Pickup Height Adjustment

The height of your pickups is crucial to your tone. I find that the better the quality of the pickup the more difference the height makes to the tone. Correct Pickup Height Adjustment is an essential part of your sound.

There is, of course, no correct distance from the string so the measurements I’ll give you are a guide and a great place to start. I recommend you set your MrGlyn’s Pickups to these heights when you install them but feel free to tweak them to your own taste after.

The principle of Pickup Height Adjustment is, the closer to the strings the pickups are the louder and more dynamic the sound, further away is more compressed and quieter.

But there’s another factor. Pickups work by magnetism, if a pickup is too close to the string the magnet will attract the string and cause a strange wobbly sound called a wolf tone. This is much more pronounced with single coil pickups and on the bass strings on the higher frets. These ‘wolf tones’ are sometimes called ‘Stratitis’.

The pickup height is measured from the top of the pickup pole (or cover) to the underside of the string when fretting the highest fret.