I've been playing guitar for many years. I've done my share of "upgrading" and being a brand $@!&#, falling for gimmicks and reviews, myths and facts of tone. But concerning pickups ... Why or how do pickups go wrong or right?

I literally have a huge box of stock guitar pickups of many brands. Mostly beginner/intermediate pickups. Squier, Epiphone, Ibanez, Samick, the list goes on. Most sound like utter garbage. Screechy, muddy, fingernail on a chalkboard. But evey now and then, some of them just sound great.

I do have a separate box for those that fit that category. Some Squiers, some unknown Korean made stuff. I'd swear sometimes, some of the beginner guitars get it right. Whether it's a matter of consistency, or luck, it just baffles me that sometimes you run across a cheap guitar that has nice musical pickups. A few of my most prized guitar pickups are from cheap Squiers, a few unknown makes.

Is it possible that sometimes higher end stuff gets thrown in the mix by mistake? Or maybe some small tweak gets made during production? Maybe a batch of materials is just better than the last?

I'm thinking about this because of the few guitar pickups that I have set aside from cheap stock guitars, and how they compare to some of my high end stuff. Which is every bit as good.

Most recently, I just bought a Yamaha RBX170 Bass with J and P pickups and the stock pickups are freaking me out a little. Rather than "upgrading" the pickups, I decided to try different pots and try an Orange Drop cap, and the midranges are singing beautifully. They're clean and clear. I'd even go so far as saying high end sounding. Certainly better than the Dimarzios I put in my Jazz Bass.

Am I falling into the brand trap? Is a P Bass that much better in the neck than a Jazz? Am I just going crazy? Why am I finding it hard to believe that the sounds coming from what's considered a beginner Bass are as good as a lot of the higher end passives I've tried out? The P bass pickup in this particular guitar is throwing out some serious singing tone.

Anyone else here experience any similar experiences with " lower end" gear before?

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Ted, I have found good gear at lower prices on a few occasions but I usually have to pay for better quality gear just like everyone else. That goes for pick-ups, in my situation all of the pick-ups that I have replaced I still have in a box, but, they all sound just as bad as when I replaced them.

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you can save the world with your guitar one love song at a time it's just better, more fun, easier with a fender solid body electric guitar or electric bass guitar.

I think most electric guitarists find themselves with box of pickups and bits after a few years - in my case, I was rummaging around for parts one day, and thought, "Huh. I've probably got enough spare bits of Strat in here to build an entire Strat!", so I did.

I have some cheap pickups which sound absolutely superb, so yes, every now and then, the lower end makers do pop out something which really does the business. On the opposite end of the spectrum, I also have a couple of very expensive hand wound ones from very prominent manufacturers lurking in there which are just absolute dogs.

THAT'S THE SPIRIT!



Arjay

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"Here's why reliability is job one: A great sounding amp that breaks down goes from being a favorite piece of gear to a useless piece of crap in less time than it takes to read this sentence." -- BRUCE ZINKY

The best part, of course, was when I completed my little project, I looked in my spares cupboard to look for a suitable matching switch tip to finish it off and thought, "Huh. I still have enough in there to build another Strat..."

Hiya,
Pickups are only as good as the bit of wood you nail 'em to.
I've been telling people for years, you can spend billions on pickups, but if you're screwing it to a cheap piece of wood, it will still sound like $@!&.
There's an inverted brand snobbery among a lot of players, usually those that haven't the will power to save up, who "prefer" to play a cheap guitar that they spent daft money on 'upgrading' (usually with equally cheap crappy parts) and swear blind that it sounds better than the real thing. IT DOESN'T, they're deluded/kidding themselves. You usually find they are using cheap, crappy amps and/or have no idea how to get the best out of them.
A good quality amp and learning how to use it will make more of a difference than any pickup "upgrade" ever will.
Now, I know Fender (and Gibson) don't make the best guitars money can buy any more, but at the end of the day, you DO get what you pay for.
A Squier Affinity Strat isn't as good as a Classic Vibe Strat, which isn't as good as a Mexican Classic Strat, which isn't as good as a US Vintage Reissue, which isn't as good as a Custom Shop NOS 56 Strat...etc.

There's a culture among the young uns round here of buying a small car - Citroen Saxo, Vauxhall Corsa etc - and spending stupid amounts of money modifying them to be able to go as fast as Subaru Imprezas etc. They still own a $@!&#* little Citroen Saxo, that regardless of what they spent still is worth nothing and with the money they spend they could have bought TWO Subarus.

A oickup is just a microphone. I f the guitar sounds crap acoustically, it will sound crap amplified, no matter what pickups you throw at it.

Cheers.

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"As long as I stay Between The Sun And My Shadow, I guess I'm doing well."

I love the tone of the ceramic neck pickup in the Affinity Squier Strat, my jaw dropped when I first heard it!

The 2/4 position of the CV 50 Strat is ah-mazing!

Brawley ceramic neck pickups too, it's in their low end 322 Deluxe, shockingly good, even on basswood.

The stock pickups on the Hwy 1 are top-notch if you know how to use them.

The 496T/490R combo in my 2012 Standard SG are about as good as it gets for a humbucker combo on mahogany. I can dial in clean, jazz, blues, rock, and metal SG and Les Paul tones alllll day long, verrrrry touch sensitive too! I take lessons online (GuitarTricks) and the teachers have killer Les Pauls, no problems dialing in whatever tone they're using.

The only replacement pickups that ever impressed me were the Bill Lawrence pickups, the Bill and Becky pickups! When I took my guitar in after installing the BL pickups to make sure I wouldn't electrocute myself (two different shops, safety first), even they were blown away by the BL pickups. ...long pause..."...wOw, I really like those pickups. What did you say these are?" The guy kept kept rubbing and stroking the strings with this squinty, sly look of awe on his face, like he found an ancient, hidden secret, he was mystified!

I don't know why this happens!

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"The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a Conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists. The American mind simply has not come to a realization of the evil which has been introduced into our midst." J. Edgar Hoover

Yes, indeed!

The sound of a guitar is created (or: influenced) by many, many factors. It's not the pickups only.
If the "chain of materials" works together fine and the quality of the manufactured guitar is good, then the sound is good.

There are good low budget guitars out there. I just would say that the cheaper a guitar is, the less good guitars can be found in that price range because the presets for manufacturing allow bigger tolerances in Quality.

Body wood for example: a cheap manufacturer buys large piles of cheap wood at a discount price. Since wood is a naturally growing material, it can be very different in quality. A high end manufacturer buys high quality wood instead.

Same goes for every single bit in a guitar.

To sum it up:
the cheaper a guitar is, the lower the chances of finding a good one up to a point, where the price simply is too low to get a useful guitar done. Below that point you just get crap.

The more expensive a guitar is, the higher the chances to get a really good one!
BUT: you can(!!) get crappy ones even if you buy from the custom shop of a manufacturer.

Furthermore it's the personal taste as well, which makes you judge an instrument.

I personally own two low budget guitars which really surprised me. An Ibanez RG 350 MYE and a Burns Cobra. Both sounding fantastic but there ARE things I had to change, like the trem on the RG and the nut on the Cobra. Other than that, they're both great.

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Kindest regards from Germany, Dee
My recordings --> http://www.soundclick.com/bands/page_mu ... dID=564337
STRATS ROCK!!! but Teles and Firebirds, too!

Suitability for instrument manufacture would be a more appropriate word than quality regarding wood. For example, all these fancy looking maples - flamed figured, etc - aren't any more expensive than a regular piece. The figuring is a deformity which looks nice, but does nothing for tone and in most cases is structurally inferior. Manufacturers generally charge more for it because it doesn't occur that often, but it doesn't cost them any more. The best maple for guitar manufacture is actually quarter sawn. I have a cheap budget guitar here that has a flamed maple neck...
A top end maker hand picks the wood that is most suitable from the lumber yard. The mass producers just orders a job lot of a particular 'breed' of wood. The lumber yard is just selling wood - they don't know or care what works best for guitar building - so there's always a chance that there may just be the perfect piece in that job lot... assuming Mr Custom Shop hasn't been along beforehand and found it out.

...and that's the other thing... the guy making the guitar in a Custom Shop knows 'his onions'. No-one at the mass producer has a clue - they know their job, not guitars - they are just machining pieces of wood to a shape and then screwing the bits together. The bits fit together well, because the CNC router is accurate, not because a craftsman made it.

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"As long as I stay Between The Sun And My Shadow, I guess I'm doing well."

Hi somebodyelseuk: actually, that is entirely incorrect. Figured timber costs a helluvalot more than plain wood. Timber with nice figure is separated out at the saw mill as it comes out of the trunks and put aside for specialist buyers at a considerable premium. I have a friend who owns a saw mill. You can be assured those people are extremely well aware of what different grades of timber will sell for and work their stock accordingly.

I can point you at many upstream sources for raw timber if you're interested. But in essence, the fancier the figure, the higher the price. And sometimes the price goes very high.

Of course, the big boys buy their figured timber at a considerable discount compared to small makers, but the differential between fancy and plain wood remains the same at all levels of the market.



I guess inconsistency in manufacturing explains some of it.

Tiny spec differences can make quite a large difference in sound where pickups are concerned. At the low end of the market tolerances and QC are a bit looser so there is the possibility for more variation in pickups from the same batch. The winds a little tighter or looser, more or less scattered, and so on. No doubt that's how some happen by chance to hit a sweet spot and some miss it by miles.

I spent an entertaining couple of hours listening to Trev Wilkinson talking about just how variable pickup manufacturing was in earlier days even in the big companies. Plenty of room there for both dogs and diamonds in the rough to be coming off the same line.

These days, what the price of up-market pickups gets us is in large part attention to detail and consistency of manufacturing output. And a few other things too...

Cheers - C

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somebodyelseuk, I think you'll find once you've been here a while that the general concensus around here is that the tone wood debate is a place we try not to go ... just to avoid unpleasantness. The subject has been argued to death and most people leave the argument with the same opinion they came into it with.

Concerning the extra parts that accumulate over the years, I place any parts I remove from a guitar into ziplock bags with a paper note indicating which guitar they came from. That way if I am ever looking for the stock pups or pots or switches from a specific guitar for whatever reason I rummage through my box of ziplock bags and find the one with the note that says that guitar. For pickguards I stick a piece of masking tape on the back and write my note on that. Tubes go back into their boxes and the pairs are put into ziplocks as well. Grouping stuff together like that takes the guess work out of finding old parts months or years down the road.

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Just think of how awesome a guitar player you could have been by now if you had only spent the last 10 years practicing instead of obsessing over pickups and roasted maple necks.

Actually, there's been some progress made in that area:

"I have six strats with rosewood boards. When I bought number seven, it only came with a maple board. When I played it, I realized how narrow minded I had been."

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"The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a Conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists. The American mind simply has not come to a realization of the evil which has been introduced into our midst." J. Edgar Hoover

my tele is a hunk o $@!&. idk where thge bridge came from but its real nice sounding

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1984 Squier Contemporary Stratocaster
1986 Peavey Envoy 110
1967 Kingston Acoustic

Amen to that!
If it's good enough for Clapton, it's plenty good for me. I have a maple fretboard on my Tele. It was the first guitar I ever gigged with. Some time later I fixed up a Penco SG and took it to the next gig... Now, I'm not a real accomplished guitar player and I do rely on seeing what the heck I'm doing... couldn't see a darn thing on that rosewood fretboard to save my life!
When I bought my Strat a couple of years later, I was very happy to find one with a maple fretboard.

By the way... I sold a Squier Strat for $100 that I put toward my MIM Fender... I liked the neck pup in the Squier better than the one in my MIM.

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It's possible that in my situation, it's an amp/pickup combo. I only have one bass preamp. It's a very good one, but when tweaking the knobs, the midranges aren't very prominent. Something that I'm reading about when researching on the net, and experiencing on hand concerning an Alembic F-1X.

The pickups in the RBX170 bass seem to be filling that void. It is possible that in another setup it would be considered too mid heavy. I'm not experiencing any muddiness or distortion out of them (which is pleasing) and the mids are cutting through clean. The Ultra Jazz pickups seem to lack mids, and in this amp, I don't think that's a good thing. It could very well be that Ultra Jazz pickups are perfectly fine with other amps. Same thing, no mud, but they're lacking in power and mids, and it doesn't agree with this amp.

For THIS amp, the stock Yamaha sound much better. I think that before I try buying new pickups for the Samick, I'm gonna put in the stocks with new pots and cap and see if I get the same results as the Yamaha.

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