#Single coil vs humbucker pickups how to#

One common thing that gives them the most personality is their pickups - those raised areas of plastic with circles of metal that sit under your strings. The cool thing about electric guitars is how much you can change their personality with a single build tweak. Okay well, hope (any of) this helped.By Melanie Griffin Electric Guitars. Humbuckers and single coils don't sound drastically different with all that distortion, but humbuckers are usually preferred for their lack of interference noise. Since humbuckers smooth out your dynamics more, the distortion is smoother and more consistent.ДЄt very high gain, tubes can produce a nice metal-sounding distortion (though not all amps are set up for this). They provide a louder signal to boot, so they'll also start distorting at a lower gain setting. OTOH, humbuckers move very quickly from clean to dirty, and that sweet spot really goes by quick. They begin to get unacceptably noisy at or just after this point. SCs accentuate this effect better than humbuckers because they offer more headroom between a quiet signal (clean tube amp sound) and a loud signal (distorted tube amp sound), based on how soft or hard you play. but it's still the same volume as the quieter clean stuff (mostly). When you turn the gain up further, the tubes stop being able to resolve higher frequencies, so they start to distort on chords, higher frets and more aggressive playing. every note is consistent and requires little effort to deliver. This allows the extra detail and 'shimmer' in SCs to come through and sound great, without having quiet parts sound too muffled and louder parts sound too harsh.Д«y contrast, HBs are smooth as silk and very easy to play in this area.

In fact it's the only gain area where playing dynamics really come out in humbuckers from here on up, playing a HB harder works more to shape the sound than actually make it louder.ДЄt mid-gain settings, tube amps are still clean but they're compressed - louder stuff isn't so much louder than quiet stuff. This can be managed with the tone controls on the guitar or the amp, but a HB is already a bit compressed and toned down, so it's easier to deal with.

HBs.ДЄt super-clean, very low gain settings, a tube amp is very expanded (soft playing = very quiet, hard playing = very loud), and SCs sound downright ear piercing when played loudly (from all the extra treble). There are many products for making SC guitars quiet at higher gain settings as well.ДЄnd if you play on a solid state amp, that's about it - the rest is specific to tube amps, which respond much differently to SCs vs. Humbuckers also cancel interference (hence the name), which is mostly only a problem when playing overdriven/distorted, but also when playing clean at high volumes or using certain effects. None of this may be very apparent if you only play rhythm parts on a solid state amp, but heavier gauge strings might help you hear it either way (you'll hear it because both guitars will sound better in different ways). So your Agile should smooth out/compress your dynamics more than your Strat, meaning it should be a little more forgiving and still pickup notes you didn't quite pluck hard enough, but also not put an icepick through your ears when you heavily accent a note. This should be noticeable at modest-to-fair volume with the treble on your amp turned up, and all of the controls on your guitars up all the way. These two effects, louder with less treble, make HBs seem more compressed playing softly on a humbucker will sound louder than it would on a single coil, but playing harder on a HB doesn't have the high frequency 'spike' of a SC. This extra output from HBs takes away some high frequency response (treble), so there's less detail in their sound - the notes are there, but the strings don't 'shimmer and shine' as much. On a clean amp, single-coils are noticeably quieter at the same volume setting. I hope you'll bare with me through all of this.ДЇirst, humbuckers output a louder signal.

#Single coil vs humbucker pickups how to#

I'm really sorry, I don't know how to answer this question well without a long explanation.