How to set your Pick Up Height - Stratocaster - Single Coils

hey guys Lukas here with blues you can use I hope you guys are doing really really well today I wanted to shoot a really really quick video just to give you some ideas on how you might want to go about setting up the pickup height on your single coil type guitar so stay tuned for that because it's coming up [Music] okay guys so basically I wanted to take a few minutes and talk to you guys about the correct way to set up your single coil pickups on your Stratocaster the height of the pickups it's something I don't know if a lot of people think about but it's really really important because if you get the pickup height too high you're gonna get some weird effects going on and so what I'm gonna show you actually is what that sounds like if you happen to have the pickups set to high so I've actually purposely set my neck pickup on my strat too high and I'm gonna play a note and just kind of let you guys hear what that sounds like so I'm just gonna fret the 12th note on the 12th fret on the e-string here just have a listen [Music] so you can you can hear its warbling and the reason for that is pretty simple obviously the pole pieces in the pickups are magnets and the strings are metal so it makes sense that if you get the magnet too close to the string it's going to affect that the way the string oscillates and vibrates and it's going to cause all kinds of goofy things you can get buzzing going on and it can have a really negative impact on your tone so in the next shot here I'm gonna show you guys what I recommend in terms of how you could set this up I'm also going to give you guys a link to fenders website they kind of spec a bunch of different types of guitars and then they set a specific measurement in the height of the from the pole piece to the bottom of the string and now the first thing I want to tell you guys is that this is really just a rule of thumb what you really need to do here is you need to use your ears plug the guitar into a decent amp and actually you know maybe use those figures as a starting point and then play from there okay guys so remember these measurements I'm gonna give you guys are really just kind of a starting point so these are Texas antiquity pickups from seymour duncan there's a peak there to give you kind of an idea what i'm dealing with these range from you know under six-and-a-half k to the bridge pickup being i think a nine point around nine nine ten k and that in that range so the bridge pickups definitely a little bit hotter but the two pickups the neck and middle pickup are definitely more in the vintage style the reason I bring this up is because fender basically says depending on the pickup style you may want to use certain measurements as a starting point so that's something you're going to want to consider is the output rating of your pickups just as a starting point if they're vintage style or Texas specials noiseless series standard single coils humbuckers or lace sensors they'll tell you what the measurement should be on the base side from the top of the pole piece to the bottom of the string and what the measurement should be on the treble side from the same area so from the top of the pole piece to the bottom of the string so essentially what you want to do is it's kind of figure out where your pickups fit in and then that's just a starting point you know you're gonna need to fine-tune that from there you're probably gonna want to try to make sure that you've got fairly consistent levels of volume from the three pickup so once you've done this set up you're gonna want to actually play through the guitar through plugged in obviously to an amp and go through all the pickup positions and sort of make sure that you don't have like a wild jump in volume when you make one switch to another and I would definitely recommend that it's best to have the pickups too low then too high you obviously heard what could happen when I had my neck pickup set too high on that particular string it just made a horrible horrible noise it's a fairly extreme example but that's kind of what you're looking at the only tool you're gonna need to do this is a Phillips screwdriver so hey that's nice and easy and for me given that these are kind of more of a vintage style pickup I'm gonna go on the base side I'm gonna go to a 2.4 millimeter height and so what you do is you press the last fret and then you measure from the top of the pole piece to the bottom of the string and then you do the same thing on the high E string and on the treble side there I'm gonna set it at two point four millimeters and I'm gonna do that across all three pickups now what you'll notice as well is that your pickups really shouldn't be flat in the guitar you'll notice that with these measurements the gap on the bass side tends to be higher than the gap on the treble side and there's a reason for that the circumference of the string here on the wound string is obviously larger so that's really the reason for the for making the adjustments that way so realistically when you're looking at the guitar it probably shouldn't be that flat you can use feeler gauges or you can get yourself a decent ruler I'm using millimeters because I just hate math so on that bridge pickup because it's a bit hotter I may need to bring the level of that pickup down to to kind of match the output of the other pickup so I won't know for sure until I actually plug it in and try it so here's roughly where I wound up with it you can see they're pretty low and you can also I think kind of tell that I have a bit of an angle between the wound and unwound strings also so what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna actually just plug this in and just give it a play through but that's kind of roughly where where this setup is again remember these are just guidelines this is no there's no hard fast rules here but definitely something you'll you don't want to play with especially if you're after a more vintage sound you know you can lower those pickups and and I think you might find it may make a difference for you [Music] [Music] [Music] so that's it guys I'm pretty happy with the results I've only been playing with it here for a few minutes so I'll have to spend a bit more time with it just to find it if I'm gonna find tune anything but but as a general starting point I think it sort of works really well so if you guys have some comments and thoughts on know how you feel like this should be done you know please let me know in the comment section below and if you don't like the video give it a thumbs down if you liked the video give it a thumbs up and don't forget to subscribe I really do appreciate your support very very much so thanks so much for watching thanks for subscribing and I'll look forward to talking to you guys again soon take care

Channel: Lucas Crossley Guitar

Views: 142,235

Keywords: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_z6iaV6ipI&t=8s, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2biWMx6q8U8&t=204s, fender stratocaster pick up heights, how to set pickup height by ear, strat single coil pickup height, how to set pickup height on a strat, single coil, pickup height, why my strat pick up treble to much, strat pickup adjustment, guitar pickups, strat pickup pole height, strat pickups height, stratocaster pickup height, setting string upheight on stratocaster

Id: BCsFKGMXT1c

Length: 8min 32sec (512 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 01 2018