Raise your pickups

[Steinmetzify]

Got one guitar left ( in this state anyway) and it's got some McCarty pickups in it that the sockmonster was kind enough to send me.

Sounds sick thru the AxeII, badass thru the GP/DI, but I'm on my 3rd rig since then and they weren't sounding so hot thru the Hotone/WOS III dealie I'm into now. They're kind of lower output and not what I'm feeling thru this rig.

Searching online for new pickups, buddy calls and asks what's up. Tell him, dude goes "raise the bass side"...thought about it for a minute, grabbed my handy dandy Stew-Mac guitar kit and did so. Major difference.

Clearer, tighter, etc...pretty easy fix. I always forget about this and it usually winds up costing me major $. I need to write this shit down somewhere....

[nightflameauto]

Depends. Some pickups need to be right up as far as is practical, some as low as they can go and some in between. But anybody that swaps without trying height adjustments fails completely. That's a universal truth.

[ajaxlepinski]

All my guitars have the treble end of the pickup closer to the strings for a more dramatic KA-CHING.

[newholland]

like any sonic rules, all of em made to be broken. works on some, and some... phoo.. awful.

i don't find that pafs sound better closer in all instance, honestly-- but depends on string gauge, touch, where you play.. also how the pickups handoff to one another is important-- so changing one can change the other. i will say this though-- knowing that you have options to dial it in is the best possible thing for getting your sound though- so hell yeah, don't be afraid to change stuff!

[clipless bumper]

......High output (14K~16K) lowered away from the strings sounds better.

I'd say that means you don't like high output pickups

EMG's - take those out and throw them in the trash......

yup - I was right

[clipless bumper]

.......Who cares. I'm a fat, old, bedroom player these days - who think guitar tone peaked w Van Halen I. ........

wait - are you a RigTalk refugee?

[MikeO]

I had the good fortune years ago of speaking to Bill Lawrence, and this was how he explained setting pickup height for humbuckers:

If you hold the high E string down at the highest fret, the distance between the string and the bridge pickup should be about the width of a nickel. If you hold the low E string down at the highest fret, the distance between the string and the bridge pickup should be about the width of two nickels.

I have always used this as a starting point. Sometimes I will then raise or lower the pickup just a hair, but these adjustments are made by ear. (Some pickups get muddy if they are too close to the strings).

Then I set the height of the neck pickups to "balance" with the bridge pickup when they are both engaged. If the neck pickup is too low, you will hear too much of the bridge pickup and the guitar will sound overly bright when using both pickups together. Likewise, if the neck pickup is too high, the guitar will sound muddy when using both pickups together. It's really a matter of what sounds good to you, because one man's "muddy" is another man's "warm", and one man's "crisp" is another man's "tinny".

Another thing to take into account is the shape of your D-ring that the pickups are mounted with. A slanted D-ring will put one coil of a humbucker closer to the strings than the other, while a flat D-ring will have both coils the same distance from the strings. This can have a significant effect on tone.