 a.m., scrolling through emails and sorting orders for his garage-based shop in Mountlake Terrace, where he crafts handmade pickups. “I get random guys from Seattle or Edmonds who would order stuff and say, ‘I didn’t know you were so close.’” He encourages locals to drop by to pick up their orders and avoid shipping charges, and he likes meeting locals who use his pickups.

To return to the weeds, we start getting into some mysterious terms: magnetic gauss, wire inductance and gauge, electrical resistance, magnet type, 60-cycle hum, and wax potting that shields against microphonic feedback. Simply, they all work to affect guitar frequencies “picked up,” commonly referred to as “tone,” and how loud the signal is going to the amplifier.

After almost three decades, of course, guitar-term minutiae are second nature to MacLeod. After orders are sorted, preparation begins with cutting braces for single-coil pickup magnet pole pieces (screws, poles, or posts that run through the guitar pickup’s coil to serve as a magnetic conductor for each string) made from vulcanized fiberboard called “flatwork.” Although some manufacturers use plastic, MacLeod uses the same vulcanized fiber material that Fender Musical Instruments Corporation has used since the 1950s. “I’ve repaired pickups using modern plastic flatwork, and they melt when you solder the wire leads. They won’t last 50 years like the old ones.”

After cutting the flatwork into two pieces that form the top and bottom of the pickup with a laser cutter, MacLeod installs six pole-piece magnets with a custom-made tool to form a bobbin (spool), what the copper wire is wrapped around. Then, he sprays the bobbin with lacquer to coat the pole pieces to prevent the copper coil from shorting and give the framework more rigidity.

Wind it up

After the lacquer dries, the bobbins are ready to wind. And this is where it gets tricky.

MacLeod said attention to detail, fine motor movement, and manual dexterity are crucial to making pickups. He said one needs the skill of an expert jeweler, because the wire used is as fine, sometimes finer, than a human hair. The bobbin is secured to a winding machine that spins it at up to 1,900 rpm.

Here’s an amazing fact: Depending on the pickup model, a single-coil pickup will have 8,000 to 9,000 windings, sometimes more. MacLeod explained that the number of windings affects the pickup’s tone.

Once the coil is wound, the hair-thin wires are attached to what’s called a pigtail, the wire leads that are soldered to the pickup selector or potentiometer, which control volume and tone. After the pigtails are attached, the pickup is placed into a pot containing melted wax, which is sealed and connected to a vacuum pump.

The vacuum that sucks air out of the pot and the pickup, ensuring that the paraffin and beeswax mixture fills every possible gap in the wire and flatwork, shielding the pickup from unwanted microphonic feedback.

It sounds easy, and compared to what’s called a “humbucker,” it is. Humbuckers are two coils working together to reduce noise and give a guitar a thicker sound. Its two coils per pickup help to eliminate the inherent 60-cycle hum found in single-coil pickups.

The humbucking coil was initially developed by Electro-Voice in 1934 for microphones to eliminate hum, and a guitar design was later developed by Arnold Lesti in 1935. However, the modern humbucking pickup, which MacLeod makes, was designed by Seth Lover for Gibson Guitars in 1955.

Some models are true vintage replicas of the 1950s Gibson P.A.F. pickups – named after the “Patent Applied For” stickers underneath – accurately capturing an old-school sound. The coils are handed off to Dave Vest, MacLeod’s long-time friend, who assembles the pieces into the completed pickup.

The business side

When MacLeod isn’t reading emails or making pickups, he’s handling the business side of Wolfetone, including material ordering and shipping. Although almost everything he uses is sourced from the United States, tariffs have hit him hard.

The highly prized Alnico magnets (a mixture of aluminum, nickel, and cobalt) used in guitar pickups are mainly sourced from China. MacLeod said that U.S.-made Alnico magnets are primarily used in the military, aerospace, and automotive industries.

“When I found out about the tariffs, I ordered $5,000 worth of magnets,” MacLeod said. His $5,000 order would become $7,000 after tariffs. He explained that just because an item is manufactured in the U.S., it doesn’t mean all the materials used to make it are sourced domestically.

And while material prices were rising due to tariffs, sales went down for the same reason.

MacLeod used to ship a lot of pickups to Austria, Germany, Norway, Italy, France, Japan, and Canada, which was his biggest foreign market. But now he’s getting few orders from our northern neighbors.

“You know, I’m kind of at a loss as to what to do here,” MacLeod said. “I know people in the music industry who are mortgaging their homes to stay in business.” His concern isn’t just for his business, but also for the stability it provides for his fiancé, Jhoeanna, and 9-month-old daughter, Rhiannon, who are currently in the Philippines. “You know, we’ve gone through shipping, typically like 15 to 20 pickups a day to 15 to 20 a week.”

This isn’t the first financial drought he has faced. MacLeod said a similar situation happened in 2017, but business shot up significantly in 2021 during a boom in guitar sales during the pandemic. Despite the current economic downturn, MacLeod and his staff keep pushing forward. The team has weathered bad times before and has confidence that they’ll make it through the current downturn.

After all, their warranty explicitly states, “We also cover a Zombie Apocalypse.”