Does pickup height affect tone?

[Michael - NYC]

I've spent plenty of time adjusting pickups, playing and listening to guitars and basses. My experience is that pickup height does affect tone, but whether you should tend toward higher or lower pickup height is a matter of personal preference of tone. Lower pickup height tends to insure increased dynamic range and a more natural tone, while higher pickups tend to have a degree of compression and thicker tone.

For a guitar that I will mainly want to use for distorted tones, I'm more likely to push the pickups a bit higher, while a guitar that will be used for some clean playing will have lower pickup height.

I play of a lot of clean bass tones, so I usually keep my pickup height at or perhaps slightly below what's typically recommended for that type of pickup, based on how it sounds and responds to my playing.

Otto

I agree 100% as I have had the same experience and results.

 

[Bliff Curton 2]

Great thread to resurrect.

The other month, I raised the pickups on my two 5'ers to get more punch and win the dB wars since I'm recording.

Then over the last few weeks, I noticed it's been hard to tune my basses when plugged into my DAW.
So I'd reach for those cheap clip on tuners and the problem went away.
It dawned on me a few hours ago what the problem is - magnetic pull causing oscillation.
The clip-on tuner senses more of the fundamental, so that's why it was easier to tune. The DAW on my computer is reading the signal just from my pickups, so mag-field induced oscillation was the symptom.
So I spent a good while getting my first 5'er set up better. The Aria SB025 with Barts.

Along the way, I figured out that the 3-way coil taps for each Bart humbucker are actually not Series/Parallel/Single but instead outer-single/Series/inner single. So up/down is outter/inner coil while center is Series.
Interestingly, I get hum when using either pickup in single, duh, but headscratchingly I get hum when both pickups blended and both switches in the same direction. So if both pickups are selected towards the neck-side coils, hum. Both pickups are selected towards bridge-side coils coils, hum. But if one is selected towards the neck coil and the other towards the bridge coil, no hum, and vice versa. Weird.
I'd also like to rewire the selector to be Parallel instead of Series, or maybe series for Bridge and Parallel for neck.

Anywho, back to the point this thread is for.
The pickups were too close, messing up my perceived tuning, causing bad overtones and intonation.
As I was adjusting pickup heights and angles, I noticed that the midrange content isn't dependent on height extremes, like treble and bass are, but more so dependent upon being within the sweet spot zone. So closer to the sweet spot, the more mids.
I also noticed that more distance also evens out the frequencies for a flatter response, until they get too far then approaching diminishing returns and then finally either a scooped or bass-heavy tone.

As for angle, I am going for an average between open and fretted at the 5-7 frets, since I don't really play past the 12th fret much.

It's gonna take a few days to tweak the heights to what is my sweet spot for my playing and personal and band needs.
But I noticed when this is done, and done well, it really gets the instrument to be fully alive and sing as it should. Tone, response, liveliness, and sustained are all optimized when spending the extra hours/days to find the right balance.

Speaking of balance, I also take the time to go back and forth between pickup heights and string heights.
Sometimes the G string sings perfectly while the D string has a dead 5th fret harmonic, so while the pickup height is perfect or near-perfect, a tweak is needed with string height to compensate for pickup shape and fretboard shape.

Maybe tomorrow I'll start optimizing my other 5'er, my NS Design Radius. Should be easier since the pickups are radiused, so less tweaking will be needed between string height / pickup height.

 

[monkeyfinger]

I am convinced that one of the reasons why hand-crafted basses sound so good out of the box is that the builder took the time to get the pickup height perfect.

 

[Bliff Curton 2]

I agree. It's a lot of work, but makes such a big difference

 

[maturanesa]

Yes, it sounds more agressive and compressed. But for me the benefit is to have a much better signal-noise ratio. You get more volume without putting the amp or preamp's level higher.

 

[sikamikanico]

Interestingly, I get hum when using either pickup in single, duh, but headscratchingly I get hum when both pickups blended and both switches in the same direction. So if both pickups are selected towards the neck-side coils, hum. Both pickups are selected towards bridge-side coils coils, hum. But if one is selected towards the neck coil and the other towards the bridge coil, no hum, and vice versa. Weird.

That’s actually normal operation. Neck coils have the same orientation and bridge coils have the opposite orientation. They cancel hum when combined within the same pickup, or with the corresponding coil in the other pickup. Also gives most difference in tone (inner coils vs outer coils).