Pickup testing guitar

[Jeff Callahan]

Just starting to experiment...

With little experience in winding PU's, I thought I'd build a guitar to test my creations. Does anybody have any tips on making a guitar to test pickups? I'm planning a test guitar build starting with a universal (bathtub) rout strat, and need a little help with the logistics. I plan on making it as easy and fast as possible to change pickups out, allowing for strat, p-90's, and humbucker pickups. Particularly I was wondering about solder-less joints. Will this significantly change the sound of the PU? Should I just plan on soldering all PU's to test them? How does one go about mounting the PU's allowing for the most adjustability?

Any Ideas?
Thanks, Jeff

[David Schwab]

I have a 1/4" jack with about 6" of wire and alligator clips on it.

I've also set up an instrument with controls, and wires with alligator clips.

You can use a guitar with a bathtub rout. If you want to get them in and out without loosening the strings, you can extend the rout out the bottom (or top) bout of the body.

Then you have to figure out a way to mount them in position.

[Peter Naglitsch]

I have routs that exctend from the "normal" position all the way up so I can slide pickups in and out in seconds. I also have contact "rails" so the pickup is connected to the wiring instantly and I can switch through all settings with a 5-way switch and have vol and tone controls in it too, just like an ordinary guitar. I have pices of plywood that fit into the rails (sliding in and out) and I mount the pickups on stackable spacers with double stick tape. I can compare pickups in seconds. Surely not the best guitar in the world, but the advantages is way bigger than the disadvantages. I'll try to post a pic later.

[Possum]

....

TV Jones has a similar guitar he takes to guitar shows, there are two plugs on the end of the slide and each pickup is permanently mounted on a slide piece of wood so they slide in and plug in at the same time. Gibson made some dumbass guitar that you could put pickups in from the back, I think it was a total sales flop, Gundry bought one and it was really poorly done....they were like $4000 too!

[Joe Gwinn]

TV Jones has a similar guitar he takes to guitar shows, there are two plugs on the end of the slide and each pickup is permanently mounted on a slide piece of wood so they slide in and plug in at the same time. Gibson made some dumbass guitar that you could put pickups in from the back, I think it was a total sales flop, Gundry bought one and it was really poorly done....they were like $4000 too!

No wonder. For that price, one can buy a crap guitar and a router and route the through hole oneself, and have lots of change left over.

[Jeff Callahan]

Thanks for the ideas, connecting the PU to the circuit seams to be my biggest concern. Would an 8-position dual row terminal strip work? I'd like to be able to have as many PU's in the guitar as possible (7 or 8 single coils). I think Lindy Fralin showed his in a previous Premier Guitar issue.

Jeff

http://www.premierguitar.com/Magazine/Issue/2009/Feb/5_Hot_Rodders_You_Should_Meet.aspx" target="_blank">5 Hot Rodders You Should Meet</a>

[David King]

My tester bass is 4 contacts per pickup with just little 4 trace pcbs on the edge of the plywood, slide-in pickup trays and 4 spring loaded "fingers" that hit the traces. I have about 40 trays so a real edge connector would have cost me more than it was worth (to me).

The controls are the trickier part. I use a single-series-single coil switch for each pickup then a volume for each, then a master tone roll-off.

Ideally I'd have a parallel option too but I ain't smart enough to keep track of all those switches and remember what they do. I hardly ever hook bass pickups up in parallel anyway.

[Peter Naglitsch]

I did exactly that, bought a crappy tele and routed it. I was a bit embarassed to buy a guitar as I mainly build guitars a nd secondly wind pickups, but hey, it cost me almost nothing and I saved a lot af time.

This is what it looks like:

And a close up with some pickups randomly thrown in there:

So lets have a contest: Whats that odd pickup to the far left?

[John_H]

At first I made a test guitar out of a Squier strat. It worked alright, but really wasn't adequate for evaluating tone. I now have three guitars that I use for test/demo. They're all rigged with alligator clips so I can swap pickups without soldering. I've replaced the electronics with high quality stuff in all of them.

The guitars I use are an old MIM Strat. I did also replace the cheesy zinc trem block in this one. A Tele with a top loading bridge that I built from parts, and an Epi studio Les Paul wired vintage style.

They're all cheap guitars, but work great for demonstration purposes. I can take them to a Jam, or drop them off at a store without having to worry about them. It's sometimes amusing to have them directly compared to the very expensive custom shop guitars.

[Jeff Callahan]

This is what I came up with so far...
I think I'll use two "rails" with a slot through them to be able to mount the PU's. My toggle switches are all working as one (all have to be on to hear any one, and one off will cut everything.) I'm still new to all this, but was wondering if I needed to add resistors between the switch and the pot, or is there a better way? This probably isn't the correct forum to post this, but I figured it is somewhat related.

Thanks, Jeff

[kevinT]

I'm actually selling the one that I have. I posted it here a long time ago but I can't find the images. It was actually made for testing pickups and it has a patent on it's design.

It has modules for different pickup types and you just slide in the module into the guitar. It uses alligator clips.

I'll take some pics of it and post it in the next day or so. I've pretty much done my R and D and don't need it anymore.

kevin

[Bruce Johnson]

Here's the bench top "mule" that I built for developing & testing the pickups on my Scroll Basses. It's all built onto a rectangular board to rest on the bench top. All of the geometry, such as the scale length and location of the cavities, matches my basses, but it's made so the pickups can be easily popped in and out.

I mounted the basic wiring harness in an aluminum panel and used standard electronics lab-style binding posts for all of the connections. Note the separate pair of binding posts just for the tone capacitor.

[Mark Hammer]

Sometimes, you get so used to looking at something a certain way that you can't imagine it any other way.....

Pickups "work" pointing down at the string, just as well as they do pointing up at it. It will bugger up your picking technique to have a pickup in the way, but it completely avoids the challenge of how to sneak a pickup under the strings without necessitating a retune.

You can can easily get yourself a body, affix a bit of mini-channeling to the side of each E string, and provide a mounting bracket that will let you slide a pickup back and forth over the strings.

Even better, it would allow you to compare one pickup situated under the strings with another situated over the strings at the exact same location.

[David Schwab]

Sometimes, you get so used to looking at something a certain way that you can't imagine it any other way.....

Pickups "work" pointing down at the string, just as well as they do pointing up at it. It will bugger up your picking technique to have a pickup in the way, but it completely avoids the challenge of how to sneak a pickup under the strings without necessitating a retune.

You can can easily get yourself a body, affix a bit of mini-channeling to the side of each E string, and provide a mounting bracket that will let you slide a pickup back and forth over the strings.

Even better, it would allow you to compare one pickup situated under the strings with another situated over the strings at the exact same location.

I've done this on numerous occasions, like this time, when I was tesing a 9-string guitar pickup made in a 5-string bass shell. It was just a quick and dirty set up. But there is no reason you can't make a jig to test them this way full time.