Guitar Pickups

Pickups can drastically affect your guitar's tone, sustain, and picking response feel. That’s a black magic; you never know

how your guitar will sound with different pickups on it regardless of the manufacturer’s description of the tone of particular pickup. The process itself is always trial and error made in darkness. duncan-hum

POLE PIECES

There are two types of pole pieces – alnico and ceramic, depends on the magnet material they’re made from. Alnico stands for the fusion of three metals – aluminum, nickel and cobalt and alnico pickups have lower output and softer tone. Because the magnet is capable to stop strings from vibrating, it’s advisable not to adjust pole pieces too close to the strings. You’ll sacrifice a little bit of output but will gain a noticeable sustain.

COILS

The size of the pick is in a straight relationship with the tone it produces. The more windings make pickup more powerful at the price of darker tone. Look at the Les Paul and Strat – Strat’s much smaller pickups make it sound more thin and shimmer compare to the fat tone of Les Paul (Gibson Humbucker ►)
Then there is another problem; single coil pickups are noisier than humbuckers. That is in the nature of them. Humbucker pickup designed to eliminate the noise, hence the name of it. That’s why engineers work hard on designing humbucker pickups that will fit into size of single coil pickup maintaining the bite and the brightness of the latest.

RAILS & POLE PIECES OGOGO - Duncan vintage

Pole pieces affect the sound of the string while bending it, the string travels away from magnetic field of pole pieces and back into it. You hear that unevenness of the output. As the result, designers started to make rails or blades (Seymour Duncan-Vintage Rails ►) across the whole pickup instead of individual pole pieces. That makes the bended string sound more smooth but trade off is the feel of it. Some old school musicians are having a hard time to adjust to it. The other solution is to increase the number of pole pieces and smooth out the magnetic field while string moves between them. Carvin makes pickups with couple dozens of pole pieces. Did you try them? How does it feel?

Question: How to correctly set up the pickup for hottest output possible?

Closest to the strings pickup generates highest output. That's general answer. Positioning OGOGO-Strat pickup

pickup close to the strings also makes compressed sound without much articulation and dynamics. Moving further away from strings lessening the output but brings more dynamics into play and more precise response to your picking technique. (Fender-Single Coil ►)

Also consider the fact that if pickup has strong magnet and positioned close to the strings, it might pull the strings toward itself and the notes you're playing will sound slightly out of tune when you're playing.

Another factor to keep in mind is to balance the sound of neck and bridge pickups that when you switch in between them, the volume remains the same or the way you want it.

And yet another thing - don't forget to balance the pickup in relation to low and high strings. That way the sound is more consistent when you're playing across the strings.

ACTIVE PICKUPS

But there's also the alternative way and EMG company is the biggest player - Active Pickups. EMG pickups has been around since 1976. The “active” ingredient means that inside of every pickup is a tiny amp that’s intended to increase harmonic content, offer more output, and boost tonal range. Their clarity and headroom go well with overdrive that gives you tight sound and excellent articulation, particularly in extreme gain situation. Comes through with a lots of punch. That's why Active Pickups are preferred choice for Metal guitarists.

LACE SENSORS

This an other alternative to traditional design. Great sustain with low noise. Almost heaven, if you like the tone. Fender used them on a lot of high end models.

CHOICES CHOICES pickup-japan

There's no correct answer or the best way to choose a right pickup or right set of pickups. Basically you don't wanna mix active and passive pickups on the same instrument for the reason that they both require different treatment of the signal. You'll probably need two different amplifiers and some kind of switching system in place. Humbuckers and single coils are more friendly to each other, you just need to adjust them to have more or less similar output signal, which is possible with certain amount of tweakin' them.