Dr Roberts Guitar Surgery
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Maintenance Tips
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Poles apart...
Question: Can I improve my tone or output by adjusting the pole pieces on my guitar's pickups, or does it not make any difference at all? Is it possible to improve string balance by adjusting the poles and is there a certain method for going about these adjustments, or is it just a trial and error scenario?
Answer: Most guitar manufacturers don’t bother to adjust the height of the pole pieces on humbucking pickups, but if you look at a vintage Strat pickup you’ll notice that the magnets (which aren’t adjustable) are staggered in height. In the days before ultra light gauge strings, electric guitars used to suffer from a phenomenon called ‘second string dominance’. The ‘G’ string was generally a wound string and had a lower output compared to the plain ‘B’ string.
Fender compensated for this by placing a shorter magnet under the ‘B’ string. Nowadays, with the modern string gauges the problem of dominance has moved to the ‘G’ string. This is why players with vintage style Strats often have problems with string volume balance. On most humbuckers and certain single coil pickups, such as the Gibson P90, the pole pieces are ferrous screws and the magnets are placed underneath the coils. This means that they can be adjusted to obtain pretty much perfect string volume balance.
In reality, unless you are playing jazz or finger styles where a clean sound is required, the overdrive and distortion sounds used by most players evens out the string to string volume differences. This is due to the compression effect produced by the overdrive circuitry in your amplifier. This said, if you do make adjustments they are best made using a clean sound so that you can hear the differences in volume.
I tend to tilt the pickups so that they are higher on the treble side than the bass side. I then raise the ‘A’ and ‘D’ string pole pieces, leave the ‘G’ string pole piece level with the pickup cover and then raise the ‘B’ string pole piece slightly. This is a good starting place for you to make further adjustments by ear.
If you get a strange ‘warbling’ or ‘wolf note’ sound on the lower ‘E’ string when you play it above the 12th fret you’ve probably got the pickup too close to the strings. The ‘wolf note’ is created by the magnet sucking the string downwards causing it to vibrate unevenly. This effect can often be responsible for fret buzz on an otherwise perfectly set up neck.
With this information in mind go ahead and play around with the pickup and pole piece height until you find settings to your taste.
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Maintenance Tips...
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No bleeding treble!
Question: When I reduce the volume on my guitar I seem to lose some of the treble. Is there a solution for this?
Answer: The simplest solution it is to fit a treble ‘bleed’ capacitor to your volume control. The value of this capacitor should be 0.001 microfarad.
The capacitor works by restoring the high frequencies as you reduce the volume.
The problem occurs because the resistance of the pot reduces the high frequency component of the sound more than the mids and bass. Components such as these are available from all electronic hobbyist shops or directly from us - phone for details!
This ‘treble bleed’ capacitor is fitted across the centre tag and the outside ‘hot’ tag of the volume control. If the effect is too great you may wish to fit a 47k ohm resistor in series with the capacitor.
If you are not sure how to do this phone us for help.
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Maintenance Tips...
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Doc's Tip: Tarnished reputation!
If you have a guitar with nickel hardware, be sure to clean it after EVERY use with a wax free polish such as Sparkle. Otherwise it will tarnish badly, very quickly. If this has already happened to your guitar you can often remove the worst of the tarnishing with silver polish.
Be careful not to overdo the polishing procedure in case you go through the plating. However, you may like the look of tarnished plating, in which case just leave it alone and in a few months you’ll have a guitar that looks well played in.
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