A Rocking Pickup, But Not The Way You'd Want

[Forrest Greene]

I just had a pair of Seth Lovers put into an Epiphone Sheraton II. They sound very fine. I noticed something about the physical installation that puzzles me.

The bridge pickup sits solid & steady in place without moving. The neck pickup is very loose. It can easily rock back & forth, toward the neck / toward the bridge. It depresses maybe 1/8 inch at most.

This doesn’t seem right to me. But then, I’m not a guitar tech. What do you think?

 

['87 sherwood]

Re: A Rocking Pickup, But Not The Way You'd Want

Odds are your springs are too small on the neck pickup or the cavity of the bridge slot is very tight and the pickup barely fit. Sometimes I place soft foam behind the pickups to make them follow the string angle. You may try this to stabilize yours.

 

[blueman335]

Re: A Rocking Pickup, But Not The Way You'd Want

The bridge pickup sits solid & steady in place without moving. The neck pickup is very loose. It can easily rock back & forth, toward the neck / toward the bridge. It depresses maybe 1/8 inch at most.

And how high is the bridge PU in the PU ring? How high is the neck PU? The difference is spring tension; it's much higher in the bridge PU because of the angled necks that Gibson/Epi uses. Use longer/stiffer springs in the neck slot and/or a shorter PU ring.

 

[Forrest Greene]

Re: A Rocking Pickup, But Not The Way You'd Want

Odds are your springs are too small on the neck pickup or the cavity of the bridge slot is very tight and the pickup barely fit. Sometimes I place soft foam behind the pickups to make them follow the string angle. You may try this to stabilize yours.

Thanks, good idea with the foam.

 

[Forrest Greene]

Re: A Rocking Pickup, But Not The Way You'd Want

Turns out I was wrong, or at least early. The bridge pickup now moves too, although not quite as much as the neck.

The bridge p/up is very high, a fat 3/16" out of the frame. Neck is very low, barely 1/8", maybe less. As I recall, there were extra springs of different sizes in the package, so they may help out

 

[AlexR]

Re: A Rocking Pickup, But Not The Way You'd Want

The pickup cover tapers a bit.....so the higher it is set the less the rocking. Its perfectly normal for this to happen, and very easy to fix should this type of issue be of serious importance.

 

[Archer250]

Re: A Rocking Pickup, But Not The Way You'd Want

Normal.

Stuff foam under the pickups to mitigate this.

 

[Mincer]

Re: A Rocking Pickup, But Not The Way You'd Want

This happens depending on the spring tension and pickup height. It affects some guitars, but not others, so you are lucky, I guess! I always used some sort of foam. Anything will work; it just has to press on the pickup from both sides keeping it still.

 

[Forrest Greene]

Re: A Rocking Pickup, But Not The Way You'd Want

Thanks to all, you've been very helpful. Glad to hear this is normal! I've never noticed it before, so maybe the large difference in height between these two increased a normal condition.

All part of breaking in after a big change. Time to fiddle around a bit, it seems.

 

[Forrest Greene]

Re: A Rocking Pickup, But Not The Way You'd Want

This is becoming squirrelly. It now seems the pickups have been connected incorrectly.

I turned the guitar over to the techs for them to install a new wiring harness & new pickups. When it returned, it had the loose pickups we’ve been diagnosing. as well as a nasty buzzing hum.

Also, the control knobs layout had been flopped. That is, the volume and tone knobs nearest the center of the guitar, which formerly controlled the neck pickup, now controlled the bridge, and vice versa. I confirmed this by setting the controls to ten and to zero in turn, then tapping the pickup poles. The three-way switch, which formerly operated vertically, had rotated and now operated horizontally.

(Although I wondered how this happened, I didn’t really mind it. To me, this layout makes more sense, visually & operationally. It seems to interrupt my mental/musical flow less when used.)

In reading up on the subject, I found a story of some poor soul whose pickups had been installed backwards: neck pickup in the bridge cavity and vice versa. Maybe that explained the control layout change — it wasn’t the pots that were flopped, it was the pickups.

Before handing everything over to the techs, I had Sharpie-markered initials on each pot indicating its assignment: NV, NT, BV, BT. Just trying to be helpful. Not hard to figure out: place the harness with the amp plug at the correct end, arrange the pots into a nice easy parallelogram, match the existing controls.

Inside the f-hole, on the pot installed where the bridge volume control had been (the one I currently thought was mistakenly occupied by the neck volume pot) were the initials BV. On what should have been the neck tone pot was indeed written NT. I couldn’t see the other two, but it’s reasonable to infer they are also correctly placed.

But they’re controlling the incorrect pickups. So are the pickups mis-installed? I loosened the strings, undid the frame, gently lifted out the neck pickup to find on its back a sticker saying Neck.

So, the only conclusion left is that the pickups and the pots are in the right places but are connected wrong, causing the controls to affect the wrong pickups.

Have I figured this out correctly?

This is a 335-style instrument with no back hatch, so any work of this sort must be done through the lower f-hole. Now you know why they call them that. These are pickups with four-conductor cables connecting to a twenty-one sound J Page-style wiring harness, so the installer is attempting to deal with correctly connecting sixteen small wires in the cramped darkness inside an f-hole. It’s a famously awkward and tedious task.

Finally, the pickups are extremely loose in their frames. They can wobble back & forth, neck to bridge, as much as 1/8”. They are also at extremely different heights. The neck is very low, bridge very high, with a large difference between them. Do you suppose this could have been necessitated by trying, after wiring them, to get the appropriate sounds out of incorrectly-connected pickups?

As always, thanks for your thoughts.

 

['87 sherwood]

Re: A Rocking Pickup, But Not The Way You'd Want

A low neck pickup and high bridge pickup is normal. All guitars are setup that way. It balances the volumes.

If you want to get your controls back to normal flip two wires on the pickup selector. You may have to spin the switch around to get it when the bridge is in the down position. If your happy with the controls the way they are than I wouldn't worry about if.

 

[Mincer]

Re: A Rocking Pickup, But Not The Way You'd Want

The height thing is normal in 335-types. I am more alarmed that your controls are wired wrong, or your pickups are swapped...it is hard to know without fishing everything through the F hole and looking at it (dental floss helps fish the pots through, a flashlight and a dental mirror might help get a look at the wiring). As far as the hum, is it all the time? It should hum a little in single coil mode, but there could be something else wrong. If you do take it in to get fixed, don't go to the same place.

 

[Forrest Greene]

Re: A Rocking Pickup, But Not The Way You'd Want

A low neck pickup and high bridge pickup is normal. All guitars are setup that way. It balances the volumes.

If you want to get your controls back to normal flip two wires on the pickup selector. You may have to spin the switch around to get it when the bridge is in the down position. If your happy with the controls the way they are than I wouldn't worry about if.

You know, I'm beginning to like the three-way switch more & more as a cause, at least of the controls flop. I mentioned it had rotated from traveling vertically to horizontally when I got it back, whatever that might indicate. A nice simple explanation.

 

[Forrest Greene]

Re: A Rocking Pickup, But Not The Way You'd Want

The height thing is normal in 335-types. I am more alarmed that your controls are wired wrong, or your pickups are swapped...it is hard to know without fishing everything through the F hole and looking at it (dental floss helps fish the pots through, a flashlight and a dental mirror might help get a look at the wiring). As far as the hum, is it all the time? It should hum a little in single coil mode, but there could be something else wrong. If you do take it in to get fixed, don't go to the same place.

No, the pickups are in the right places, as are the pots. That leaves the wired connections, it seems. Or maybe a mistake w/the switch — which had rotated from previous — could be a cause. Now it needs someone who knows what they're looking at.

The hum is all the time. I'm hearing it from a Fender Super Champ XD amp, which has clear channel & a voice channel w/sixteen digital voices. I pu tone controls at TDC, turned Gain & Effects as off as possible. I fiddled w/combining the remaining controls on guitar & amp.

The most revealing was keeping the volume & tone controls in one place while simply dialing through the sixteen voices. They are set up in five or six groups, most of which progress from clean to overdriven. The volume & sound of the hum alters right along as it should w/the voices, indicating the guitar's the source.

I certainly considered trying someone else. These techs have done well several times, so I'm inclined to give them a bit more benefit of the doubt.

Also, if they made a mistake in one part of an otherwise well done, complex project like this, it seems maybe only fair to give them a chance to redo it properly.

That said, I do have bookmarked a long-standing family-owned music store in the next town over.