PICKUP THE PIECES
Pickups are a popular mod to make – but their influence on the rest of your rig is often misunderstood. Here, Tim Mills of Bare Knuckle Pickups explains how to use pickups to alter not just the sound but the feel and responsiveness of your amp and more…
What’s the difference between high- and low-output pickups, in terms of their influence on other parts of your rig (such as amp and pedals)? “If we look at something highoutput versus something lowoutput, the higher the output the more juice it’s putting down the cable, if you like. I mean, a pickup’s output is in millivolts, so it’s not huge amounts of current we’re talking about here. It’s very small amounts – but the front-ends of different amps all do react differently to that, and it really does vary from one make to another, because some amp front-ends are very sensitive to what actually hits them, some less so.
“At the end of the day, it’s really about how much headroom it soaks up. So, as a general rule, if something is hitting the amp with a higher output, you’re going to use up more of the available headroom, and that’s going to translate into a more compressed sound – that’s the most straightforward way of saying it. Whereas something lower-output would put less current out and therefore use less of that headroom. So the sound will seem bigger, because it’ll have more depth and more room to actually expand or bloom with the amplifier.”
Gary Moore got a huge sound with his famous Fiesta Red Strat, but when we tested the pickups on that guitar they were relatively low in output. How does that work? Most people would equate hot pickups with a huge sound… “Well, if we take Gary, for example, he wasn’t known for tickling the strings. He really played with some considerable gusto and would use a quite meaty string gauge as well. So he’s picking hard, he’s digging into the string hard, and the string itself has got a considerable mass. All of that is going to generate more current in the pickup immediately.
“He’s using a lower-output pickup and, essentially, he’s soaking up a bit of that headroom by hitting the pickup hard initially, so he’s kind of maximising the output that pickup will have, just with his picking style. He’s hitting the guitar strings hard. They’re big strings, so we’re getting lots of current coming out of those single coils. He’s then going to, let’s say, an overdrive – which you could then set up to boost that signal even further, and that’s where we’re going to get that screaming-hot lead tone.
“If you compare that to using a high-output pickup into a highgain head, for example, then Gary’s sound will still sound more dynamic and open, whereas the higher-output pickup and higher-gain head will have a more compressed and saturated sound.”
You have more dynamic range at your disposal with lower-output pickups, then… “Absolutely, yes. That’s what my reference to headroom is, really. The more headroom you’ve got, the more dynamic range you’ve got, and the better that will translate to you as a player. When you reduce dynamic range, or reduce headroom, everything starts to get choked up. Take, for example, the old thing of running a Marshall flat-out to get its best tone. Well, if you do run any amp on absolute full-chat, you’re pushing the headroom to the max. The amp has got nowhere else to go.
“So the sound, rather than actually sounding massive, starts to sound choked up – and it almost sounds like the amp is coughing and spluttering because it’s being hit so hard. There is nowhere for the note to expand into because the headroom has all been reduced. So, you know, you’re often better to have more headroom to translate those notes, to allow them to bloom and grow, and that’ll make a much, much bigger sound.”
Turning that question on its head, what’s the best way to get good tone from an amp, like a Twin, that has so much headroom it’s in danger of sounding too glassy and clinical?
“If you run any amp on absolute full-chat, you’re pushing the headroom to the max. The amp has got nowhere else to go”
“I would definitely use a drive pedal and probably a vintage or at most a vintage-hot pickup. That will give the biggest tone, because the pickup will be translating the dynamics of my playing, assuming I’m playing with a nice light touch. We’ve not used up any of the headroom there; there’s plenty of response to pick attack, to volume control. The boost pedal, the drive pedal, is then juicing that signal up. The amp has got masses of headroom, so it’s not going to choke up at all.
“We can hit that amp quite hard with our drive pedal, so we’ve got a nice clean, pure tone coming off the guitar, gritting it up with the pedal. And then we’re going into this massive amount of headroom in the amp, which will just make it sound louder and really punchy. Conversely, if you were to try doing the same thing with, say, a highoutput pickup in the guitar but with the same rig, you’d find because the signal coming out of the guitar was really hot, and it’s hitting the drive pedal, which is then trying to juice that up… we’re going to get a really compressed sound and it won’t be anywhere near as responsive. It’ll sound very saturated, but you’ll lose that pick dynamic completely; you know, it’ll flatten it out. Which is fine if you’re just, say, shredding away at a million miles an hour; it’ll just even out all your pick dynamics. But if you’re playing delicately and with some feel, and there’s plenty of space in the phrasing, it won’t suit that at all.”
When are hot pickups the ones to go for, then? “For harder rock styles through to metal styles: anything where compression can be your friend, where the note density, let’s say, is much more intense. If you’re playing faster, very intricate technical passages with a lot of drive, having some nice compression in there just
evens it all out, smooths it all out; it smooths out the pick dynamics, and focuses it up, tightens it right up. That’s the argument for when you want to go with a real mediumto high-output pickup and a real juiced-up amp.
“Even then, the more headroom you have in the amp, the bigger the sound will be. You don’t want the playing or the tone to sound congested at any point, but having it saturated with some focus is ideal. Having said that, though, I know of plenty of rock and metal players who still prefer to use a lower-output pickup, and a drive pedal, and an amp, so that they can still back off quickly, either with their picking, or just by rolling back the volume to clean things up, you know. So it really does depend on how you approach it.
“Alnico magnets feature more in country, blues and hard-rock where you want to have plenty of meat in the midrange”
“If you’re just pure-out metal, though, the likelihood of doing a lot of volume pot work is going to be pretty slim, and you’re going to be looking more for focus and intensity in your sound. That’s where the higher-output pickups are going to come in.”
We speak about some amps having a fast response – so do some pickups have a faster attack or response to picking than others, too? “Yes, and a lot of that will come down to the magnet that powers it. If you have a ceramic-powered pickup, you tend to have a much faster attack than you would with an Alnico, which has a sort of slower, smoother sound – I mean, I’m not talking sluggish, but just by comparison, purely because ceramic is so much more efficient. With ceramic, you get a very bright, percussive high and bass signal tracks very, very quickly.
“So, again, it tends to be much better suited towards rock and metal styles rather than, say, blues rock, jazz, country, anything like that, whereas Alnico will produce more body in the sound. So for country styles, blues and the hardrock sound where you want to have plenty of meat in the midrange, plenty of snap – that’s where an Alnico magnet will feature more.”
How is your own rig setup? And how do you balance out the elements within it to get the sound you want? “It really depends what guitar I play. I mean, in the band that I’m playing in at the moment, we play pretty powerful hard-rock stuff, verging on… I suppose you might even call it ‘metal’. I come at it a bit leftfield. I’ll use a Telecaster with a Flat ’50 bridge coil, which is a hot vintage coil but it still gives me some headroom. I’m quite old-fashioned. I like to use the volume pot a lot, so I can back off and clean up well.
“If I’m using a Superstrat then I use one of our Holydiver bridge pickups, which is a pretty highoutput pickup – but then the Strat in question has a maple ’board. It’s a bolt-on neck. It’s also got a Floyd Rose, so we’ve got a lot of extra treble being put into the signal. This means that a higher-output pickup in that instance can lower the resonant peak and maximise what’s going on in the bottom-end and the midrange. So that’s another way of looking at it.
“If I’m playing Les Pauls, I go the vintage route because of the biggerbodied instrument. I prefer a nice low-output pickup, like a Riff Raff, which is basically a ‘Patent Applied For’-style pickup. That, a drive pedal, a big amp with plenty of headroom, and you can still get a massive rock and metal tone out of that. So, you know, it really depends on which weapon I’m going for, I suppose.”