How To Adjust Your Guitar Pickup To Get Good Sound

Like all aspects of guitar playing, the question of how to adjust the guitar pickup to get a good sound is mostly a matter of taste. You can fool around endlessly making adjustments to your pickups but you only NEED to adjust your pickups if you want more distortion from your guitar, you want an even amount of distortion on all the strings, or there is a big difference in volume between the pickups on your guitar.

In order to make your adjustments to get a good sound you need a little knowledge of how pickups work and the techniques used to adjust them. When you adjust your pickups, it is best that you disconnect the guitar from the amp while you are making the adjustments.

If you don’t know a lot about guitar set-up it is probably best to get personal guidance from an experienced guitarist. The alternative is to be prepared for a long process of trial and error plus the possibility of then needing advice from a more experienced guitar player and putting up with remarks about your lack or expertise.

The basic idea behind learning how to adjust your guitar pickup is that if the strings are too near to the pickups the magnetic force on them lessens their ability to vibrate. But on the other hand, the further away from the pickups the strings are, the lesser their ability to pick up the sound. The guitar’s pickups can be raised or lowered by turning the screws on the sides of the pickups. A decent distance between pickup and string is about three-sixteenths of an inch. This is to stop you bumping the pickups with your pick.

Single coil pickups have six magnets in them and humbuckers have twelve. On some pickups these rods, or pole pieces can be adjusted with a screwdriver. The basic procedure is to loosen the pole pieces to raise them, connect the guitar to the amp, listen to your tone, go back and make further adjustments if necessary.

If you have your strings closer to the pickups, therefore getting more sound, that doesn’t mean the quality of your sound will be better. If you are the kind of person who prefers to make sound adjustments by ear you could focus your attention on the output of the neck pickup and move it up until the sound breaks up, then bring it down a fraction. You could adjust the bridge pickups as close as possible to the strings. These pickup usually don’t damp the strings as much as the neck the neck pickups.

This video is the next best thing to having somebody show you how to adjust your guitar pickup: