Get The Best From Your Humbuckers

It’s been said that the best things in life are free, and we find that saying is never more true than when applied to getting a better tone from our guitars. With so many products on the market that claim to improve guitar tone in one way or another – from fancy new picks made from exotic materials, to super-rare new old stock amplifier tubes someone discovered in a factory basement – it’s a relief to remember that we often can make just as big an impact for free with nothing more than a screwdriver and a few spare minutes. We are, of course, referring to the ancient and noble art of pickup adjustment.

Passive magnetic guitar pickups work by detecting the velocity of string vibration and converting it to an electrical signal via Faraday’s Law of electromagnetic induction. If that reads like it was written by someone who just Googled it themselves, well… There is a lot of technical information that explains this process, much of which can be gleaned from academic resources and other SD blog articles, so I won’t repeat it here. What I will say is that our pickups “hear” string vibration through an electromagnetic field around our strings. Making adjustments to our pickups changes the shape of that field, which, in turn, changes what the pickup hears and thus, changes our tone.

There are many, many different styles and models of electric guitar pickup (which, if you’re reading the Seymour Duncan blog, should not be news to you), and they each have their own levels and methods of adjustment. For the purpose of brevity, we’ll focus specifically on fine-tuning the adjustment of the common passive humbucking pickup.

In a surprising figure supported by no real data whatsoever aside from my own personal hunch after having consulted nobody, it is estimated that fewer than 50% of people who own an electric are even aware that the humbuckers are adjustable, let alone make any attempt to adjust them themselves. For the other  > 50%, here is how I imagine most pickup adjustments are performed:

Guitar owner turns screws on either side of pickup, plays a few notes, declares “YEP IT’S NOT TOUCHING THE STRINGS AND IT SEEMS LOUD ENOUGH I AM DONE NOW I THINK I WANT TO HAVE CRISPS FOR LUNCH.”
That would do in a pinch I suppose, but what enthusiasm our hypothetical straw man has for taco lunches, he is lacking for some key aspects of pickup adjustment. I want you to have your tone and your crisps, so what follows in our next tone installment is our preferred, in-depth method for humbucker adjustment.