Pickup positioning question.

[Saturday]

I just bought online from a mate a Seymour Duncan Phat Cat for the neck position. My question is, how different they are from the Bridge position version? anybody puts neck versions of pickups in the bridge?

it

[Frankenstrat]

It will work. A lot of pickups are designed so as to give a balanced volume when put into two pickup guitars. The neck position will make a pickup louder because of the increased energy of the sting's motion there. Also the neck position tends to increase bass frequencies and the bridge position tends to have more treble at the detriment of bass tones.

[Saturday]

thanks a lot! anyone else?

[guitarNed]

There are two main issues: output and string spacing. Most PU manufacturers create sets of pickups for the neck/bridge positions. The bridge position PU is usually slightly hotter. Regarding spacing: as the strings move from nut to bridge, they gradually move further apart. The bridge is a good amount wider than the nut. This divergence will cause the strings to be spaced a bit wider at the bridge PU position than at the neck PU position.

 

You can easily mix & match different models of bridge and neck pickups, but it is less certain when you put a bridge PU into a neck position. For example, Gibson makes a 490R and 490T pair of pickups. On the studio, they mix the 490R with a 498T, offering more output on the bridge than the 490T would give. But you don't see people mixing a 490R and a 496R.

 

One way to judge: look at the output of neck.bridge pairs made by several manufacturers, then choose pickups with a similar percentage of difference.