Does Unplugged Tone Correlate To Amplified Tone?

[j. pierce]

I'll be working on making a pickup for one of my new guitar builds soon. (The SG type thing)

It's strung up, and unplugged, the tone if a bit bright, with more pronounced upper mids.

I'm wondering if this is something that I should plan around when making the pickup - it seems the guitars I've built that sound darker when played unplugged sound darker amplified, and the same holds true for brighter guitars. But those dark an bright guitars I'm drawing examples from also seem to have pickups that are generally perceived as having those tonal characteristics as well; so I don't know if it's a case of the unplugged tone carrying over to the amplified tone, or the pickups creating these tones. It seems to me that the sound generated by strumming an unplugged electric is coming from a different mechanism than electric tone - I don't know if one has any bearing on the other.

Any thoughts?

Obviously the answer is to swap some of the same pickups between different guitars and see how things relate, but none of them are made for the same form factor pickups, which makes this difficult.

[WezV]

obviously strings, woods, construction and hardware are the main components of your unplugged sound. Pickups, fx and amps are the main components of your plugged in sound - but the rest still has an effect... you only have to swap a pickup through a few guitars to see the efect wood, construction and hardware is having

Some pickups, fx and amps can be transparent enough to really let the woods, construction and hardware shine through but a lot of them try to take over with their own thing (especially in a market where so many products are aimed at achieveing a particular sound). I prefer products that are honest about what they will and wont work with... and thankfully a lot of pickup makers are

i would suggest looking through pickup manufacturers websites, taking note of the magnets, output and wire they are using and what market they seem to be aiming it at and listening to any sound samples you can which will hopefully tell you the guitar it was played in.. then work from there

i would recommend the bareknuckle pickups forum in particular as it has a lot of user submitted clips which means you get to hear the same pickups in a wide range of different guitars and there is a lot of discussion on the sound and construction differences in the pickup section as well

Pickup descriptions:

http://www.bareknucklepickups.co.uk/products.html

Clips:

http://bareknucklepickups.co.uk/forum/index.php?board=5.0