Pickup Adjustments

Well in this video I'm going to talk about what all these screws do on your pickups. A lot of times guitar players don't bother messing with these screws. I mean we might rise the pickup up a bit because we know it means that we're going to get a lot more output and power. So we'll turn these two middle screws to raise the pickup closer to the strings therefore giving us more output. But we never touch these other ones. What are they there for and what do they do? Well they're like little mini volume controls on each string. So you can actually tailor the sound of your guitar by rising and lowering those pull pieces. There are standard settings that you can use and that are suggested in books which would be to stair step the top three or four. If your third string is a wound string you'll want to raise that one up a little higher than your fourth string which will be a little higher than your fifth and a little higher than your sixth. So basically your pull pieces are going to be stair stepped. So in this case since I got a bare third wire I would stair step these three pull pieces. The third and second string pull pieces would be pretty even and then this one would be brought up a little bit as it is here. Now these pull pieces I've adjusted a little bit to the standard setting. As you can see I'm getting hopefully that shows on video there's a little bit of an edge there and then this one's almost flush. Now one thing you don't want to do is screw these in so they're below the face of the pickup. That's a no-no and the other thing is you don't want to you want to adjust the pickup height so that your pull piece is what you do adjust them if you do this technique. You don't want to get them so close to the string as to cause what's called dampening. Dampening is when the magnetic force within the pull piece that surrounds the guitar string you get it too close the magnetism of the pickup is going to slow down the waver of that guitar string and that's called dampening and that'll kill your sustain and it'll kill your tone. You can actually pull your string out of tune so you generally want to be you know within an eighth of an inch to a quarter inch below your string. You don't want to get them real real close. You'll actually hear it if you get them too close and once you hear it back it off a little bit and then play with these pull pieces and you can get different sounds. Now I found that on occasion I would stair-step these three so this would be low a little higher a little higher and then this one would be low this one was a little higher and this one was a little higher and it gave me a pretty nice overall clear clear sound. So just by playing with these pull piece adjustments you can do quite a bit with your your tone of your pickup. So I hope this helps you to experiment with the pull pieces on your pickup now that you know what they do. So you can overcome a weak low end or a weak high end just by adjusting these outside screws to get an overall bass increase or decrease and this one would give you an overall treble increase or decrease. So you can actually wiggle the pickup back and forth to get your balance that you like and then use these to individually balance the volume of each string.