Cheap pickups

[Campy]

So what's with the cheap stock pickups, why do they usually sound so bad?

[Possum]

well....

Its probably cheap components, heavy potting, wound for most efficient use of magnet wire, cheap magnet wire, ceramic magnets. Brass baseplates on the cheapest ones.

[Spence]

It's a puzzler. Why do manufacturers handicap their products with cheap pickups? I don't recall them doing this before people like DiMarzio and Duncan were able to offer replacement pickups. Though I have to say that some old pickups were pretty cheap by the standards of Fender and Gibson. For example; Hofner, Framus etc.
I suspect that manufacturers realised that guitarists were spend-a-holics by nature, always looking to upgrade; Duncan and DiMarzio offering easily available 'upgrades' and so it made economic sense to put cheap pickups on the guitars. Word gets around quickly when it comes to sudden improvents in tone with a simple upgrade.

I can remember my first pickup up-grade coming in the form of a Van Zandt tele set. The resultant change in tone was astonishing compared to the
cheap Japanese garbage that adorned my tele. The difference wasn't immediately apparent, visually at least. However, a quick comparison revealed what Possum was saying. Cheap components, primarily but also key to the equation was that these pickups were underwound and done on an autowinder and laquer potted.

Even now you'll find people who rave about pickups like that. They are all certifiable or too stubborn to even try something better.

I have some old friends who smugly tell me that they can get great tone from stock pickups. They have never bought replacement pickups and sound terrible and don't realise it. They're good players but just sound so bad that it's cringeworthy.

[David Schwab]

It's a puzzler. Why do manufacturers handicap their products with cheap pickups?

I wonder if some of them just don't know any better. Let's take Fender. They probably think all their pickups are fine. If you are having pickups made over seas, what difference does it make between making them like you used to make them, and making those plastic strat bobbins with ceramic magnets? It can't be that much cheaper!

I had a customer bring me a Yamaha electric guitar... it was an SG-200, the cheaper version of the SG-2000 (like Santana and Bill Nelson used). He was complaining that the humbucking pickups were thin sounding and noisy. Well I was surprised to discover that they were wired up wrong! Each humbucker had it's coils wired in phase, which of course makes it sound out of phase. I would think a big company like Yamaha would know better! But who knows who they farm out their pickup manufacturing to?

I don't recall them doing this before people like DiMarzio and Duncan were able to offer replacement pickups. Though I have to say that some old pickups were pretty cheap by the standards of Fender and Gibson.

I was just saying this to my son today. I had half a P-bass pickup in my hand, and the date code on it says 1974. I bought this pickup new from Manny's Music in NYC, to install in my '72 Ric 4001 bass. Since then I had rewound the pickup to low impedance. I was saying to my son "that's too bad, because it would be worth something now... but at the time it was just an old Fender bass pickup... and people stopped wanting them when Dimarzio's came out!" And there's nothing special about old Fender pickups, as far as how they are made. It's not a complicated pickup. But apparently that construction has its own tone, and the newer plastic bobbins sound different... like on the strats. I'm sure some of that is because the magnets no longer touch the coil wire.

Another funny one is PRS. They used to use Duncans, and then they went to their own pickups. I'm sure this was to cut costs, but I saw a video with Paul Smith himself saying they started making their own pickups because they couldn't get what they wanted elsewhere. I've worked on some PRS guitars, and I thought they were the worst sounding pickups I ever heard! The FHS bridge pickup just barked.... had no tone at all, and the vintage bass neck pickup sounded like someone had a carpet over the amp! The owner had me replace them for Duncan Alnico II Pros. It totally changed the guitar.. it sounded like a Gibson after that. Got a great Mick Ronson tone. Maybe PRS has changed them since then, but they were really awful sounding pickups. That and the fact that the neck had a back-bow with no truss rod tension on it made me question why people think these guitars are so good? I wasn't impressed at all.

The bass world is a little different, in as most high end basses use Barts or EMG's, or they make their own. But once again, I have an Ibanez SR-855 SoundGear 5 string that I bought when the SoundGears first came out (1987 I think). The two "Regulated Lo-Z" pickups sounded good, but they were noisy. It turns out that they used a dummy coil setup... under each pickup (which looked like a Jazz bass unit... sealed in epoxy, and active) was a humbucker size bobbin with no poles or magnets. It attached to a wire that went back into the pickup. Not a bad idea, but it just didn't work well. After that they went to Bartolini pickups, and then back to their own pickups.

You would think with the importance of pickups on an electric guitar or bass, that makers would want the best sounding units!

I guess either they don't know any better, don't care, or have to meet a bottom line as far as budget.

[OFM]

You're right, David...

I was wondering about cost-cutting and thinking that materials for making great pickups are not as expensive as you might think, but when you're talking about 4000 guitars per day, every cent is worth saving in their cost function.

My friends and some customers, give me their cheap pickups for studying them (i appreciate a lot their generosity) and i think i've learned a lot in that process.

Some of the things i've observed:

1) BASEPLATES: They don't use Nickel baseplates, instead, they use cheap brass baseplates. These ones tend to disturb the sound due to Eddy currents (i don't know exactly what happens). The screws that hold the bobbins to the baseplate are also very important. Cheap pickup use standard steel screws, while better ones use brass-made screws. IMPORTANT NOTE: "Demarzio" uses brass plates and steel screws in their pickups, and the very underrated Ibanez V8 has nickel base and brass screws (i've seen some cheapo Duncan Designed with nickel base too).

2) MAGNETS: They're the heart of the pickup. In a cheapo pickup you should expect a cheap magnet with no special care of magnet circuit design. If you read them with a gaussmeter, they 'll give (or not) irregular reads or uneven charges through the magnets. If you're lucky, you can find well designed magnets (ex: I have some chinese yamaha pickups made in 1994. I crapped 4 of them and found a very cool ceramic magnet in one of them... it was just luck).

3) WIRE: Same as magnets. For me is very difficult to tell if a wire is made of poor copper alloys with poor coating or not. When my customers ask for a "Pickup pimp" I prefer to use my own wire, just to be sure.

4) CONSTRUCTION: In a cheap pickup you may expect a plastic bar to hold the bobbin and sometimes a double-slug design to lower costs in manufacturing pickups with metal spacers. You will find in 99% of these pickups very cheap cables. Sometimes the pickups are not correctly wax potted or not potted at all. The tape they use is a plastic film tape too (no paper-tape).

That's what i found... Maybe it can help to understand the cheap pickup world...

Greetings,
Ben

[ken]

Cheap pickups are usually made simply to reach a price point, and tone be damned.

In Fender's case, cast plastic bobbins means that they don't have to pay for Forbon, and for someone to cut the Forbon out, another person to assemble it, and a third to dunk the bobbin in lacquer, not to mention a winder operator and all the others who worked in that department. Now all the real pickup maker (Mighty Mite?) has to do is take the bobbin out of a box and wind it. Then, the steel poles are pushed into the bobbin, ceramic mags are glued to the bottom of the coil and leads are wired on.

MBA's think in cost savings of pennies or less a part, spread over thousands of parts. To them, wire is wire, and cost/benefit analyses probably told them that cheap pickups would help them reach their point.

Look at it this way...

A mexiStrat costs $400 at the store. It probably cost the store $189.00 or less depending on model, in quantities of 10 or less of one item. That $189
pays everybody's salaries, overhead, etc. so any possible cost saving is highly valued. For Fender, it's simple economics, for us, it's an opportunity.

Ken

[Possum]

PRS

PRS---I don't "get" these guys either. Their guitars cost and arm and a leg but they sound horrible. A friend had one with P90s in it and they are the worst I've ever heard, screeeeechy, toneless crap. I really don't see the difference between a PRS and a Korean Schecter, they are so solidly built and gunked up with too much finish they are pretty toneless. Another friend had an earlier one thats worth alot of money, he got rid of it with the same complaints, no tone....

Some of the real early cheesy cheapo pickups are kind of ingenius some of them. I have a pair that came out of a 70's plywood LP copy with bolt on neck,no identifying marks anywhere. The pickups look like buckers but are single coils and a cool design actually, just needed some better winding and they'd be cool, actually sounded pretty cool as they are. But most of the early 60s pickups were awful. I had a "Pleasant" guitar made in Japan, my first electric guitar, bowed neck, pickups were weak and tinny and I just didn't know any better. I couldn't understand how these good players with strats were getting incredible tone, so I tried all kinds of fuzz tones and crap and never got good tone, til I got a real guitar. They definitely are some boring ass pickups being put on guitars, I had an American Standard long before I made pickups that just would not make anything but a boring sterile tone. It was the pickups for sure. Fender's Custom Shop pickups suffer from the same boring sterile tones, I don't understand why either, they use the right wire, good magnets but they suck. I suspect they are using computer programmed winders in the Custom Shop, those pictures of Abagail Ybarra hand winding pickups in the shop just gotta be P.R. bullshit. She must be in her 70s by now and they are telling us she winds alot of pickups every day, handguided? Then how come her arm isn't in a cast from intense tendonitis, is what I want to know :-) What she really does is SIGNS a bunch of pickups everyday.....

[RickyD]

Back in the late 60's in my crowd, it was a "known fact" that Fender's had cheap little pickups that were no good. We referred to the guitars as "Trashocasters". Pretty clever.

[Sweetfinger]

Momma always said I was a little contrary....

I've always said- Tone is where you find it! I don't care where a pickup came from, or what name is on it, or what it is made of, or how much it costs. If it sounds good, it IS good!

Sound....well, there's the subjective part. The sounds that we as players try to emulate is generally the sounds that we think are great and are used to hearing on records and live.
If Leo Fender for some reason had decided to make his pickups with thick molded plastic bobbins instead of flatwork, and used steel poles, everyone here would be piping up with their opinions on WHICH plastic was the best for the "authentic" tone, the EXACT composition of the steel rod stock, how you just can't get that steel anymore, and how you HATE those guys who don't want to spend the money on molds because their pickups that are wound right on the magnets sound shrill and full of unpleasant high end.

I don't think there are any "bad" pickups, just pickups that are not well suited for a certain application. I've stated before a coupla times- I really LIKE the Mexican fender steel pole pickups with the two ceramic mags glued to the bottom. I think they are fabulous sounding pickups. Of course they don't sound like a set of original 50's pups, and they're not really meant to.

I also find it a bit weird that you're all bashing "cheap" pickups, while laboriously and meticulously trying to recreate some of the cheapest pickups ever made. Leo Fender was a THRIFTY MF! If he could have made the Strat pickup any cheaper, he would have! Wire, and 11 parts including eyelets and a cover versus how many for the Gibson equivalent? A P-90 has about 17 pcs. An old DeArmond has over 20, but rarely do we hear players lambasting the old cheapskate Leo for not making his pickups with adjustable polepieces.

Also, please stop referring to Japan made pickups as "crap". Japanese pickups are made to sound just exactly the way the Japanese want them to. I'm being general here, but from the copy era to the present, the Japanese have preferred a very clean, bland, even sound out of their pickups- almost across the board on all brands and models. They also have vending machines for used panties and eat octopus chips. It is sufficient to say that the Japanese ear is tuned a little differently than our own- it doesn't mean their pickups are junk. I find it amusing that my favorite Japanese pickups are from the time period when the WERE making their pups as cheap as possible. Those early to mid 60's funky pups wound on super thin nylon bobbins with several blocks of ceramic magnets crammed up inside have a sound all their own, that NO Fender or Gibson will EVER get.

I'm not bagging on "boutique" pickups. I think it is a wonderful thing for a customer to be able to call up one of you guys and say "I'd like a bridge and neck Charlie Christian set with white pearloid tops", or "I've got a dark sounding rosewood board Strat, and I like the sound of a modern set of nickel 10's combined with a reverse magnet stagger, and could you make the neck pickup cleaner sounding than usual?" and have those made just for them. I just think that it is a bit self delusional to label any mass produced or odd sounding pickup as crap, junk, cheap, etc.

And for your informational tidbit of the day, now that I've rambled and ranted a bit- For the holidays, I bought a carton(4 guitars) of the most inexpensive electric guitars I could find (Baltimore, which is Johnson's budget line)- intending to sell a couple as beginner instruments, and part out the others. They all needed a lot of work to get playing good, which is typical, but I was a little surprised to see THREE different pickup types scattered in the four guitars, one guitar had a mix! Even the pickguards wouldn't interchange. The first pickup type was a molded strat-style pickup with a standard type cover, and a ceramic bar magnet that is inserted flush into the bottom of the bobbin, with shorter steel poles. The second type had the same type cover, but the ceramic mag was larger and glued to the bottom of the bobbin with full length steel poles. The third type had a smaller ceramic magnet that was flush mounted into a plastic bobbin, with short steel poles, but the bobbin was more like the old Korean single coils, as the bobbin/magnet/pole assembly was glued up inside the cover, and a separate plastic baseplate was snap-fitted to the cover assembly. The funny part- The second type, which was the most standard in terms of construction, had a very dark sound with no sparkle at all, lots of lower mids(the sound that is almost universally derided by connoseiurs), the first type sounded like many inexpensive SC's: bright and overwound a bit- um.... serviceable. The gem was the third type which is NOT at all constructed like any traditional SC. Slightly overwound, complex, punchy, and growly. I am going to put a set of these in my Am Strat. Seriously! The downer: the pole spacing isn't standard, so you can't transplant the guts to a different cover, the pickguard routs are different, and the covers have a textured face which advertises to the world that they AIN'T FENDER.

Remember: today's junk is tomorrow's collectible. I guarantee you that someday, not tomorrow perhaps, but the day will come when some guy is showing his buddy his most prized vintage guitar: A Johnson strat! Pre -EMG designed pickups dude! and made of real wood!!, on Earth!!! OOOOHHHHH!!!! Its full of lead solder. Just the permits to have it cost 18 thousand galactic credits!

[Spence]

Maybe Fender's pickups were cheap. Didn't sound bad though. So the point is that cheap pickups don't have to sound bad.
I sell quite a lot of my pickups to Japanese customers who clearly are not happy with the generic Japanese sound. The big problem they have is one you have already outlined. American designed pickups just don't fit into the metric equation. i have had to alter every Japanese or korean guitar I've owned to make US stuff fit. it's enough to put poeple off doing it.
BTW, the Fender humbucker had adjustable CuNiFe poles and was considerably more expensive to make than a Gibson humbucker.

[soundmasterg]

OFM, you mentioned that some pickups aren't correctly wax potted or not potted at all as being a problem with cheap pickups. Many of the original pickups that the boutique clones try to emulate today were not potted like the original Fender Tele and Broadcaster pickups, Gibson P90's, etc. If you do pot them, you get rid of the feedback problem, but it changes the sound too and makes the pickups less open and responsive.

A lot of the cheapo pickups out there are trying to emulate a great pickup from yesteryear, like a Strat pickup for instance. If you use different parts for it, then it will sound different than the original. Thats not necessarily good or bad, but when someone that IS different is sold as sounding just like the original and it doesn't due to construction, then thats a problem. If something is designed from the ground up to use cheap components and it sounds good, then thats fine. If something was designed with more expensive parts like nickel silver baseplates and some modern manufacturer subs in a brass baseplate instead, it chokes the tone and doesn't sound as good as the original design. As long as people don't try to pass this stuff off as original, then it doesn't bother me.

[GlennW]

I had a MIJ Bradley fake Strat for a while - the pickups (alnico rods) sounded better than the Fender Strat pickups I had. Seems like they were between 4-5K, don't know about wire size.

[David Schwab]

I've always said- Tone is where you find it! I don't care where a pickup came from, or what name is on it, or what it is made of, or how much it costs. If it sounds good, it IS good!

That's what I was saying about amp modelers... if you get a sound you like, who cares where it comes from!

Sound....well, there's the subjective part. The sounds that we as players try to emulate is generally the sounds that we think are great and are used to hearing on records and live.

That's true. If we grew up hearing solid state amps with no distortion, and that was the classic tone of some form of popular music, that's what we would be using... I shutter to think about it though!

I also find it a bit weird that you're all bashing "cheap" pickups, while laboriously and meticulously trying to recreate some of the cheapest pickups ever made. Leo Fender was a THRIFTY MF! If he could have made the Strat pickup any cheaper, he would have! Wire, and 11 parts including eyelets and a cover versus how many for the Gibson equivalent? A P-90 has about 17 pcs. An old DeArmond has over 20, but rarely do we hear players lambasting the old cheapskate Leo for not making his pickups with adjustable polepieces.

That's what I was saying in my post. There's nothing special about Fender pickups, as far as how they are made. But if people don't like the pickups in the cheap Fenders it's just because they sound different...

Leo really liked to find the simplest and cheapest way to do things. This is reflected in his guitars in general. Compare a Broadcaster to a Les Paul. Gibson made their solid body like an arch top... set neck, carved top, bound body and neck, and a rosewood or ebony fingerboard.

Leo did a slab body with the edges rounded over, a single piece bolt on neck with no separate fingerboard, and he picked woods that were easy to finish and not very expensive (like alder). And look at the original tele bridge... three saddles made from all thread! That should keep the cost down!

And his guitar didn't sound like everyone else's guitars. If the sound hadn't caught on, history would be very different. But he happened to come up with a good sounding instrument that was fairly easy to make, and is now one of the most popular guitars out there.

So rather than approach making a guitar from a traditional background, he did it from a machinist's background.

[pun15her]

...Cheap pickup use standard steel screws, while better ones use brass-made screws.

How does this effect the sound?

[Mark Hammer]

1) I'm with Sweetfinger: pickups sound the way they sound, and if you don't like a given pickup then move on to another one. Having a specific tone is not the same thing as working well or providing interesting tone. I'm sure there are PUs out there that have THAT magic tone but are useless as all get-out because no one saw fit to pot them properly. What many of us view as some sort of benchmark for PU construction is essentially something we equate with a specific tone of specific players. I feel quite confident in saying that many of the most revered African players would probably sound like crap if they played through the PUs that could make them sound like Joe Bonamassa, and vice versa. Match the PU to the task, and be tolerant of differences.

2) A guitar is made of many parts and broad categories of parts, each of which requires a special type of expertise to make good choices in. There are guitars out there where the finish is exquisite but the wood choice or neck profile or electronics or body balance is the pits. And, there are guitars out there that look like roadkill but sound absolutely amazing. Same way you can have an amp that has everything except for the right speakers or a sensible layout of controls. That someone has the desire to produce inexpensive guitars and has the capacity to manage inventory and staff, and produce and distribute large volumes of product that make a wee bit of profit per unit, is separate from knowing what makes up a great instrument for the money. No one has to pass a knowledge test before they launch into the manufacturing world. And kids that buy their first guitar at Radio Shack also do not have to pass a knowledge test before buying.

3) I will simply echo everyone's comments so far with regard to how manufacturers think about achieving a given pricepoint and what sorts of corners can be cut.

4) Finally, in view of the plethora of 3rd party pickups out there, you have to wonder how much the "quality" of stock pickups on budget instruments is predicated on the assumption that the buyer will treat the stock PUs as simply a temporary measure until the "real pickups" get installed.