A luthier, a book and a steel-guitar forum.

Lollar Pickups is the company of Jason Lollar, a guitar maker who became a pickup specialist almost by accident. The company says he has been a professional luthier since graduating from the Roberto-Venn School of Luthiery in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1979, where, he told the writer Dave Hunter, students were taught to wind rudimentary pickups by hand. Performer Magazine, in a 2013 interview, says he started on an old Kay acoustic at seven and played bars professionally while still a minor. Through the 1980s, he told Hunter, he built guitars on a limited basis while playing in a blues band and holding down a full-time job.

When the company began is less settled than it looks. NAMM’s oral-history notes on Stephanie Lollar, recorded in 2021, say she and her husband formed the company in 1987, and describe her part in running the books, hiring staff, building distribution and helping to write Jason’s book; NAMM lists both as co-founders, and the company’s website names both as founders. English Wikipedia gives 1987 in its information box but 1995 in its text, citing the Performer interview — which does not mention 1995. Jason Lollar told Hunter that he got serious about the guitar business “in 1992 or ’93,” and told Performer it was “the early ’90s.” The company’s About page, in 2026, is headed “30 Years of Listening.” We give the dates as the sources do.

The turn to pickups came through a book. Living on an island with a small local market, Lollar told Hunter, he decided to write about the one part of the craft nobody had covered: the hands-on making of pickups. The result, Basic Pickup Winding and Complete Guide to Making Your Own Pickup Winder, was self-published; he told Performer it sold several thousand copies and that hundreds of people started in the business by following it. Guitar World, in December 2004, called him “the Moses of pickup winding,” and NAMM says many pickup builders credit the book as their inspiration. Requests followed for custom pickups and vintage repairs, and around 1996 and 1997, he said, the online Steel Guitar Forum brought a wave of demand from steel players, whose old pickups taught him more. His standard line, he told Hunter, grew out of patterns in those custom orders.

Vintage voices, built by hand.

Lollar’s catalogue reads like a history of the electric guitar. Alongside Stratocaster, Telecaster and P-90 pickups, it makes Imperial humbuckers — which Guitar World said in 2004 were wound to replicate Seth Lover’s original humbuckers — as well as Charlie Christian, gold-foil, Firebird and offset-guitar types, bass pickups and a long list of lap- and pedal-steel models, including Stringmaster- and Horseshoe-style designs. Many answer old originals from Fender and Gibson. In 2024 Guitar World reported the launch of the DC J-Bass, a hum-cancelling Jazz Bass pickup priced at $155.

The client list grew by word of mouth. Guitar World named Billy Gibbons, Robert Randolph and Peter Stroud among the players Lollar had built pickups for in 2004. The company’s website quotes Bill Frisell, Luther Dickinson and Death Cab for Cutie’s Dave Depper, and says it worked with Guild and Kim Thayil of Soundgarden to recreate Guild’s HB-1 humbucker for his signature S-100 Polara. James Williamson of the Stooges, in a quote on the same page, credits Lollar with replicating the pickups of the 1969 Les Paul Custom used to record Raw Power.

Design and documentation.

A guitar pickup — a coil of fine wire around magnets that turns a vibrating string into an electrical signal — is a part many electric-guitar players choose to replace. Several American firms have built businesses on making those replacements.

In California, Seymour Duncan, founded in 1976, gives Santa Barbara as its home on its website, while Wikipedia places its headquarters in neighbouring Goleta; EMG, also founded in 1976, is based in Santa Rosa, Wikipedia says, and its website says “Made in California Since 1976.” In Washington State, Lollar Pickups says every pickup is made in its Tacoma workshop, and TV Jones, founded in Whittier, California, in 1993 according to Wikipedia, now gives its address as Poulsbo.

In the East, DiMarzio’s website gives an address on Staten Island, New York; Fishman, known for acoustic-guitar pickups, lists Andover, Massachusetts; and Lindy Fralin Pickups, which dates itself to 1989, is based in Richmond, Virginia.

Ownership, as far as the public record shows, is private. Wikipedia describes Seymour Duncan, DiMarzio, EMG, Fishman and Lollar as privately held; the other two websites name TV Jones, Inc. and Lindy Fralin Pickups, LLC. We found no report of any of the seven being bought by a larger group in the sources we checked.

Founding dates are not always settled: Wikipedia gives both 1987 and 1995 for Lollar, and the early 1990s for Fralin, which says 1989.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A maker’s mark on every pickup.

The workshop has moved, though the method has not. In 2009 and 2013 the company’s website gave its address as Vashon, on Vashon Island in Puget Sound, trading as Lollar Guitars, Inc.; by January 2017 its contact page gave an address in Tacoma, Washington, where it remains. The often-repeated “Vashon Island” is the company’s past, not its present. The company says every pickup is made in its Tacoma workshop, that “there is no assembly line,” that each is built from scratch and that it makes many parts in-house: it says it charges its Alnico magnets to strengths set for each model, hand-polishes exposed humbucker bobbins, laser-cuts single-coil flatwork and runs every pickup through more than a dozen test points. Those are its claims. In 2013 Lollar told Performer that nine people worked in manufacturing, making up to a couple of thousand pickups a month; by 2026 the team page listed about two dozen people, around ten of them pickup builders.

Ownership appears unchanged. In 2026 the website still listed Jason and Stephanie Lollar as founders, with a general manager running the business, and we found no record of a sale in the sources we checked. The company trades from lollarguitars.com, a reminder of its guitar-making start, though Guitar World pointed readers to lollarpickups.com in 2024.

For a design guide, Lollar shows how a maker’s mark can carry a brand: the company says the initials it puts on every pickup are “our guarantee of quality.” Performer placed the name in select company in 2013, saying tone-seekers would likely name “Duncan, Fralin and Lollar.” Compare Fralin and Seymour Duncan. For this guide we use cedar brown, butterscotch and nickel with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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