Pickup Pole Piece Adjustments

Hey Gospel Guitarist here again and I have another tip video for you on how to set up your pull pieces on your adjustable pickups. We've all heard about like staggered pull pieces on strats and things like that and we usually have a bunch of flat ones like this second coil on your humbuckers. Most of us don't really do anything with these screws here I have other video that explains that you can use these as volume knobs because that's basically what they are when you raise them they get louder when you lower them to the surface they get quieter. But one of the things that some of the techs out there talk about is taking your radius gauges find out the radius for your guitar whatever it might be this one's a 12 I and you set you know your bridge radius would be set up so you can take your bridge radius figure out what which one it is 10 12 15 radius whatever and whatever your guitar happens to be when your strings are off place your gauge over your pickup adjustable pull pieces and then start to unwind them so that they mask the curvature of your radius that'll give you a nice balanced pickup tone and the other thing that it does is if I can get this up for you a little bit here now if you look at the slots on the the heads of the pull pieces you'll notice that they're so it kind of goes back and forth so that you don't get a weak spot from the pull piece center a lot of pickup companies and guitar companies send the guitars out and the screws are aligned with the strings so the slot in the screw is right underneath the string but that gives you kind of a weak spot because these are supposed to be magnets right so why would you want your string hovering over the weakest part of the magnet where it's gone it's been removed cut out so if they're staggered like that and this pattern just happens to keep showing up on my humbuckers in order to get like it depends on your radius of course but for a 12 radius you'll kind of get a like that and so they're kind of staggered but the you'll get a better magnetic field if you have some metal under the string rather than the slot under the string is the point so you may like that sound um at first it might get a little bright to your ear because you're used to hearing pickups that are just leveled against the face of the pickup which also levels your sound um a lot of companies like DiMarzio and Seymour Duncan they can actually tune in with the windings certain tones it can be mid heavy bass light or real bright or real dark depending on what kind of pickup you buy and we usually don't mess with these poles we just buy the pickup that's already wired to give us a certain sound but even if you do get that you can still adjust the pull pieces to personally tailor the sound to what you like out of your guitar so before you go out start swapping pickups and spending hundreds of dollars start playing with your pole pieces and also these two screws here to get your pickup within an eighth of an inch or less from your strings you don't want to get them too close but too far you're going to lose power too close they start to pull and dampen the string and you'll lose sustain and you'll know because it keeps pulling it out of tune anyway that's today's helpful tip on how to set up your pole pieces on your guitar to get the highest performance so hope that was helpful for you try it out see if you like it if not just screw them right back flat okay so thanks for watching don't forget to subscribe and like see you in the next video