My Guitar Notes

Electronics

A pickup is a filter with a magnet in it.

A pickup does not hear the guitar. It reads a moving steel string and converts that movement into voltage. Everything else — magnet, wire, wind count — decides the shape of the resulting filter.

Magnet

Alnico 2weakest of the common grades; softer attack, lower output
Alnico 3low strength, low output; chime without edge
Alnico 5stronger; tighter low end, brighter top
Alnico 8strong; aggressive midrange, high output
Ceramicstrong, cheap, consistent; harder high end at volume

A magnet grade is not a personality. Two pickups with the same magnet and different wind counts will differ more than two pickups with different magnets and the same wind.

DC resistance

The usual proxy for output, and a poor one on its own — it ignores wire gauge. Conventionally: roughly 6–8 kΩ for a vintage single coil, 7.5–9 kΩ for a PAF-style humbucker, 12–16 kΩ and up for contemporary high-output designs.

Pots and capacitors

250 kΩsingle coils; loads the pickup more, shaves top end
500 kΩhumbuckers; the standard, brighter
1 MΩvery bright; used by some pedal steel and jazz builders
0.022 µFtypical tone capacitor, humbucker
0.047 µFtypical tone capacitor, single coil

A tone control is a low-pass filter whose corner moves as you turn it. Wiring a pickup straight to the jack removes the load, not the pickup's own character.

In this section

Catalogued electronics — 629

Further reading

A cross-section of the archive — sampled across the catalogue