pickups for wider string spacing

[Mememe]

I'm building a baritone, 30" scale 6-string, with bass-VI or similar strings. I'm leery of such heavy strings with the prevailing 10.5mm string spacing, and want to go with an 11.2mm spacing, or larger (but smaller than bass guitar string spacing). How will this affect the responsiveness of the pickups in an H-H configuration? Would installing a 7-string pickup at an angle work? Or, more generally, how sensitive are pickups to the alignment of the strings to the pickup poles? Thanks!

[Bizman62]

There's at least two common pickup widths available: The 50mm G(ibson) and the 53mm F(ender) measured from E to e. So definitely ask for at least the F spacing! If the poles don't match, there's blade versions as well. And of course custom made ones if your budget allows.

Once I had a talk with Veijo the Pickup Guru about the size of the magnetic field of a pickup pole piece. According to him, if the string is above the top of the pole it should be good. After all the strings vibrate quite widely! Logically thinking the field doesn't go much farther than halfways to the next pole, otherwise the inner strings would be boosted by the adjacent poles from both sides while the outermost ones were helped only from one side. Following that logic the innermost strings would be boosted even more, yet as we know the inner poles are often elevated for extra boost which seems to confirm that the effective magnetic field isn't too large to interfere with the next one.

Tele bridge pickups may have an even wider spacing like the Little 59™ ST59-1B with the spacing of 11.3mm. The Strat version is narrower. Obviously you shouldn't use them slanted for maximum width!