Wax potting

The treatment applied to a pickup so its coil is mechanically damped, preventing the windings from vibrating and generating unwanted noise.

Coils left untreated can behave like a microphone, amplifying tapping on the guitar's body and, in the worst cases, feeding back into a howl at high volumes. The usual process is to heat the pickup gently in molten wax under vacuum so the air in the coil is replaced by wax, then let it cool. The result is a quiet, stable pickup under gain, at the cost of a slight loss of the open quality that unpotted coils sometimes have.

Example: a high-gain player will normally want potted pickups, while a jazz player after a livelier clean sound may prefer them untreated.

Wax potting

See also