Cut a pickup in half?

[alex1fly]

Not literally. But is there a way to have a pickup only sense a couple of strings? Could you cut the magnet (assuming it's a bat magnet and not polepiece magnets)? Or with something like a P Bass pickup, could you turn one half upside down to prevent it from picking up strings? I'm bouncing around ideas and am curious if anyone thinks something like this would work before I go hacking things up. Basically what I want to achieve is to have a separate output jack for a pickup that only "hears" the low E and A strings and send that signal to a second amplifier. Think it could be a fun way to mix up and layer different tones... Or a complete disaster, always possible.

Alex

[Clint 55]

A duckbucker with the black and white wired individually for 1 coil and red and green for the other coil. Don't need 2 pickups just 2 jacks.

[ErikH]

You would need two separate pickups to do this. One to each output jack. You could always get two pickups, remove the pole pieces from the strings you don’t want picked up and wire it up. That should accomplish what you want. No pole pieces will take away the focused magnetic field. It might work.

[ICTGoober]

You could get a hexaphonic pickup that has 6 individual outputs - one for each string. I think Bartolini sells one.

[Mincer]

Didn't the Ripley Kramers have pan pots for each string?

EDIT...yes

[beaubrummels]

Reminds me of Chet Atkins’ sideman who had a Gretsch with bass strings for E and A and the rest standard guitar strings.

[alex1fly]

You would need two separate pickups to do this. One to each output jack. You could always get two pickups, remove the pole pieces from the strings you don’t want picked up and wire it up. That should accomplish what you want. No pole pieces will take away the focused magnetic field. It might work.

Removing the pole pieces sure would be easy, and then just wire that pickup to its own output jack. Would this only work with single coils, or with humbuckers too? I'm not sure how much the slug coil picks up versus the polepiece coil.

[ErikH]

Removing the pole pieces sure would be easy, and then just wire that pickup to its own output jack. Would this only work with single coils, or with humbuckers too? I'm not sure how much the slug coil picks up versus the polepiece coil.

Would be about the same in a pickup wound with equal coils. Worth the experiment by removing the screw coils to see what happens. I’ve never tried it in over 30 years of playing. Lol.

[AlexR]

Probably a more balanced solution for amp setup and tones is to do a crossover. So the lows can either get separated out and sent to one amp only, or you set it up so that the input to one amp has a cutoff so it only gets the lows.
If you have the strings separated out then you would have the disconcerting sound of your tone maybe shifting between amps as you play along with runs up the fretboard.

And multi amp rigs where there is duplication always sounds so much better/fuller than the sound separated out.

[beaubrummels]

You wouldn't want to remove pole pieces from a typical Strat type single coil The wire is wrapped directly around the magnet poles and you stand a good change of destroying the pickup.

[Clint 55]

You could either make a hybrid double screw humbucker or order a shop floor custom one then easily unscrew the screws/poles.

[idsnowdog]

I know a few Jazz Bass pickups are using split coils. Doesn't Fralin have a split-coil single coil pickup? I also believe the Fender 12 with their split pickups have some different coil options.

[alex1fly]

As an experiment I unscrewed polepieces out of the high E and B strings of a soapbar pickup - the high E still was audible, though softer than the other strings. I am not so sure that pulling polepieces out is the way to do it. The next experiment may be sawing off a chunk of bar magnet underneath the pickup

[Clint 55]

Yeah if you remove the poles and the mag underneath that half, the effect might be pronounced enough to work.

[PicoRiveraTele]

Not literally. But is there a way to have a pickup only sense a couple of strings? Could you cut the magnet (assuming it's a bat magnet and not polepiece magnets)? Or with something like a P Bass pickup, could you turn one half upside down to prevent it from picking up strings? I'm bouncing around ideas and am curious if anyone thinks something like this would work before I go hacking things up. Basically what I want to achieve is to have a separate output jack for a pickup that only "hears" the low E and A strings and send that signal to a second amplifier. Think it could be a fun way to mix up and layer different tones... Or a complete disaster, always possible.

Alex

Easy to do with these: https://mango-grapefruit-nme7.squarespace.com/

If you have humbuckers, your best bet is to remove pole pieces, but the strings will still magnetize slightly, even without the pole pieces, so you will hear a little bit of "cross talk".