Don’t sHun lowoutput pIckups

“If you overwind a pickup or use a magnet that is too strong, all the high-end gets rolled off,” says Tim Mills of Bare Knuckle pickups. “That leaves you with a tone that is dynamically unresponsive and lacking in any sort of definition. Ultimately unusable. With a proper selection of wire gauge and magnet type it is possible to get extremely high output from pickups, while retaining a good degree of clarity, although the higher in output you go, the more compressed the tone gets. A lot of people don’t realise lower-powered pickups can work really well in applications usually reserved for high-output pickups.”