Dumb DCR Measurement Question:

[Xeromus]

Can you measure a pickup's DCR while it is installed, or do you have to remove it from the circuit?

[Blille]

Re: Dumb DCR Measurement Question:

You can. Use a patch cable, have the controls wide open and the difference is actually pretty small.

[ArtieToo]

Re: Dumb DCR Measurement Question:

^ What he said. The tone control doesn't matter. Just dime the volume pot. If you want to get even closer, do the math. Now that almost all calculators have the "reciprocal" key, it's dirt simple.

[shadowfire90]

Re: Dumb DCR Measurement Question:

I was going to reply to this yesterday but I was still waiting to get my account activated.

Alright so the easy answer is - don't , it's not accurate.

The long answer
Alright so I have a BC Rich Warlock and it has the stock pickups in it. The uncovered BDSM pickups. Outside the guitar they measure in at 19k of DC Resistance each approximately and they have around 10 Henries of inductance. However.. if I measure them in the guitar with the electronics still in and using a 5ft cable I'll get 17.7k DC resistance. That being said a lot of people will get the wrong impression about a pickup measuring that way and can/will email either the pickup maker or a seller on a third party website and complain. I thought the pickup was hotter.

The only real world application for this method is when you finish wiring up a guitar when it's late at night so I can't turn an amp on and want to make sure everything works. Say a JB will go from roughly 16k to 8k when i split the coils. I had a friend bring in a Schecter KM7 one of those single volume ones and the push pull was actually backwards. The wiring was correct Schecter did it right, everything looked fine but when I de-soldered the push pull the connections were opposite inside the push pull. I thought I'd seen it all. I used that multimeter trick to solve that issue.

The good news is unless it's really obscure pickups or nothing but a B and N stamped on the bases of them that you'll get just about any multimeter reading on google. I've actually been recording everything that comes in and out. Honestly though DC Resistance doesn't tell us enough. It's on just about every multimeter even cheap ones. Inductance matters a lot more. There is a great blog on it on here. 16k with a 5H pickup versus 16k with a 10H pickup assuming the same magnets and all will be night and day.