Custom Electric Guitars by Black Mesa Guitars Pickup Placement Notes Page

Custom Electric Guitars by Black Mesa Guitars page header

Innovative Custom and Semi-Custom Electric Guitars

Some Thoughts On Pickup Placement

Much has been said about ideal pickup placement in electric guitars. It is generally assumed that there are fairly precise locations at the antinodes of a vibrating string, meaning the line of greatest string excursion at the fundamental and succeeding harmonic frequencies; and that in order for a guitar to sound “right”, the pickups must be located at those precise points. In building a guitar based on a classic design such as a Strat® or Les Paul®, many builders (and guitarists!) are firm in their belief that it won’t sound right if the pickup is relocated for any reason; say, to shoehorn in a couple more frets.

Perhaps it would help if those who think about these sorts of things would try to conceive of the antinode in a different way. If you envision a vibrating string as a sine wave, it is easy to see that while a node, that is, a place where there is little or no string excursion, is indeed a precise point, an antinode can be seen as more of a zone. A pickup located almost anywhere in that antinodal zone will be sufficiently excited to produce a usable signal. Naturally, the output will diminish proportionally to the pickup’s distance from the node, but you really have quite a large area in which to locate a pickup, especially at the neck position.

But the issue is greatly complicated when the string is fretted. Hey, the nodes and antinodes move! The speaking length changes, the frequency changes, the wavelength changes, therefore the oh, so careful positioning of the pickup to correspond to a line of greatest string excursion goes out the window. Each note up the scale moves the whole node/antinode business closer to the bridge.

All this means is that locating pickups according to antinodal calculations is really kind of a greased-pig contest. The only truly reliable method is empirical; how does it sound? Guitarists all know that as a string is plucked closer to a fixed point (the bridge), the greater the treble response. Therefore, moving pickups half an inch closer to the bridge in order to facilitate use of 24 frets will simply result in a very slightly brighter neck pickup tone, but the gain is a guitar with greater range and flexibility. Worth the tradeoff? Only you can answer that for yourself.

There are some great resources on the web which discuss the physics of this stuff in detail. Some of the most useful I have found are:

http://www.kettering.edu/~drussell/Demos/string/Fixed.html
(simple animations illustrating the node/antinode idea)

http://www.till.com/articles/PickupResponse/index.html
(Well written explanation of these principles, with more complex formulae for the real egghead)

http://www.till.com/articles/PickupResponseDemo/index.html
(really nice Applet designed by Donald Tillman showing the effects of changing pickup locations)