Resisting Common Wisdom - Electric Guitar Pickups



I've recently come back to playing more electric guitar again after having mostly bounced back-and-forth between my Seagull acoustic and my Yamaha bass. I found a local luthier/guitar tech that was well recommended and had been in business forever to take a look at my Hagstrom Swede. I'd gotten it into my head to rewire it after the bridge pickup stopped working. I'd ripped out all the old wiring and bought new pots and caps, but then left the whole project untouched for a year for lack of workspace. The new wiring that The Guitar Doctor put in was flawless and completely knocked out the annoying ground hum that the crappy stock solder job had caused, but in the course of fixing it, Doc also discovered that one of the coils of the bridge pickup had demagnetized, which was the cause of the original problem.

I love heavy metal (Enslaved, Opeth, Amorphis, etc.), so I had been spending a lot of time over the last couple years thinking about what pickup I might get if the non-functioning pickup was bad. I had read interviews with my favorite guitarists where they talked about their favorite pickups. I listened obsessively to Keith Merrow's 15 model Seymour Duncan bridge pickup comparison and A/B'd them all to find my favorites:



I was, like most metalheads, sold on the idea that I should get a hot, overdriven humbucker as my path to tone nirvana.

But sometime during the whole process I started to wonder about other pickups. In order to educate my ears better, I had gone and listened to single coils and P90s. I admired the tone that Springsteen got from his Tele/Esquire on his electric version of "The Ghost of Tom Joad." I looked at both the stock Telecaster pickup and the humbucker-equipped '72 Thinline, then realized that the Thinline had humbucking pickups that were build very differently from the PAF styles, and ended up going to Reverb's Classic Electric Guitar Pickup Shootout video to further educate myself and check my own assumptions:

So when Doc confirmed that I needed a new bridge pickup and suggested that I look at vintage output pickups, I was already starting to lean that direction myself.

Sure, I love metal, but I don't really play much metal on my guitar. And when I do play a bit of metal, I do it through a modeling amp or amp software that has distortion on tap - so much that I have to turn down the pickup volume to keep the sound from going to mud. My guitar really only needs enough output to find that sweet spot where the signal is just starting to breaking up when you dig in a bit with your picking. Any more than that is overkill. Meanwhile, with good quality pots on the guitar I can use a lot more of that range to explore the nuances of tone and output that open up when the breakup point is closer to the top of the dial. You can EQ frequencies out, but you can't add them back in after they have been clipped.

So I have a vintage output alnico 4 humbucker in the bridge now, and if I were to shift into playing metal I'd probably shift into a longer scale and an alnico 8 or ceramic pickup, but want to find one with more usable output rather than just more output, or even a set of actives, just to get a tight signal, and leave the gain to the amp and pedals.

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