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You know those screws in your pickups? The ones that sit below each string?
This is a lesson I've been dying to write.
You know those screws in your pickups? The ones that sit below each string? Sometimes they're hex instead of flat-head, sometimes they're on each coil, sometimes they're only on one coil. The point is, they're found on mid- to high-end guitars. They're called adjustable poles.
In my 37 years of playing, I have yet to receive a guitar that had the pickups or the poles adjusted. I've come to the conclusion that it's simply because the vast majority of people don't know what they are or how to adjust them. So that's what we're covering today. I call this setting way of them up "hot."
Here's the deal: Your pickups have magnets in them, which creates a magnetic drag on your steel-core strings. You want sustain, right? You want the string to reverberate for a long time so you can let those notes sing! Well, let's start by not letting the magnet in the pickup pull and drag on the string and slow it down when it doesn't need to.
Step one is to figure out how far away to back the pickup off the strings using the mounting screws, which control position/angle. For the bridge pickup, which is typically where all your high tones and high gains come from, you want the bass side of that pickup backed off as far away from the strings as you can get it. For the neck pickup, it's the exact reverse situation. You get all your warmth from the low strings, so back the pickup away from just the high strings.
If you have a middle pickup, you want it to remain even