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pole adjustments on humbuckers do u just listen


smokestack

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Pretty much, yes.

But if you're fiddling about making micro adjustments to the pole screws of a typical bucker, you might be listening a long time to little avail ](*,) .

 

Pickup height should always be optimised by ear but it's the larger scale adjustments made by raising or dropping the whole pickup which make the difference with humbuckers. You only have adjustable poles on half the pickup anyway.

If you decide to just leave the screws evenly level with the can, you won't be missing much. That's the way many good pickups are supplied and used throughout their life.

If you decide, quite logically, to adjust the poles to follow the radius of the strings...again that's fine, but you might struggle to hear much difference in most applications.

By all means experiment a little, but don't obsess or worry about it. It's no big deal unless the screws are grossly mis-adjusted.

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Also a yes......actually pretty much what smoke said.

 

Truth be told I personally could never really hear any improvements by adjusting the pole pieces.....that's not saying that there not might be some. I've read where lots of folks say there is, just haven't worked for me. I remember just spending allot of time listening and turning them just to finally screw them back down to where they where originally...or close enough.

 

Now a days, if and when I feel like it, I'll just adjust the pickup height, and I just adjust them by ear......got no choice, can't see even with my glasses.

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The only pole pieces I've ever adjusted on an LP are the ones under the 1st string. Both mine seemed a little weak, even with aftermarket SD pickups. A turn and a half helped quite a bit on both.

 

I like a lower pup height. Too close to the strings and you start to overdrive the amp. Mine are set with the neck pickup all the way down and the bridge raised enought to balance the volume. I hear more wood in the tone with that setting.

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I read an article in some magazine about Les Pauls where they interviewed some factory tech from Gibson and he basically said that they should be set up to follow the radius of the strings, with the center pieces the highest and the outer pieces the lowest. He also recommended an alternating 45° angle slant on the screw slots, kinda like this:

 

/ / / as opposed to _ _ _ _ _ _ or | | | | | | ;

 

...however I'm of the opinion that this is nothing but voodoo, although it looks nice.

 

Starting with all pieces equal like this, one could then conceivably "balance" the output by making adjustnments to the individual heights I guess, but I've never seen the need to do so.

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