'What's a Pickup?' Well, wish I had a dollar everytime a parent asked me that question whilst I demonstrated the sonic virtues of an electric guitar intended for their loved one...

I generally explain it to them as a microphone for the guitar strings, or in slightly more technical terms; Pickup's are electromagnetic devices, made up of magnets and a coiled wire(s), that convert string vibration and body resonance into electrical energy that passes through a guitar cord to an amplifier. That's my short answer, and most people can generally handle the gist of my explanation.

For most of us who have been playing for a while, we understand that pickups greatly effect the sound our electric guitar makes, and for a Gearhead like me pickups represent one of the easiest tone altering modifications you can make to your guitar. A soldering iron, a bit of ambition and you can be swapping over pickups like a pro in no time. Pickups, or rather changing them, are my A-Number-One first step in altering a guitars tone.

Now look, I know you can never turn a 'sows ear into a silk purse' by swapping over pickups. Put a genuine 1950's Seth Lover Gibson PAF into your Chinese Gibson-O-Clone and it's not going to sound like a 59 Les Paul is it? What it will sound like is a Gibson-O-Clone with a good pickup, probably clearer and warmer. You will hear more of what your guitar REALLY sounds like, before all those body vibrations and string vibrations get screwed over by cheap ceramic magnets and wire better suited to toy electric motors than a musical instrument. If you like your current guitar, the way it plays and feels, and want to give your music more than an even chance, then try changing pickups before ditching the whole guitar.

Think of this analogy, if you recorded your amp with an el-cheapo plastic $15.99 microphone it would sound pretty bad right? Bad when compared to sticking, say, a $299 Shure SM57 in front of your amp, it would be a 'no contest' right. Well consider this, the cost component of the stock pickups in your Gibson-O-Clone may be much much much less than that $15.99 microphone I mentioned above, perhaps as low as a couple of bucks per pickup, see where I am going. Cheap pickups cannot really reproduce the full potential of your axe, just as that $299 Shure Microphone is going to convert your amplifiers sound waves into electrical energy better and more faithfully than the cheap mic, so will good pickups covert that string vibration into electrical energy for your amp.

So is it the Pickups or is it the Guitar that sounds bad? The answer lies in listening to your electric guitar unplugged. The way I look at it, a great sounding electric guitar is always going to sound great, even unplugged. Unplugged you take the electric's (the pots, pickups and amplifier) out of the equation, leaving you to listen to the guitars inherent tone. Is it dull, bright, bassy? Do the notes ring out and sustain well? Don't let salesmen push you into immediately into plugging in and amping up, take to time to listen to the guitar unplugged first. Hear and feel the vibrations the body makes, if it sounds good unplugged then it should sound just as good amped up.

Of course those pesky cheap pickups can screw things up along the way, but you know how easy that is to fix now, don't you ;-)

from  G e a r h e a d E z i n e  Issue Number 18
Australia's On-Line Guitar Ezine by Chris "Gearhead" Carr http://www.1800Instruments.com

Australia's On-Line Guitar Shop