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Keeping Your Balance
If your electric guitar has 2 or more pickups, having the volume or output balanced between them is extremely important. Especially on a Stratocaster style guitar which of course has 3 separate pickups.
What I usually do to set the pickup height on a Strat is depress either E string at the last fret (21st, 22nd or whatever) and be sure the string is about 1/8" from the pole piece on the treble pickup. I then adjust the middle and bass pickups as mentioned above.
The final test is to plug the guitar into an amp and flick the pickup switch back and forth to be sure all 3 pickups have a balanced output to each other. Often times a guitarist will want the treble or bridge pickup to be just a bit louder than the other two, but not to the point where it’s over powering.
On most humbuckers at least one set of pole pieces per pickup are adjustable. This is a great feature because it allows you to balance the volume of each string!
Greigg Fraser is a guitarist/songwriter
from London Canada. Click below to visit his web site and listen to audio samples from his two CD's!
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Let’s start at the bridge or treble pickup. Near the bridge
the strings are much more “taught” and don’t have a
chance to really vibrate, so this pickup should be the closest to the
strings. At the other end, the bass or neck pickup tends to be louder
by nature because the strings are much looser and have a greater
opportunity to vibrate. Therefore this pickup should be much farther
away from the strings. On a Strat where there happens to be a middle
pickup, as you can guess it should be half way between the relative
height of both the treble and bass pickups.
If the pickups are too close to the strings you can end up with
some rather ugly overtones, particularly on the low E and A strings -
listen for it and adjust accordingly.
With humbucking pickups you usually can have them a bit closer to
the strings than what would be the norm for single coils. This is
because with a single coil pickup the magnetic pull is concentrated
on a very narrow area of the string. With a humbucker there’s 2
coils which affect a much wider area of the string and causes much
less magnetic pull.