Pickup Height DOESN’T change TONE very much!

Im starting to think your viewers are forgetting that you are mainly about recording and mixing music. Your not just a channel talking about playing a guitar in your room through an amp. So end of day we should all remember glenn is teaching us alot of ins and outs of recording audio, mixed with some reviews and comedy , but the main idea is the studio work. Cheers glenn i figured some people needed a reminder.

Awesome Video

try a real amp at reasonable gain. you can play a plastic kazoo into a modeler and get the same tone (i kid, i kid but not completely)

Finger style playing sucks if the pickups are too low.

There's something I've been wondering for years and that's whether or not there are simply also different shapes in the magnetic fields, considering there are not only different magnets but also poles and blades and so on.

I play 5-6 string basses with thicker strings and run my action as close to the neck as possible without fret buzz, and usually have to lower the hight of my pickups. Never noticed a difference other than the strings werent slamming against them anymore lol

It changes the sound a bit and therefore the feel is different and guitarists play by feel.

I don't know which of my 2 comments will appear first here so here i will describe my "Stellarcaster" and all its features . I started with a "Starcaster"-"Strat electric guitar" By: Fender (said that right on the head stock) I stripped it totally paint electronics and all down to bare wood and empty of anything at all then extended the control cavity for more controls and bigger Pick ups... the paint is a stars and Planets, Space theme custom paint job on the body and headstock. with a 2K semi gloss clear coat finish. then I made a custom extended Brushed Stainless Steel Pick guard that I loaded with the added electronics. Including 3 quad rail/coil humbuckers wired in coil pairs with 5 wires. one braded ground and also the start and finish of each pair of adjacent coils. each with their own P/P vol. for coil splitting and reg. Tone pots all are 500K audio taper type the bridge tone pot also a P/P to activate the bridge and neck P/Ups together regardless of any other controls. It's wired like a 50's Les Paul with coil splits and I used .047 orange drop tone caps for a brighter sound and the way i did the coil split for which coils are closest to the bridge when in circuit maks it brighter as well so the guitasr sounds like the Strat it started as but with nore power and the ability to use all 3 Pick ups all together. even though I installed a Fender 5-way blade style selector switch which functions as it should but through my unique wiring and the use of that P/P tone pot get added functionality and added tonal options as well. and yes the wiring was a challenge with all the solder connections and the wire routing...since the normal/traditional wire used for most electric guitars is really to big for the minute electrical current produced by the P/Ups to begin with. usually in mere millivolts. I stripped out a salvaged Computer VGA cable for all the smaller stranded wired within it that have their own insulation and are adequate for the minute voltage they will carry. saving space in the control cavity and easing wire routing as well manipulating wire that small takes some skill and the use of tools to place it exactly where you need it to be and hold it to solder it in place. .. takes time but the end result works as designed after working the bugs out of the wiring diagram.. but now it all works as intended. and sounds great. I found that when the pots and switches are mounted to the Stainless Steel Pick guard that they are essentially grounded to it through their cases, eliminating the need for any ground wiring but to the Bridge itself to any grounded component in the entire circuit. and the Pick guard acts as the shielding as well.. so none is needed inside the control cavity either.. It all works well for such an extreme and unique guitar wiring scheme. a black and dark blue background for the stars and planets paint scheme, the Brushed Stainless Steel Pick Guard, loaded with those bug powerful quad rail Pick ups and the Tele style Chrome knobe adorning the 6 pots and a chrome tip on the 5-way selector switch and I added a Kill Button too, just for more fun....remember the paint is on both the body and the head stock envision it for yourself... cool looking spacy guitar that looks feels and sounds great. My "Stellarcaster" really rocks the Cosmos.... LOL ... Wanna Play??? yes I am very [proud of myy very first ever guitar project that is thr beginning of the collection I will actually build with my own 2 hands , one at a time as I please and the way i want them to be.

I like both of your channels and watch them often. I learned that the tone doesn't change with Pick up height, but only the volume changes with the distance of the Pick up from the strings , AKA closer is louder. that's about it... I learned that with a cheap Sears Silvertone/Danelectro with 2 'Lipstick' Pick ups. through a very high power Kenwood 6420 custom modified Receiver amplifier (2850 Watts total output) through all 10 channels/5stereo pairs.. with may more built in featured to many to list here ... easy to tell the difference with that much power available to crank it up only when I adjusted the amp settings to high, mid and Bass were there any differences in tones anyway. pick up height had no effect on tone, only on volume or signal strength from the pick ups them selves... Basic Physics or hydrodynamics/audio dynamics. LOL and that was when i was about 12 yrs old or about 53 years ago as I'm now 65 and have just recently completed my very first guitar upgrade/mod/ build you may have read about in my other comments on some of your videos before this.

Wouldn't it be necessary to adjust the input gain so that the input signal always has the same level? This should have a strong influence on the “amp” and the compression. And the changed final volume also has an effect on what you hear (Fletcher Munson).

My pickups got louder when I put them closer to the strings. I had them too far away though.

Lefty Lowers pickup
Righty Raises pickup

That's my way of remembering

Pick up hight sounds dirty when it's high and a little cleaner when it's low. Not much difference

Wish there was someone like you who played non-metal. Metal music sounds all the same to me - And that's including amps and guitars and effects. I mean there's some differences but it doesn't seem to be significant that is whether something is a little more distorted or not or brighter or darker It's always that same overly distorted terrible buzz saw kind of music. I don't know why people like it.

pickup height does matter. The rule is simple. If your a soloist, have your pick up low and boost the gain as high pick ups will magnetize your string and cause it to lose its sustain. If your a rhythm guitarist who likes to chunk heavy chords , you want your pickups high.

The cleaner the tone the more pickups and pickup height matter. High gain masks a lot.

Nonsense!

Without changing the gain on the amp to match the input on the audio interface this A/B test isn't really an A/B test, since the gain stages on the amp will act completly different with such different output from the pickups.
Within a normal height range, the pickup height is more about the tonal balance and how "hot" you want your output from your guitar into the amps gain stage.

Good work as very helpful information to have when recording appreciate it. Your hard work pays off in the long run Glen.

Someone help. My Gibson SG sustain kinda sucks. Its my favorite guitar and sounds amazing but the sustain pretty much sucks. My Ibanez RG621 sustains forever. But the SG fizzles out after about 2 seconds. I noticed when I decided to learn some Santana. Its not like a deal breaker for the guitar but its the guitar I play most and am hoping I cam do something to improve the sustain. Anyone please give some advice.

Unless your deaf you can tell the difference

Cheap pickups being muddy? Nooooooo.....

Would have been interesting to not just see the waveforms, but also the spectrograms.

Pickup height evens out your volume from string to string and correct distance is also important. It most definitely does do that. Very important for live performance

Great video, but i didn't understand nothing.Translate it please.

It doesn't change tone it changes sustain and headroom. Everybody know dhat!

"tone"? No. Volume, response, "feel", noise floor? Yes.

Curious to know what you guys think of adjusting pole pieces on passive humbuckers or should they just be left at factory settings, I never see anyone talk about that?

Really dig your content, and have tried a lot of your suggestions and have received some knowledge about recording at home.
Do you have any thoughts on hotrodded pick ups? I have rail pick ups with the ceramic and alicon(can't spell) buffered on top and bottom, and capped. They are dark, and forced to play bright. Any thoughts??🤘👍

It makes the strings stick to the pickups.

Pickup Height changes the tone more than changing ur guitar to hollow body ROFL! Tonew*d my A*

With my jazzmaster I sometimes don't even hear that I'm not changing between neck, middle and bridge when I'm actually on the rythm circuit the whole time (pickup switch disabled and only the neck pickup). I automatically and without noticing compensate for brightness by picking closer to the bridge. For reference, the jazzmaster normally goes from muffled bass noises to earshattering icepick shrilness. I actually played a 3 hour gig this way, wondering all the while why I couldn't cut through the mix lol

Nothing seems to change the tone, I’m fuckin done not even going to tune my guitar in the future

Hate to say it but hunting for tone changes through extreme distortion seems to me the wrong way to go about it. Listen clean, when you're testing something remove as many variables as you can. Record DI straight into the box, no amp sim, nothing. Science mutheflippers!

"it doesnt change tone, it only changes articulation..." errrr? how is articulation not a part of tone? your treating it as different things. You could have gone mor into the different pickup models and constructions.... maybe worked with one of those magnetic field visualiser cards? the way a magnetic field propagates and is distributed is the factor. a humbucker with high windings but with the magnets tucked away far from the strings only slightly enlarging the fields indirectly through pole pieces of course doesnt have as significant a change in output as compared to a single coile where the pole piece IS the magnet right at the string. so the small change of height has a much higher impact. the mag field is much denser at the poles then a perpendicula field of the bar magnet. the drop off per mm of Gauss/flux is the factor here. maybe you could have got a gauss meter for that. makes sense?... i tried....nonativespeaker.

wtf? swiss army knife?

It changes the interaction of your setup without having to use boost pedals or e.q. and have the strings ring out evenly fairly dramatically. If you added up all the things that people say don't matter very much, it ends up making a huge difference.

Malcom Young used a semi-hollow, I call AC/DC Heavy Metal. Maybe not Thrash Metal. Dave Grohl also uses semi-hollow.

I didn't hear much diff on the Yamaha

What you hear live and what can be picked up by recording equipment are 2 different things.

Ppl are mistaking output for tone jus cause you have more output doesn’t mean the tone of the guitar has changed

Hey, if I pickups sound the same how about a shoot out with Chibson guitar pickups vs Seymour Duncan? I think there will be a bit of a difference.

I like the lower pick up sound. The low end is tighter giving you more control over it in the signal/digital chain. Of course I immediately lowered my bridgr pick up on my SG and with the high gain on my processor, I hear the individual chops much better. Lol its easier to hear my mistakes.

As Richard Feynman always said "If it doesn't agree with experiment it's wrong." I would guess a H/O pickup and close to string at least kills a bit of sustain.

Lowering the pickups and raising the screws is a great trick! It does effect ones sound and sustain length slightly. I have noodled around with many guitars and pickups and yeah it is a small difference but you can hear it. Recorded eh maybe but live yes it is noticeable. Basically lowering the pickup allows the strings to move more freely while moving the screws up a mm or two still gets a louder signal from the proximity to the strings. You did not raise the screw height. That is the part you missed. About the counter clockwise lowering it makes total sense if you work on the guitar. The spring reverses pressure so when you loosen it it goes down tight squishes spring and thus higher. Like I said before in other posts it is only one tiny piece in getting that great tone you want. You have to have the correct pieces and put them together the correct way to make the most out of your guitar and amp. This takes a long time to learn what needs to be done in each situation.

The high pickups introduce so much woofiness to the palm mutes.

The lowered pickup is tighter and clearer.

It'd be interesting to compensate the lower output of low pickups by adjusting the input gain of the amp sim. How would that change the sound?

The most difference will occur on the neck pickup, because the string will move further over the pickup poles. This may move into less linear magnetic fields when very close..

Nice video, but have you considered comparing lowering the pickup to just dialing down the volume knob?