Pick up positions

[ThatCluelessGerman]

Hey guys,

I hope you can help me out. Please don't laugh but I have absolutely no knowledge about pickups. I have no preference, no experience and I don't know if I even ever used the switch on my guitars... .. if it makes sound, great. If I don't like the sound, I push and pull some knobs in the amp software until I'm happy.... So:

I ordered a (non PB) kit without any hardware (because the hardware from the store is just not what I prefer visually).

It is a LP style kit and it has 2 big holes for the pickups. That means I can use humbuckers and/or P90's, right?

So I ordered a cheapo humbucker and a cheapo P90, just because I never had any P90s before and why not and such.

But they will come "naked" with no frame and no specification which is for the neck and which is for the bridge.

I ASSUME that it doesn't really matter and it's just the frame that defines the position (one being higher than the other)? So if I decide to put the P90 in the neck position, I just use the "neck frame"?

Or is there any other criteria which defines where to put each pickup?

Another question:
I have a 3 way switch. That should work, right? Because I can either pick neck position, both positions or bridge position, no split. Right?

Sorry for my dumb questions, I have really no idea of guitar electronics.

[Sonic Mountain]

There are no dumb questions. We all started somewhere and that's the whole point of this forum.

Ok, first off, yep 3 way switch is fine. If you want to go crazy with other switching options you can add push/pull volume and tone nobs. But its a good idea to keep it simple as you start out.

It's very hard to know if the routes will fit a P90. It's actually quite a different shape to a humbucker. You can get humbucker shaped P90's but I'm guessing that's not what you've ordered. It's possible you could enlarge the cavity. Not sure.

You can work out neck vs bridge by using a multimeter to check the resistance of the windings. Generally speaking you put the higher Ohms reading in the bridge position and the lower in the neck.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'Frame'... the pickup surround?

I don't think P90's typically have a surround. They are either mounted using a 'dog ear' stlye or protrude through a pick guard or just sit in the route.

[ThatCluelessGerman]

Aaah, thank you, that is helpful! Yes, with frame I meant the pickup surround. Sorry, my English is probably awkward, it's been a while since I left school ;-)

I thought Humbuckers and P90s had the same shape, so my bad. Let's see if it fits. If not, I'm just going to keep it for a possible future build. I don't think I have the skills to enlarge the cavity, that screams trouble pretty loud to me.

Good tip with the multimeter, I actually have one.

Now it brings me to the next question. I have A + B 500k pots. How do I find out if I can use them with the pickups or if they need other pots? Or do all pickups work with the same pots?

Thank you so much for your help so far =)

[Simon Barden]

You'd use A type (audio taper/log taper) on the volume pots and can use either log or linear taper (type B pots) for tone. 500k is the value normally used with humbuckers and P90s.

[ThatCluelessGerman]

Cool, thank you!

What would happen if the multimeter shows I have two neck or two bridge pickups, and I would still use one of them for the neck? Does it just mean one could be a bit louder than the other or would I run into any other trouble?

[Sonic Mountain]

Only one way to find out

You can adjust the pickup height to help balance the outputs.

It won’t cause any major issues.

[ThatCluelessGerman]

Thank you, I will try it and probably post here again, crying for help =)

[Simon Barden]

You've got two different sorts of pickups. Also you could have different magnet types and different wire gauges. The DC resistance value doesn't tell you much unless you know more details about the pickups, so I wouldn't go by it at all in this instance.

But most mixed pickup designs put a humbucker in the bridge and a P90 in the neck e.g. the Gibson BFG. It's a good combination.



You can see from the picture that a soapbar P90 is longer (pole to pole) than a humbucker (about as long as the humbucker + the pickup ring) and also narrower, so you'll end up with a gap at either side. You either live with the gap, or you return the P90 and go for a humbucker sized P-90. A dog-ear P90 has a cover that just about covers up a standard width humbucker hole. You may have to fill the ends of the rout with some wood in order to fit the mounting screws, but that won't be seen. You'd need to get a proper neck-position dog-ear P90 as it has a lower cover than a bridge one. They aren't height adjustable, but a neck one will be the right height for a LP style neck position.

Can you provide links to the pickups you've ordered?

[fender3x]

Or you could send the P90 back and exchange it for a P90 in a humbucker size. There are LOTS of those around. It would be a lot easier than most of the mods you can use to accommodate the P90, and would sound very close to the same.

Generally you want the louder pickup in the bridge position. Ohms is not a perfect test of that, but generally a P90 will have a bit less output than a humbucker. Set at the same height, with two pickups that are the same, the one at the neck will be louder. That is because there is more string vibration which produces the output closet to the neck. But you may be able to compensate for this with string height. The high tones are not as pronounced at the neck, and P90s are better at producing clear highs than most humbuckers, which makes the position Simon suggests pretty common.

[Simon Barden]

Generally you want the louder pickup in the bridge position.

Semantics I know, but you generally want to put the pickup with the higher output in the bridge position. As Fender3x says, the string vibrate with a greater amplitude at the neck position compared to the bridge position, so fitting the same pickup in both positions will result in the bridge output being noticeably less than the neck position.

You can balance outputs to some extent with pickup heights, but move a pickup too far away from the strings and it can sound , thin, weak and uninteresting.

So most pickup sets come in neck and bridge positions, with the bridge having more windings so that its output when installed is then similar to the neck pickup's. But a bridge pickup from a vintage style set may have less output than a neck pickup from a modern rock-orientated set, so you need to chose carefully when mixing pickup types.

If you do have one pickup louder than the other, then it is normal to have that louder pickup in the bridge, but you don't have to. You may use the neck pickup for most of your solo work, and use the bridge for cleaner, more jangly chord work.

Straight DC resistance isn't the only consideration, as the wire gauge also affects the DCR value as well as the number of turns. 43AWG wire is thinner than 42AWG wire (42 is the 'standard' pickup wire gauge), so is used for pickups where they want to fit more turns on the same bobbin size. But 43AWG has on average 27% more resistance per unit length than 42AWG wire, so two pickup made with a similar number of turns, but one with 42AWG wire and the other with 43AWG wire will have similar outputs, but the 43AWG pickup will have a higher DCR reading, and so appear 'hotter' than the 42AWG pickup. But the normal use of the thinner wire (apart from on physically smaller pickups like a Tele neck pickup) is to make overwound pickups.

So a humbucker with 10% extra windings of 43AWG wire, will not have a DCR that's 10% greater than the base humbucker with 42AWG wire, but 110% x 127%greater. So the base 8k pickup could have a 10% overwound variant with a DCR of 8k x 1.1 x 1.27 = 11.17k. That 11.17 k figure makes it seem a lot hotter than 10%!

Magnet types play their part as well. The stronger the magnet fitted to a given pickup coil, the higher the pickup output will be.

Increasing basic magnet strength goes Alnico 3, Alnico 2 (A2 is apparently stronger than A3 in rod magnet form but weaker in bar magnet form), Alnico 4, Alnico 5, Alnico 6, Alnico 7 (6 and 6 are rarely used for guitar pickups) and Alnico 8, Ceramic and then Neodymium. They will also add a slightly different tone to the pickup, so a maker can tune a pickup's sound by changing magnet type but increasing/decreasing the number of wire turns as appropriate to get the same output.