Installing neck pickup backwards - good idea? (Cold Sweat in Gibson SG)

[Dave Sloven]

Hi all, I'm wondering if anyone has installed their neck pickup backwards - i.e., screw coil toward the bridge - and how this worked out?  I'm considering turning my CS neck around on my SG when I do my next string change, just to see what it sounds like.  My reasoning is this: I have a very noticeable neck angle on this SG - which is normal for SGs, especially the ones with the batwing pickguards - and I have found that raising the pole pieces on the bridge pickup allowed me to take advantage of that fact and to compensate for it, in that the front of the pickup is closer to the strings than the back, so I was able to move the pole pieces up while having the front of the pickup at least as close to the strings as the pole pieces on the rear coil.  If I rotate the pickup this will allow me to do the same thing with the neck pickup, and give me much more adjustment on the pole pieces and perhaps make the neck brighter and more defined.

Has anyone tried this and had negative results?  The only thing that worries me about it at the moment in terms of trying it is whether my pickup lead is long enough to do it.  I will have to open it up to find that out though.

I guess I should also ask does rotating the pickup in this way change the polarity?  If so I might give it a miss

[King Zog of Albania]

I'm sure it'll make a huge difference.

Maybe manufacturers could start adding a lever to guitars to rotate the pickups through 180 degrees.

It'll probably make you play faster too.

[Dave Sloven]

Thanks for your help.

Smart asses must be highly valued in Albania.

[GuitarIv]

Smart asses must be highly valued in Albania.

 :lol:

Sorry but I can't help you there mate, never tried it, but in fact I don't think you can do any damage just by testing it. Maybe someone else who tried it out chimes in :)

[Philly Q]

It probably won't make very much difference to the sound because (I think) the CS neck has quite symmetrically-wound coils.

But as you've already observed, it'll let you adjust the polepieces to compensate for the fact that the SG's pickups aren't parallel with the strings, so it's not a bad idea.  It certainly won't put the pickups out of phase or anything dramatic like that.

I'd say try it, can't do any harm and it's easily reversible.

[Dave Sloven]

Yeah, thanks for the comments regarding possible technical problems.  I think it's worth a try, just because I'm not a fan of warm sounding pickups in general and the neck pickup could pick up a little more treble via moving the pole pieces up more in the reversed position. At the moment I have moved them up a little and the pickup down but in the neck area there is very little scope for doing that, unlike at the bridge.  Before I change the bridge to the Cold Sweat I will post a photo to show where I ended up with my adjustments on the bridge pickup.  It looks kind of weird, sort of like some of those Warpig photos people have posted with the bolts sitting up high.  They are up a couple of turns at least

I'm glad that I didn't get an etch on the neck pickup, because that would look really daft upside down

[Philly Q]

The other thing you could consider would be using some angled pickup rings on top of the scratchplate, to help make the pickups more parallel with the strings.  That's what I was going to do when I had an SG Standard.

The only problem with that is, the springs are still pushing against the flat bottom of the scratchplate and trying to push the screws into a vertical position, despite the angled pickup rings.  To solve that, I was going to buy a spare scratchplate and enlarge the pickup cutouts so they'd be the shape of humbucker cavities in, say, a Les Paul, then I'd put the angled rings on top of that.

In the end I sold the SG Standard and I now have a Tokai which is early-'60s style with mounting rings and the small scratchplate, so no problem.  :lol:

[GuitarIv]

Get back to us with results AO :)

[Kiichi]

I can actually weigh in on this as I like to do this a lot in order for my autosplit with the outer coils on HSH PUs.

As Philly rightly pointed out it makes more difference the more assymetrically the PUs are wound, quite logical when you think about it.

I think most of the time it results in more of a bright tone, but results differer from PU to PU.
It generally is more of a subtle change you get from it, but worth trying for guys like us. It certainly can give you that extra bit you are looking for, expecially combined with pole piece and height adjustment.

Deffo go for it, I am pretty sure youŽll like it. Then get back to us =)

[Dave Sloven]

I'm going to try it - I basically want a brighter tone while backing away from the strings a little as where I had it set until recently it has been a little 'woofy'.  This woofiness is a general problem with SG neck pickups as far as I can tell.  It's not so much a general problem across all sounds - what sounds woofy under distortion can sound wonderful clean - but if I can dial most of that out by giving me more options in terms of the overall pickup height and pole piece height then that's good.

One thing I will do for sure next time I buy a pickup for a Gibson is to get short rather than long legs for the neck pickup.  On neither of my guitars have I needed long legs and they do limit how low you can move the pickup.  At a certain depth the pickup starts to tip and the screw comes out of the pickguard rather than dropping the pickup further.  That's fairly low, almost flush with the pickguard, but certainly it does limit the other guitars it might be moved into and there seems to be no advantage with the long legs.  On the other hand I would always get long legs for a Gibson bridge pickup, especially an SG

[Dave Sloven]

The pickup went in 'around the wrong way' perfectly fine, plays like normal, I guess because it is very symmetrical, like people have said here. The merit of the mod will only been known when I have adjusted the pickup height and pole piece heights, but having it in this way certainly allows more adjustment relative to the angled SG neck.  I have to set the bridge height properly first though, as I could not remove the pickguard without also removing the bridge and that's all messed up now.

I'll post some photos in the thread on the bridge pickup swap:

https://bareknucklepickups.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=30531.0