It's been mentioned in the past that to beef up your tone sometimes all one needs to do is raise the pickups a smidge. I'm wondering how you tell the optimal height setting. What happens when they're too high? I imagine this varies based on the type of guitar/pickups. So opinions specific to Jags/JMs especially will be helpful to me.

Danny Snyder

"With great reverb comes great responsibility" - Uncle Leo

I am now playing trumpet with Prince Buster tribute band 'Balzac'

Playing keys and guitar with Combo Tezeta

Formerly a guitarist in The TomorrowMen and Meshugga Beach Party

Latest surf project - Now That's What I Call SURF

Holy cow (abunga) is this a deep one.

As best as I can tell, there is no set rule. The closer the pickup is to the strings, the louder it will appear to be but too close and it gets muddy and can even cause overtones to cloud up the guitar's tone. Too far away and the guitar sounds thin. It is a very complex combination of guitar/pickups/strings/setup and amp.

I carry a small phillips screwdriver around to tweak on my pickups' height whenever I get the urge to try and blame my lame sound on my guitar. I keep the pickups on the Jazzmasters about 1/4" below the strings. I noticed that Boulder Bob had his set really low but he gets an awesome sound when I've heard them play in Colorado. The Jaguar about 1/8" below as it seems to have less output. My Strat (yeah, yeah, I know) much lower than the Jazzmaster, and the Hallmark, lower still.

Tweaking on the pickup's adjustment is a great fun thing to do at practice. Right guys? Noodle, noodle, noodle....................

ed

Traditional........speak softly and play through a big blonde amp. Did I mention that I still like big blonde amps?

Disclaimer...I am not a luthier. I've setup a lot of guitars, my own included, hence the info is based on my personal experience. Usually the best teacher. Below, I am referring to single coil pickups. They are usually fairly strong magnets and have a lot of influence on those strings.

The closer the pickups are to the strings:

The louder the sound will be for the same volume setting.
The better the S/N (signal to noise) will be.
You generally get better punch/attack.
You reduce sustain (the magnetic field from the pickups will dampen it).
Can affect intonation because of the magnetic pull.
Fret Buzz (strong magnets in single coils don't help this at all).

The further the pickups are from the strings:

You will get a "darker" sound with more sound being influenced by the body
You get more sustain
Better intonation.
More noise in the signal.
Less fret buzz.

Some have said that if your pickups are close enough, you actually "compress" the signal. This is because the gap between the loudest and quietest string doesn't have the dynamic range it might have with a pickup that's further away.

If your pickups have staggered pole pieces, it's generally for a wound G string. If you use a plain G, lowering the pickups slightly will even out the volume differences between the strings.

Pickups are rated in "gauss" (low magnetic pull) can be moved closer to the strings and will have different sound as well. EMG, LACE and Kinman have low gauss pickups. If you going to change pickups, you might want to consider a pickup where the magnet can't pickup a 5lb steel ball...:-)

Now having said all that, before adjusting the pickups, the guitar needs to be in tune. Then you need to balance the sound coming from each of the pickups so one is not over powering the other. Start with the neck (it will always be the loudest pickup) and you can either adjust it with factory specs to a starting point, or just get it to a point you like the sound at. Flip to the middle pickup, and adjust it so there is no great volume increases between it and neck. Lastly, you can do the same with the bridge, unless you want the bridge to be really punchy in which case it will be significantly higher and louder.

If you crank the volume control full and you're not getting the clear sound you want, drop all the pickups a turn or two, try again.

If your intonation is wonky and it was good before, you need to drop all those pups too.

Lastly, if you want more bass/treble you can adjust one end of the pups for that (go easy with this because it's going to affect your mid range sound because the string might not be position in the middle of the pole piece any more).

Just keep adjusting and setting, and you'll end up with a great sound guitar, or least the best sound you can get with the pups you have.

If you still want more sound variations, think about adding in a switch to give you more mix positions on your pickups (i.e. ALL on, bridge and neck for example).

Hope this helps.

Mel

Excellent posts guys - thanks

Danny Snyder

"With great reverb comes great responsibility" - Uncle Leo

I am now playing trumpet with Prince Buster tribute band 'Balzac'

Playing keys and guitar with Combo Tezeta

Formerly a guitarist in The TomorrowMen and Meshugga Beach Party

Latest surf project - Now That's What I Call SURF

zak
To be a little more Jag/Jazzmaster-specific, when I played Jaguars and Jazzmasters I would set the bridge pickup as high as physically possible (fret the guitar at the last fret and raise the pickups until the pickup covers touch the strings, then back it off a tiny bit from there) because they didn't affect intonation or sustain at all, especially with the ultra-heavy flats I was using at the time. Then I'd adjust the neck pickup for the optimal combined pickup tone (since I spent most of my time with both pickups on). It's the neck pickup that will pull the strings out of wack the most, because they're more free to move further from the bridge and closer to their maximum travel distance (over the 12th fret). Two-pickup guitars are less prone to the effect of magnetic pull than strats or other guitars with more than 2 pickups.

+1

SSIV

MissingLink
Thanks for sharing, guys. I'd always kind of assumed that higher was better. Anything specific to lipstick pickups? And regarding fret buzz, are certain strings more affected than others - eg, would low E being heavier be more prone or less?

I've never used lipstick pickups, but I know they were normally wired in series rather than the traditional parallel of single coil. My guess is they would be slightly lower in output so they could be adjusted higher to compensate.

Generally speaking a low action with lighter strings will produce the buzz more easily. You options are raise the action, dress the frets or try heavier gauge strings. My extreme fixes are replacing the nut or reworking the bridge. I rarely got buzz from higher strings, just the low E and A. I experimented with different strings to find something that sounded good without having to tinker with the action.

As a last resort, try a lighter pick. My normal ones are .50mm. On one of my guitars, if I used .44mm or less, the buzz stopped...just feels a little flimsy. But I'm more a guitar percussionist than a picker anyway...:-)

Mel

Ivan, I was wondering if you would like to chime on this. I just wrote about the show in Cincinnati, and while I was pondering all of the sounds that night, along with the inevitable evaluation of my own Strat sound, I was curious if you had a standard pickup height.

Any other Strat players have strong opinions on this? I have mine pretty low, and I like my sound just fine, but I find that my tweaky side gets the better of me now and again.

• Jamie
  SSS Agent #181
  Cartoons drenched in reverb!
  The Mystery Men?
  El Capitan & The Reluctant Sadists

Since my guitar has individual on-off switches for each pickup, I adjusted the height of each one to do a different thing. One is set at medium height for a clean tone used for general lead guitar playing, other at maximum height for those moments when one feels possessed by the spirit of Link Wray and needs a little instant overdrive, and finally the other one is set way low for rhythm guitar work. Besides I play lead with the neck pickup and rhythm with the bridge one. It works for me...

http://www.myspace.com/losderrumbes

I should have read this thread years ago, I've just added a nice extra dash of brightness to my guitar in about 10 minutes flat, just by lowering the pickups.

Incidentally, one of the finest sights I ever saw was a man adjusting the height of his pickups during a solo. He was playing Interstellar Overdrive, and it looked just like the bit in Spinal Tap when he subtly tunes the violin he's using to batter his guitar with. I was in tears..

MissingLink
Thanks for sharing, guys. I'd always kind of assumed that higher was better. Anything specific to lipstick pickups? And regarding fret buzz, are certain strings more affected than others - eg, would low E being heavier be more prone or less?

Hey Link. I'm a huge lipstick fan too. If they are originals, or closely modeled on originals they are much lower output than Jag or JM pickups so you can put them quite close to the strings without hurting things as much. The biggest thing for me with lipsticks is not having them so high that you constantly hit them. As good ones are basically super thin, hard chromed, and basically act like a drum head, transmitting any tap of the pick against them to the amp. And I don't mean "ooh, I brushed the middle pickup on my strat". I mean "Thud! Thud!"