He hand-wound the pickups simply because he couldn’t figure out where to buy them. Instead of winding 8,000 turns like the machines at Gibson or Fender were doing, he stopped at 1,000, or 1,500, or whenever his hand was cramping too badly to continue. Enter Ron Wickersham, with his passion for active electronics. Ron quickly realized that these low-impedance pickups Rick was producing captured a much wider frequency band then the pickups on existing commercial instruments. Coupled with a pre-amp to boost the signal back to the levels achieved by high-impedance pickups, the result was an amplified guitar or bass with a much richer, more natural tone. Alembic Inc was born.