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Posted

If you have a guitar body made of 2 different woods, lets say a mahogany bodied guitar with a maple top, will bottom mounting the pickup on the mahogany vs. top mounting on the maple effect the tone? Or does all the tone signature come from the bridge and neck?

-Sven

Posted

i like to mount pick ups to the wood, not pick-up rings. to me it sounds a little fatter. some people can't hear a difference, i can. the wood makes up a significant part of the tone of a guitar, so this is why i like my p-ups to be connected to the wood.

Posted

I also find that solidly mounting the PU to the bottom of the pickup cavity gives a fatter, fuller, richer sound than on the mounting rings (though the placebo effect might account for a bit of it). If you consider that the pickup signal is a result of the string's movement through the pickup's fixed magnetic field, or the string movement relative to the pickup, it's also logical to say that the signal is a result of the pickup's movement relative to the guitar string since it's all... relative. So any vibration that the wood imparts to the pickup will be added to the pickup signal. And I think that solidly mounting the pickup to the back rather than having it suspended on 2 spring-loaded screws will allow it to pick up more wood vibration. If it's good enough for EVH... :D

Posted

Really, it shouldn't matter. The pickup itself isn't affected by the vibrations of the wood, and theoretically, you don't even have to have that sucker mounted in at all. What does matter is the strings and how they vibrate. But the pickup does not.

Posted

don't mean to disagree with you,reaper,but it does matter.the pickup picks up all the vibrations of the guitar,not just the strings.on my v i direct mounted the bridge pickup,but i noticed some serious muddiness(an overall lack of note seperation),so i hung them from metal mounting rings...BIG difference.i prefer the rings.

but if what you want is a warmer,less "technical" sound...especially without gain,direct mount them.

Posted

This can be settled with a simple test. Hold your strings and knock on your guitar. You will hear the knocking through your amp speakers because the pickup is picking up the wood vibration. Even if you remove all your strings, you will hear the knocking and it will most probably be louder if the pickups are direct mounted.

Whether direct mounting sounds better or not depends on a lot of factors like pickup type, type of wood, etc... etc.. etc...

Posted
don't mean to disagree with you,reaper,but it does matter.the pickup picks up all the vibrations of the guitar,not just the strings.on my v i direct mounted the bridge pickup,but i noticed some serious muddiness(an overall lack of note seperation),so i hung them from metal mounting rings...BIG difference.i prefer the rings.

but if what you want is a warmer,less "technical" sound...especially without gain,direct mount them.

That's something I've never experienced with any of my axes... but anyway.

Posted

Thanks,

interesting... Sounds like so experimenting is in order. When you bottom mount the PU, is it possible to have the PU mounting brackets and screws concealed? I suppose you could just put on a PU ring after the PU was mounted, or you could even make a ring from wood if you were delicate enough.

-Sven

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