Most all guitar and bass pickups are wound by some kind of winding machine where the bobbin is mechanically rotated in order to pull or draw the magnet wire from a spool. A winding machine can be a simple hand winder or more complicated computerized winding machine. A simple winding machine can be a sewing machine motor with a foot pedal to control the winding speed and is usually hooked up to a counting device to count the desired number of turns. They are often called hand winding machines and you control the pitch by moving the hand guided magnet wire back and forth.

Coil machines can be very costly and can control the amount of turns per layer and number of layers. More expensive coil machines have an automatic traverse or pitch control and when programmed will give you the desired number of turns per layer for a particular gauge of magnet wire.