Josh

[JBP]

I’ve had a Hamer MIk Echotone Custom for many years.  I decided to upgrade the Duncan Designed Pickups with Seth Lovers, and it sounds great, though the neck humbucker pole pieces on the high and low e strings are barely inside the pole piece.  It sounds great though the neck pickup is a little lacking in the low frequencies. Have others had trouble matching up the pole pieces when swapping out pickups in this guitar?  Any advice other than to raise the low e pole piece or eq the low end on my amp?  Thanks 

[hamerhead]

I had a MIK Echotone for quite a while and the stock pickups loved my Vibrolux. I swapped them(??) for some GFS Gretsch-like things that sounded fantastic. The tuners were the weak point, I thought. Really great, under-rated guitars.

Does your guitar sound OK? Does the position of the polepieces affect the sound, or is it just a visual thing? Some people reeeeally hate that and I get it, but if it sounds good, it IS good. Don't let it bug you.

 

[JGravelin]

The magnetic sensing field put forth by a humbucking pickup extends far enough beyond the actual pole pieces that it's pretty forgiving in regards to string spacing and alignment in most cases. That said, there IS a point where if it's too "off", the amplitude of the strings vibration will not be sensed and represented through the amplifier in the same way as the other strings.

With 49.2mm PAF spaced humbuckers on Gibson-spec'd guitars, the strings typically pass nearly dead-center over the neck pickup poles. This makes me wonder if the bridge saddle slots might be a narrower metric measurement?

 

 

[JBP]

Thanks for the answers.  I moved the pole piece over the low e neck humbucker slightly with a flat head screwdriver and it did the trick!