Balancing pickup volume

[souvenir]

I noticed today when playing my Les Paul Special through my amp's clean channel that the bridge pickup was considerably lower in volume than the neck. With this distortion it's not as noticeable.

 

Is there anyway, other than by ear, that I can balance the volume of my pickups to get them as even as possible?

[Gruupi]

Well, you pretty much have to do it by ear. You should start at with the recommended specs for the hieght from the strings and work from there.

[Dr. Ellwood]

Yes, have your tech check the proximity of your pickups to the strings, you should have about equal volume at similar volume pot settings. There are instances where you might want your neck pu to be hotter than the rear. On the neck pickup you may perceive more volume because it is further from the bridge and will sound more bass therefore sound louder, unless you have changed the proximity of your pu's from their factory settings the balance should be pretty well balanced.

[souvenir]

Thanks for the advice guys.

 

If balancing by ear, is this better done on clean or distorted channel?

[Scott Fraser]

Yeah, what everybody else said. Bridge pickups are wound to be louder since there's less string vibration back there than up near the neck. Thus it's already supposed to be compensated, but if it's not quite balanced, just crank down on the height adjustment screws to bring the bridge pickup up higher & that will balance them out.

 

Scott Fraser

[Scott Fraser]

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Clean, no effects, no compression.

 

Scott Fraser

[Dr. Ellwood]

Yeah.. been thinking about it, even went and got out my main LP ..and.. I guess what I do almost automatically is compensate with the PU volume to get the mix I want when I using both pickups, so I roll off the neck pu to mix the bridge for some top end brightness but keep the low end growl with the neck pu.