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I got a pile of guitar pickups, but unfortunately they're all electric pickups. Has anyone tried to turn them into an acoustic pickup? Or will it sound weird?

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Typhoon Guitars
http://www.typhoon-guitars.com

It really depends on the pickup. Generally, soundhole pickups would be considered underwound if used on an electric. Half of a humbucker wound to vintage specs (3.5 to 5k DC resistance) would probably be your best bet. It would also be the easiest to experiment with if you use the slug side and try different bar magnets underneath. If there are any decent pickups that might have resale value, you might want to sell them and use the proceeds to get started doing some winding.

I'm in the middle of developing a pickup system that uses low impedance coils, DC resistance is being experimented with between about 500 and 1k ohm. To work with a guitar amp, they need a matching transformer or a little active boost circuit. In my system they go through some specially designed digitally controlled analog preamps... But I have tested them with just a clean boost and they had a very natural acoustic-like voicing despite being in a solid body guitar. If you want to try going down that road, I recommend getting some relatively heavy gauge (36 AWG) wire and using it to rewind some of the pickups you have on hand. Winding with such heavy wire means you can fill the bobbin normally so the coil geometry is maintained but impedance drops way off. The resonant frequency will shift out beyond anything the instrument produces, and beyond the audible spectrum of humans. What you're left with is a perfectly flat frequency response that provides a good representation of how the strings actually sound. Most of the soundhole pickups on the market are in between, generally wound to produce as much signal as possible while trying to avoid letting the natural coil resonance color the sound of the instrument. To summarize my opinion: This is a good excuse to start experimenting with pickup winding if you are so inclined.

I've found http://www.music-electronics-forum.com to be particularly good if you decide to venture down this road.

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Pat

I've installed a few humbuckers in acoustics. Apparently there's a specific genre that uses that particular sound.

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