CHOOSING A PICKUP You're not happy with the tone that you're currently getting and you want to upgrade your pickups but where do you start? This is our guide to helping you choose a pickup. WHOSE TONE DO YOU ADMIRE? Often there is a guitarist whose playing and tone you admire. Consult our Gear of the Greats Section to see if his/her details are listed. If you happen to know already and you don't see them listed, why not suggest their details for the benefit of other guitarists as well as being entered for our competition where you could win a Seymour Duncan pickup? HEAR FOR YOURSELF Many manufacturers - Seymour Duncan, DiMarzio and Bare Knuckle - now provide sound clips on their web-sites to let you hear their pickups in action. CHECK OUT THE SPECIFICATIONS Specifications aren't the whole story but they are another aid to selecting the right pickup. Currently we list the specifications for all the passive humbuckers, P90s and Tele pickups that we sell in our Specifications section. We will be adding to these in due course. Certain manufacturers offer detail specification and installation instructions, eg EMG, and we have included direct links to these within the site. WILL IT FIT MY GUITAR? Today most pickups of any particular type are, generally speaking, interchangeable. However, if you have a Far Eastern guitar from, say, the 70s then it's possible that while it may look like it's fitted with humbucking pickups they may not be the same physical size as a modern replacement pickup which is designed to retrofit a Gibson or derivative guitar. We have included dimensioned layout drawings of all the popular pickup types in our specifications section so that you can check whether a replacement pickup will fit your guitar. CHOOSING A HUMBUCKING PICKUP The humbucking pickup was, to all intents and purposes, invented by Seth Lover of Gibson in 1957. It was designed to eliminate the hum and extraneous noise that was often picked up by single coil pickups. For maximum hum cancellation both coils need to be identical however, in the late 50s the coil winding machines were operated by hand and often coils were very uneven and did not conform to the specification of 5,000 turns per coil. This had the effect of reducing the hum cancelling properties but emphasising certain frequencies depending on how the coils were mismatched. This fundamental inconsistency is why pickups from the same batch could sound markedly different. Over the years the specification of the pickups were gradually changed - wire, magnet, bobbins, covers, etc - and as more modern coil winding machines were used consistency and accuracy improved. However, Gibson have arguably never really recaptured the tone of their original pickups. Your technical reference point is the original Gibson Patent Applied For (PAF) humbucker which utilises an Alnico V bar magnet, 2 x 5,000 turns of 42 SWG wire and typically has a DC resistance of 7.5 - 9.0 kOhms. They were not wax dipped. IS COLOUR IMPORTANT? As the pickups were designed to be enclosed by a nickel-silver cover, Gibson were unconcerned about the colour of plastic used to make the coil formers or bobbins. The vast majority had double black bobbins, some had one black and one cream (dubbed 'Zebra coils' by collectors) and very few had double cream bobbins. DiMarzio cleverly trademarked the double cream bobbins configuration so if double cream bobbins are important to you then your choice is limited to DiMarzio. STRING SPACING The classic Gibson humbucker has an outer pole centre spacing of 1 15/16" (just under 50mm). However, Fender guitars have a low to high E string spacing of 54mm so if having the poles totally aligned with the strings is important to you on your Fender, or derivative, guitar then choose the F (DiMarzio), Trembucker (Seymour Duncan) or Wide (Bare Knuckle) spacing options. COIL TAPS AND PHASE SWITCHING Humbucking pickups obviously have two coils which are wired in series and out of phase. The fact that they are out of phase reduces the 50Hz interference that pickups can be prone to. Traditionally humbucking pickups come wired with a hot lead (for the signal) and an outer earth braid. Some modern pickups are wired with an individual signal lead plus a common earth lead - termed 4-conductor - to allow the pickup to be wired in a variety of ways. The most common configurations are the coil tap and the phase switch. The coil tap will allow the humbucker to operate as a single coil pickup , ie reduced output and increased treble, with the potential to have increased noise as well. It will not make a Les Paul sound like a Strat but it gives some extra tonal variety. For a better approximation of a Strat sound from a Les Paul you could use the Seymour Duncan SH-3 Stag Mag which uses rod magnets rather than the usual bar magnets. The phase switch, which is intended to put the bridge and neck pickups out of phase when both are on, will give that slightly hollow sound that is characteristic of position 2 on a Strat. Again it won't make a Les Paul sound like a Strat but it gives more tonal variety. To find out how to do this study the appropriate diagram in our Circuit Diagrams section. We sell the appropriate push/pull potentiometers which means that the guitar can have this modification without having to drill any holes and cause irreversible damage. Check out our guitar electronics section. VINTAGE, HOT AND VERY HOT? What sort of tone you want will depend on what music you enjoy playing. We have categorised the manufacturers' ranges into three categories to give you a place to start. Pickup output is generally related to DC resistance. The reference point is a Gibson PAF which had a DC resistance of between 7.5 and 9.0 Kohms. The higher the DC resistance - the higher the output. As a rule higher output humbuckers tend to be less toppy than lower output humbuckers. The magnet used has an important influence too. The Gibson PAF used an Alnico V or an Alnico II bar magnet. Alnico II has the lowest flux density and is best for lower output, sweeter sounding humbuckers or single coils. Alnico V is the accepted standard magnet type for guitar pickups. High output humbuckers tend to use ceramic magnets which have a higher flux density and give a grainier more raucous sound. For Vintage tone think of Paul Kossoff playing a late 50s Les Paul Standard through a Marshall on 'Alright Now', or Gary Moore playing Peter Green's old Standard on 'Still Got the Blues'. With its Alnico II or V magnet, a Vintage bridge humbucker should give a smooth, slightly edgy sound with pronounced upper-mids while a Vintage neck pickup should yield a plummy rounded tone with plenty of definition. Vintage humbuckers tend to be used for Classic Rock, Blues, Jazz Fusion, etc. For Hot tone think of Billy Gibbons playing one of his custom guitars on 'Sharp Dressed Man'. Plenty of drive with sparkle and harmonics. Another player who uses Hot humbuckers is Joe Satriani in his Ibanez guitars. With their Alnico V or Ceramic magnets Hot humbuckers tend to be used in Heavy Rock, Shred Metal, etc. For Very Hot think of Steve Vai or Eddie Van Halen. With Alnico V or Ceramic magnets, Very hot humbuckers tend to have very pronounced lower-mids and lose their top end. They are very popular for Nu Metal, Heavy Rock etc. CHOOSING A STRAT PICKUP Launched in 1954 the Fender Stratocaster has been used by a variety of top-line artists - Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Mark Knopfler, Stevie Ray Vaughn, etc - who have all used this versatile instrument in their own idiosyncratic way. Guitars from different eras have different sounds as pickup designs have developed over the years. The wide range of pickups we have will let your guitar cover every tone from Hank Marvin to Stevie Ray! Your technical reference point is the original Strat pickup. Three identical pickups (staggered Alnico V rod magnets surrounded by 8,000 to 8,700 turns of 42 AWG Formvar wire) created the sound that launched a legend. In late 1974 the staggered height rod magnets were replaced by even height rod magnets as the advent of light gauge strings rendered staggered poles obsolete. The wire was replaced by enamel coated wire in the early 60s and Polysol wire in the 80s. Early pickups were wax-dipped until the mid-60s and then again from 1981. Due to tighter wrapping and scatter winding on earlier, hand-wound pickups output is slightly higher while treble response is more emphasised on modern parallel wound pickups. Like every other guitar there are variations down through the years and whatever era you would like to recapture we have the pick-ups to do the job. The bridge pickup in particular can be weak on a Strat and it is common to replace it with something more powerful. There are several pickups by the main manufacturers which offer a humbucking construction and tone within a single coil package. This means less noise and more power. However, as pickups increase in power they tend to lose the essential Strat tone. This may not be important to you and if you like the feel of your guitar but like to play Nu Metal then, for example, a Seymour Duncan Hot Rails for Strat will get you where you want to go. CHOOSING A TELE PICKUP The world's first volume production electric guitar was what we know today as the Telecaster. Over 50 years on the Telecaster is still used on countless records. The archetypal Tele sound is the clean, twangy one heard on so many Country & Western records and made popular by guitarists like Steve Cropper and Albert Lee. However, the edgey, screaming solo on Stairway to Heaven was reputedly played on a Tele by Jimmy Page, rather than a Les Paul as one would expect. These versatile instruments can cover many bases and our pickups will let you push the envelope further. Your technical reference points are the original Tele pickups. The early bridge pickups used c9,200 turns of 42 SWG wire wrapped around 6 Alnico V rod magnets, and had a DC resistance of 7.5 k Ohms. The early neck pickups used c8,000 turns of 43 SWG wire wrapped around 6 Alnico V rod magnets and had a DC resistance of 7.7k Ohms. CHOOSING A P90 PICKUP Your reference point is the original Gibson P90 which first saw the light of day in 1952 on the Les Paul Standard guitar under cream plastic covers. It is a single coil pickup with polepieces and two Alnico V bar magnets. It is prone to more noise than the humbucker but it can have as much power. It is more trebly than the humbucker. It has 10,000 turns of 42 SWG wire. DC resistance is 8 - 8.5 kOhms. Most manufacturers offer stacked humbucker variations of the P90 for lower noise. Gibson term their version the P100. As this pickup has become more popular manufacturers have started to offer P90 pickups in humbucker packages. This configuration was first used by Hamer but even Gibson have offered their own version in some of their SG and Firebird models. CHOOSING AN ACOUSTIC TRANSDUCER If you already own an acoustic guitar or are thinking about buying one an acoustic transducer is the perfect way to mike it up for stage or studio use. Many modern acoustic guitars come equipped with built in electronics but ask yourself this - how often does electronic equipment get updated? Every 6 or 12 months? But what about that new Taylor that you saved for, for what seems like forever, which was meant to last you for years. If you buy a pure acoustic guitar you will be able to update the pickup or transducer as new technology becomes available without any damage to your precious guitar. That is very difficult if not impossible to do with factory installed pickups. Acoustic transducers fall into three categories: Magnetic The easiest pickup to fit to an acoustic guitar and the least expensive is a magnetic pickup, which is basically an electric guitar pickup optimised for acoustic use. However, magnetic pickups tend to be the least realistic in terms of reproducing acoustic guitar tone. Piezo Piezo pickups either attach to the sound-board or are mounted under the bridge-piece. they work by converting sounboard vibrations into electrical impulses. While they give a more accurate sound than magnetic pickups, they are more expensive and can be more difficult to install, typically needing a jack-socket to be installed using an end-pin jack-socket. Hybrid Hybrid systems like the Fishman Rare Earth combine magnetic pickups and internal microphones to give a more accurate rendition of the guitar's tone. However, they tend to be the most expensive and require an end-pin jack socket also. CHOOSING A MINIHUMBUCKER When Gibson acquired Epiphone in 1959 they redesigned the product range. To set the range apart from the Gibson range Seth Lover was asked to design a new pickup and the Minihumbucker was fitted to most of the Epiphone range. When Gibson launched the Firebird range in 1963 they used a variation of the Minhumbucker without polepieces. This has a significantly different internal construction though, using a bar magnet in each coil rather than the classic humbucker configuration of a single bar magnet beneath the coils with polepieces inside each coil. When the Les Paul was reintroduced in 1967, Gibson decided to put the Minihumbucker on the core guitar in the range - the Les Paul Deluxe. Probably in an attempt to use up surplus parts they mounted the Minihumbucker in a routed out P90 cover, rather than use the full sized humbucker used in the companion Les Paul Custom. The Epiphone/Les Paul DeLuxe Minihumbucker is a little less powerful than a standard humbucker but it is a little brighter. The Firebird minihumbucker is less powerful still and even brighter although it's been used by a wide variety of guitarists, eg Johnny Winter and Sonny Landreth. Your reference point is the original Epiphone Minihumbucker which had 2 x 4,250 turns of 42 SWG wire yielding a DC resistance of 6.5 - 7.5 kOhms, and an Alnico II bar magnet.