Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Pickups...

...but were Afraid to Ask.

Part One

By Steve Morrill

It's not very often that you buy an electric guitar and love every aspect of it. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but it's far more common to love the body, the neck and the feel-- and hate the pickups. The search for "king tone" and that "certain sound" can turn you into a collector...not of rare vintage guitars, but of pickups. I'm sure it's fair to say that just about every electric guitar player has a pickup collection-- a shoe box or bureau drawer of perfectly good pickups that didn't quite make it, like the rail your friend said was "killer", the humbucker model your brother-in-law uses in his Les Paul, the pickup Joe Satrianni loves or the one Jeff Beck is supposed to use. It can be confusing and frustrating. So what do you do?

The fact is that the best way to judge any pickup is to hear it in your guitar through your rig. You should experiment with the various kinds of pickups to discover what gives you the performance you're looking for. Knowing what you're looking for - and at - may help you avoid the pickups destined for the shoe box. Here's an overview of various kinds of pickups and some suggestions for their use.

Humbuckers

The Humbucking pickup was invented in 1956 by Seth Lover and Ted McCarty while they worked for Gibson. "Humbucker" or "Humbucking," like "singlecoil," describes a design rather than a particular sound. Humbuckers are doublecoil pickups, meaning two separate singlecoils wired together in series to cancel or buck the hum common to singlecoil pickups. Whether you call it a Humbucker or Humbucking, it's simply a pickup in which the negative (ground) lead from one coil is wired to the positive (hot) lead from the other. The remaining two leads are the hot and ground leads of the Humbucker. The coils sit on opposing magnets. One coil is loaded with adjustable slug pole piece screws which can be used to balance the volume of individual strings if necessary. "Vintage" singlecoil pickups offer pole slugs that have staggered heights that perform the same function. The original Gibson "PAF" (Patent Applied For) Humbuckers are warm, smooth, have great sustain and, most of all, are quiet.

The invention of the Humbucker allowed the guitar to get loud-- real loud-- without serious noise interference. By varying aspects of construction such as the number of windings and the magnet type and size, an extremely wide range of sounds and tones are possible from rock to jazz, metal to sweet, rough to raw to screaming. Gibson's reissue of the original PAF Humbucker, the "'57 Classic", has impressed the Gibson fanatics. DiMarzio's version is named "PAF." Seymour Duncan calls theirs "the '59." W.L. Van Zandt makes the "True Bucker."

And so on--the possibilities are endless. DiMarzio offers twenty-two different Humbuckers. Seymour Duncan's latest catalog shows thirty-two, and Gibson has five new and reissued Humbuckers in their catalog. Enough choices yet? Wait, there's another twist in the coil...

Editor's Note

Stay Tuned for Part #2
In the next issue, Steve wraps up this in-depth article on pickups. He'll go into the details of active vs. passive, and the various other types of pickups.

Steve Morrill is E.U. Wurlitzer Music & Sound's Guitar Service Manager and a 20 year veteran technician and builder of fretted instruments. You can get in touch with Steve by calling our Massachusetts Avenue Store in Boston at 617-738-7001.