When making a pickup, does the orientation of the magnetic field relative to the winding matter?
The instrument I want seems to be hard to get hold of in my country, so I'm building one. I won't say which instrument, so that the answer will be more generally useful.
I have sourced a magnet that's wide enough to span the width between two strings, and I'll probably use a wire from some cheap headphones (easy to source and usually have a thin layer of insulation). Now, I understand basic digital electronics but I have no intuition as to why a pickup is even going to work. So I don't know which way to arrange the magnet or anything either.
Does North need to face outward or into the body of the instrument? Or even toward either end of the string?
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I think normally you would use six magnets, one for each string, or you whole use one large magnet in the shape of a plate that spans all six string and have six pole pieces for each string that are ferrous and screw into the big magnet.
Either way the magnetic field should be perpendicular to the body of the guitar, but it doesn’t matter whether north or south is pointing out of the guitar, as long as all the magnets have north in the same direction.
One thing you might want to do before building your first pickup is build a simple battery powered electromagnet and see how that works. A pickup is like six electromagnets combined into one thing except instead of the magnetic field being created by electricity in the coil, the field is created by the magnetic metal and the that sort of makes electricity in the coil.
The OP has revealed in a comment that the instrument is a dombra.
This is a traditional instrument with two strings, from central Asia.
Traditional strings are gut or nowadays nylon as shown here.
It might seem obvious but I'll point out that these won't work with an electric guitar pickup. For that the strings should be steel.
The sound hole of the dombra is very small and so not suitable for an acoustic-guitar-type pickup.
Traditional solution
If you want to stay traditional then I suggest a surface-mounted Piezo Transducer Pickup as used for violin, ukulele, or cigar-box guitar. These detect the vibration of the soundboard of the instrument. They can be bought online from China and are very cheap.
Steel string solution
If you are not worried about being traditional then you can use steel strings and even a solid body if you wish.
In that case here is what you need to know:
Source of pictures
These pictures and the full text are available at How Does a Guitar Pickup Really Work?.
With single cool pickups, like with Telecasters, if you wind one with reversed windings and reversed polarity, aka RWRP, your serial position will be noise-free, like a humbucker. With Stratocasters, there is no neck-and-bridge option, the middle is made RWRP so the 2 and 4 positions are noiseless.
The magnet poles should be in the direction perpendicular to the plane of the strings.
For an individual single coil pickup the polarity of the magnet doesn't matter. If you use several magnets, they all should have the same polarity.
Polarity starts to matter when you combine several single coil pickups. The most common humbucker configuration uses two pickups with opposite polarity and opposite coil connections.
Note that typical guitar pickups have thousands of winds in the coil, so cable from headphones might be too short.
Others have addressed the magnet orientation, so just to add one additional point.
The cable from headphones will be magnitudes too thick for this task. You will barely get a couple of dozen winds even if your cable is long enough. You need about 1,000 or so. The wind count & layout will vastly affect the resulting pickup. Pickups are wound by machine, even if the machine is hand-powered, because this is not really one of those tasks humans are good at. Imagine taking all the cotton off a sewing bobbin, then putting it all back again, neatly.
You can buy pickup wire, it's actually really cheap - e.g. www.wires.co.uk/acatalog/gpw.html - but if you can't stretch to that, then another source would be wound voltage transformers from power supplies. They use the same type of wire.
Pickup (& any transformer winding) is extremely thin copper wire with a microscopic thickness of insulation. Nothing else can be substituted.
I also found this on the differences wire types & winding can make - mwswire.com/guitarpickup/
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