Balancing Guitar Pickups

Hi, I'm Mike Sullivan. Welcome to Guitar Tech. How to do it yourself. Hi, Gospel Guitars here. A quick video. I've had a video up for quite a while that's popular about what all the screws on your pickups do, and sometimes people bring up balancing the output of more than one pickup on that video. So it happened again the other day, so I just thought I'd make a quick video about it without getting too carried away here. Most of the guitars we play are multiple pickup guitars. So you're going to have your neck pickups, some of them have a center pickup, and then you've got your bridge pickup, and then you've got your toggle switch or your five-way selector switch for different pickup configurations on our guitars. We also have our volume controls to control the volumes of our pickups. What I do, the way I approach it is, I'll put the pickup selector in the middle whenever I'm setting out to balance my pickups, and for me personally, I like to use both of the pickups together better than just the neck pickup or just a bridge pickup. I mean for lead rock stuff, yeah, you know, lead bridge pickup all the way, but a lot of times when I'm playing clean, I'm almost never on this pickup, so I like to have a nice balance between the two. And so the question is, how do we balance our output of our pickups? And you can do that when the pickups come in your guitar when you first get your guitar. They may not be set up the best. Now hopefully the guitar shops, you know, set them up pretty good. I know Schecter does a pretty good job with theirs, at least the ones I've got my hands on, but it may not be what you want. So for me, a lot of times, especially on those Pauls, I slap it into the neck pickup and it's just mud city. I mean nine times out of ten, it's just mud city. So I'm always rolling off on the neck volume. So what I do is, I set it up, there's a screw on the bottom and a screw on the top in the center of your pickup ring, and that's to adjust the pickup height. And a lot of people just think of that as I get more output if I raise it closer to the strings. But you can also balance your output by using these two screws. You can either increase your treble by only bringing up the bottom, or you can increase the bass by only bringing up the top. And what I usually do on the neck pickup is I decrease the bass by lowering the top of the pickup farther down into the body than the upper strings is. So it's not going to get that woofy muddy sound happening all the time. And I don't always have to go down here chasing the volume knob to get rid of it. I just quickly flip to that pickup and I'm already there. You're going to have to decide how muddy you want your pickups on. Not that they're all muddy. I mean some of them, like the Marzio, they'll give you stats on how they're wired and how the EQ settings are. And I don't like a lot of bass in my neck pickups. But I learned that trick really quick on Les Pauls because I used to play Les Pauls a lot. And I was always chasing down the volume knob and I'd have a, I'd always be rolling it off to about five or six so that, to get rid of the mud. And even when I used both pickups, I was doing the same thing. I'd be around six or seven to blend the pickups. But I almost never ran the neck pickup full up because it would just get too muddy, lose the clarity. For your bridge pickup, it's the same thing, same approach. If it's a little too bright of a sounding pickup, you can always lower the high end of the pickup down in the body and balance it out a little bit better. When it comes to balancing both of them, you know, if you get a good sound the way you want on each one separately, then you got to come to the final decision of how much of each pickup do you want to hear in the middle position. And that's totally personal taste. For me, you're going to lose volume anyway. When you go from a single use of either one of the pickups to using both pickups, you're going to lose volume output. It's just guaranteed. It's going to go down because you're running more in the circuit. But you can use this as a bass control and this as a treble control, because this is on the bridge and this is at the neck. So if you think bass treble, once you get the pickups balanced out, how much of each sound do you want in that middle position? And it's totally personal preference. There's really no right or wrong way about it. You just have to use personal preference. And keep in mind, you do have volume controls and a tone control to take into account. But if you're like most of us, unless you play clean, I don't use a lot of the volume controls. I've just always kind of used a flat-out approach. So I try to balance my pickups to where it sounds good wherever I put it. I do go to the, I still can go to the neck pickup and back it off a little bit sometimes. But there is, you know, no rule that says anything. There's no book that's going to tell you exactly how these should be set up. There are standards set out by Gibson and Fender and other companies about how far they should be from your strings and things like this. And you don't want to get them too close to the string, because then it causes string dampening. So when your string is making this motion, when it's vibrating, the closer you get the pickup to it, it just, it'll start big and then it'll tighten up really fast. And that kills your sustain. And sometimes while it's ringing, it'll make a bigger dip to the bottom towards the pickup, because you got the pickup too close. So it's going to start dampening with the magnetics of the pickup itself, and it can even pull you out of tune. So it's all personal preference. Again, just take some time to sit down with your guitar and get it the way you want it. If you haven't seen my other video on pickup adjustments, just type in pickup adjustments and I'm going to pop up, you know, it's a very popular video and it goes over all the screws that are actually on the pickup itself, all the magnet under each string. And people, I've gotten a lot of good feedback on that one. So I guess I nailed the explanation. Okay. But I do get questions about this. And since I don't go into balancing the guitar output on a pickup video, where I'm more focused on what all the screws do by themselves, I'm not really trying to get you to balance anything at that point. I do just talk about the tone of the pickup itself, how you can do your own queuing on your pickup. And you blend that knowledge with this knowledge in this video, and you can pretty much do what you want with your setup. So I hope you find it helpful and just something else to experiment if you haven't done that yet. And a lot of us just kind of ignore little simple things like that. Oh, another important tip is when you're doing it, plug in. Don't leave it on the table and be hitting your strings and then thinking this is how you're going to like it. Have it in a playing position like I am now and be plugged in and be playing normally. Play stuff you play all the time. Don't play stuff you don't play. Play if you're in a band, play one of your songs where you use a lot of pickup selections and really nail what you want. You'll be a lot happier with your guitar. Instead of ripping guitar pickups out and putting something else in, you might be surprised what you can do with what you already have. So if you're just watching me for the first time, please subscribe and like and share my video. And again, if you don't know what all these screws do, check out my pickup adjustments video on this channel. So thanks for watching, have a good day, and happy picking! Well, thanks for watching and see you next time on Guitar Tech, How to Do It Yourself.