Designing a guitar with hot-swappable pickups

&gt; On every electric guitar, the pickups have dampening springs. From trolling online guitar forums, it sounds like these are pretty important for dampening some vibrations from affecting the pickup.<p>This is a strange statement. Many pickup designs have springs as part of their mounting mechanism, but it&#x27;s not for dampening vibrations - it&#x27;s to allow the height of the pickup to be adjusted.<p>Certain pickups (notably, off the top of my head, Fender Jazzmaster &amp; Jaguar pickups) don&#x27;t even use springs for this - instead there&#x27;s a block of foam placed underneath the pickup that compresses as the pickup is screwed down.<p>Of course, it&#x27;s possible some cork-sniffer guitar nerds will claim that they can hear the effects pickup springs have on tone (and the effects of different metals in the springs, no doubt), but these are the same people who will claim that they can hear the difference different glues make on tone, or will swear up-and-down that a real $5000 Klon has a richer and fuller sound than a $100 clone made from the exact same circuit with the exact same components, or that tube amps sound better because &quot;electrons can&#x27;t survive in a crystal lattice&quot; [0] (so buy my $100K tube amp!), or...<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=iVTj08qTwGw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=iVTj08qTwGw</a>

Dan Armstrong guitars had a nifty system for this, which goes back years.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;farm4.static.flickr.com&#x2F;3130&#x2F;2319685814_b648ce0118.jpg?v=0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;farm4.static.flickr.com&#x2F;3130&#x2F;2319685814_b648ce0118.j...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cdn.mos.musicradar.com&#x2F;images&#x2F;Product%20News&#x2F;Guitar&#x2F;Oct08&#x2F;ampeg%20first%20look&#x2F;ampeg-front-460-100-460-70.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cdn.mos.musicradar.com&#x2F;images&#x2F;Product%20News&#x2F;Guitar&#x2F;...</a>

Nice to see some electric guitar geekery on HN :). I started playing last year during the pandemic too, but I had learned a bit in elementary school and I played alto saxophone for around a decade in various school jazz groups.<p>Gentle suggestion: try to see how many different tones you can get out of one sole pickup by varying your technique (angle and strength of attack, angle that your finger is fretting the string, the part of your finger you fret with, amount of vibrato, type of vibrato, gentle bends, etc). Try practicing with the amp cranked so you can play notes at normal volume just by brushing the pick against the string and listen to the errors it reveals in your technique. The electric guitar is an extremely sensitive instrument. Pickups do make a huge difference (particularly switching between singles and humbuckers), but I got this advice from a teacher and it has totally changed my perspective on tone. If you can develop a deep understanding of the relationship your technique has to tone, you can find a tone that is yours on any guitar, I guarantee it.

Jimi went from a $5 acoustic in 1958 to being dead in 1970. That&#x27;s less time than what it takes most of us to go through our GAS (gear acquisition syndrome) and just enjoy playing the darned thing.

Without video it isn&#x27;t clear how convenient&#x2F;easy it is.<p>Here&#x27;s another approach: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;pZaTbCBvcOI?t=39" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;pZaTbCBvcOI?t=39</a> (it&#x27;s in Russian, but the mechanics is very simple)

It&#x27;s extremely tempting to try to speed up your progress on the guitar using your existing engineering skills (e.g. what we have here), mathematics skills (e.g. learning music theory), or other resources (e.g. buying loads of gear), but the only way reliably to make progress is practice, practice, and more practice playing the guitar itself.

Often the cheap necks can be made quite nicer with a bit of extra fret work. If the edges feel sharp then it&#x27;s a matter of filing&#x2F;sanding them to get them smoother. If there&#x27;s buzzing then re-level and re-crown. There is a wealth of information on guitar building. If you want a bigger challenge, build your own neck. It is doable with hand tools though the right power tools certainly make it easier.<p>If you want to drill straight holes without a drill press there&#x27;s this little guide doohickey you can buy that you hold against the piece and put your drill bit through the guide.

&gt; Lately I’ve been learning to play guitar. I wanted to be able to try out a bunch of different pickups on my guitar, to get a feel for what sound I prefer.<p>I&#x27;ve been playing for over 10 years, and I still don&#x27;t really care. I have a strat with the standard three single-coil pickups and a Gibson with two humbuckers. I&#x27;m sure it makes some difference, but where I&#x27;m at, I can&#x27;t hear enough of a difference beyond the big things that it just doesn&#x27;t matter.

It’s awesome to see this—the post makes it look quite straightforward to build your own guitar! But: As a guitar player myself I have learnt that GAS is ever-tempting, especially pickups.<p>Personally I think that if all the time I spent reading “sound descriptions” on pickup manufacturers’ websites I would instead have spent playing, not only would I play much better, I would also sound much better.<p>Sound comes out of your fingers more than out of anything else. Billy Gibbons would sound like Billy Gibbons no matter what pickups one puts in his guitar. He would surely notice the difference, the vast majority of his audience wouldn’t.

Somnium Guitars [0] also makes guitars with easily hot swappable pickups. They have a mounting system where you can put most pickups into their mounting module and click it into place from the back of the body. It’s still a bit pricey, but starts at a less expensive $2,495 MSRP vs $4,500 from Relish.<p>Here’s a video from Know Your Gear on their product: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;Vj2uJBeSHt4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;Vj2uJBeSHt4</a><p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;somniumguitars.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;somniumguitars.com</a>

Very cool DIY. Was hoping to see what it looks like from the back with all the electronics in place? And maybe a video of how the swap works in practice would be helpful to illustrate.

FYI, this idea got implemented a few times in various forms, the most known commercial implementation is by Dan Armstrong.<p>Ampeg Dan Amrstrong guitar and bass are just cool, look them up.

An interesting idea, but not convinced, as they don’t look very adjustable for height, for example, my Tele pickups are higher on the treble side, compensating somewhat for the higher output of the bigger strings. You could cut this into the mount, but that defeats the purpose of being able to test things quickly, the moment one variable is fixed, you have an instant constraint. This experiment is a trade-off, I get that. He’s not an experienced guitar player and wants to fiddle with pickups. Fine, enjoy, EVH was all about getting the sound to match what’s in his head anyway, whatever it took.

For those like me who didn&#x27;t know: a pickup is a thingy that generates a tiny electrical field around a string. This allows electronics to translate string vibrations to an audio signal.<p>One thing missing (for me) from the article is a rough idea of what the effect could be. Why would you care about easy swapping at all? Why not find the right one(s) and stick with that&#x2F;those? Why does changing speed matter - would you change them between songs?<p>(Yes, I didn&#x27;t know about pickups before this article)

Might want to look at Somnium Guitars for a more refined (not DIY) version of this. They have a really nice system. Not cheap, but the build quality is excellent.

Not an expert, but I did recently upgrade the pickups in an older guitar. I learned that not all pickups are wired to the guitar the same way. Seymour Duncan HotRails had to be connected differently than Seymour Duncan VintageRails, for example. This would be a complicating factor to any hot-swapping system.

One could get a Line 6 Variax and play with endless variations on body types, pickups, tunings and recordings of vintage guitars. Old ones can be had for very little these days.

But how about the results of which pickup sounds he preferred?

Very nice. It would be awesome if this were standard.

Tone is in the hands.