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Choosing Pickups

727 bytes added, 19:31, 7 April 2014
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Tone
==Tone==
===Guitar Considerations===
The biggest consideration for a pickup should be matching its tone to your guitar's tone. You want to compensate if your guitar is naturally dark/bright, etc. For example, if you have a really bright-sounding guitar, and you install a very bright pickup, you will get a very harsh tone. Sometimes this isn't as easy to discern as just listening to your guitar unplugged - it's really about how the pickup will see the string, which isn't necessarily what you hear.
 
It's best to find what kind of wood the body of the guitar is made of, and if it is a solid-body or hollow-body - this should have the largest impact on the guitar's tone. Do some internet research to try to narrow things down.
 
===Modern vs. Vintage===
"Modern"-voiced pickups have a smaller resonant peak than "vintage" voiced pickups. Because the resonant peak is usually a fairly high frequency, even for humbuckers, the lower resonant peak means the tone has more bass relative to treble and sounds fuller and fatter. Typically, "blues" single coils have more of a "modern" or "fat" voicing. Vintage humbuckers sound very nasal, whereas modern humbuckers sound "bigger".