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The best electric guitar pickups 2021: top single coils, humbuckers and P-90s to upgrade your tone

Breathe new life into your electric guitar tone with a fresh set of pickups

If the tonewood is the heart and soul of your electric guitar, the pickups are its brains and voice. Without them you’re left with a plank and some wire. But wait, you say, my guitar already has pickups. Why should I need more? It’s simple: a change of pickups can completely alter your guitar’s tone and make an average instrument a great one.

Here, we’re going look at all different kinds of pickup. We’ve got passive single coils and humbuckers, an overwound Soapbar-style P-90, active humbuckers, active single coils — and all the best pickups money can buy from trusted names, including Seymour Duncan, Fishman, DiMarzio and more.

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What are the best electric guitar pickups right now?

The Seymour Duncan SH-4 JB humbucker was built to rock, and the list of players who have played it is like a who’s who of ‘80s and ‘90s legends of rock and metal. It’s a hot-rodded ‘bucker with an alnico V magnet that’s wound to sock a tube amp right in the front end for that sought-after dynamic breakup.

When it comes to Strat pickups, it’s got to be Fender’s Custom Shop Texas Special Strat models. The Texas Specials are overwound for a generous helping of Lone Star sizzle but radiate a warm midrange and have a solid, pronounced low-end response, while staggered pole pieces make for a balanced output.

Best electric guitar pickups 2021: buying advice

Pickups: the basics
The design principles behind the electric guitar pickup are relatively simple. A pickup has a magnetic core, typically a bar magnet or series of magnetic pole pieces, which is wrapped in strands of insulated copper wire.

This coil produces an magnetic field that picks up vibrations on your strings and delivers the electrical signal to your amplifier. A pickup’s tone depends on a number of factors including magnet type, the number of windings around the core, and the number of coils in the pickup.

Single coils, humbuckers and P-90s
A single-coil design is just that: it has one magnetic coil of wire. The most common single coil you will find has wire wrapped around six magnetic pole pieces, one for each string.

You might often hear of staggered pole pieces, which sees the pole pieces at different heights to balance each string’s output so they are all the same volume. These single coils will have a sharp, brighter sound with plenty of treble.

A P-90 is a single-coil design too, but it has a bar magnet core instead of pole pieces and more windings — which gives it a fatter, hotter sound. You might read about overwound Stratocaster single coils; these have simply had more windings, which may give them a higher output and a bit more girth in the midrange.

Now, single-coil designs are great, but at high-volumes, with loads of gain, you run the risk of hiss, hum and feedback. This is where the humbucker comes in.

The humbucker features a dual-coil design that not only thickens up the tone, adding more sustain and a higher output, but these two coils are wired in series and out of phase to cut out the hum and electromagnetic interference. Hence the name. Does that mean they’re better? Well, that depends entirely on what you’re using them for.

What pickups are right for me?
You can’t beat the clarity and bell-like chime, not to mention the treble-forward snap of a single coil when your blues, country, indie or whatever sound calls for it — and when distorted, that high-end really cuts through the mix.

But there is no questioning the humbucker’s popularity, which grew quickly following the release of Seth Lover’s Patent Applied For humbucker and Ray Butts’ Filter’Tron in the 1950s. With their higher output, humbuckers hit the front end of tube amps that bit harder and made them break up into distortion quicker. The humbucker’s impact on the rock scenes of the 1960s and ‘70s changed popular music forever.

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Today, there are all kinds of variants. Seth Lover’s P.A.F. would be considered a sedate vintage option in your guitar, while metal players look to ever more powerful pickups to chase more gain, harmonics and sustain.

Magnet materials range from the softer-voiced Alnico II and slightly hotter Alnico V, with ceramic magnets often reserved for higher-output pickups such as the DiMarzio Super Distortion.

Active or passive pickups?
Traditional pickup designs are passive. That means the amplified signal output is generated solely from the magnetic coils. Active pickups feature an onboard preamp, usually powered by a 9V battery that is secreted in the rear of the guitar. The active pickup’s preamp kills hum — even in single coils — and popularized by EMG, active humbuckers have become the go-to option for metal guitarists such as James Hetfield and Kerry King who need high-gain and sustain to get the job done.

Ultimately, you’ve got to look at your playing style and ask yourself what you want from your tone. Here, we have pickups for players of all persuasions, from the vintage rocker through to the country ’n’ blues picker, the rockabilly hepcat, the metalhead and all in between.

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Custom Guitar Pickups Guide

Why do companies mass produce sets labeled as “custom guitar pickups” when they’re clearly not? And what actually makes a pickup custom? Is it just any brand that’s not DiMarzio or Seymour Duncan? If so, then why does Seymour Duncan have a custom shop?

The Tonal Factors

The word ‘custom’ gets thrown around a lot as a marketing buzzword for guitar equipment. You see the word included in product titles for virtually anything…I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some Custom Strap Button Screws out there. The word implies uniqueness in my book, so when I see a mass-manufactured big-brand ‘custom’ guitar, I get annoyed. It’s just a different guitar.

In the case of pickup companies, the word is implying that the winding or magnetic posts are different from the norm. But with virtually every combination of components already branded and available to buy, the ‘norm’ has to be a standard related to how the parts are put together – particularly the winding.

You’ll see companies racking up 10 bobbins at a time and turning on an automated winding machine to churn out identical sets. The shame in this isn’t that it’s somehow a worse tone, but that there’s so much more variation in the sound of a pickup that’s wound one at a time or by hand, and the imperfections in technique can produce something entirely unique.

There’s quite a bit of variety to be offered from a part that’s comprised of so few pieces that affect the tone. In fact, switching your pickups is the most significant tonal change you can make to an electric guitar before the output.

The Winding Defines Custom Pickups

Typically, pickups are wound by machines that count the exact same number of turns, repeat the same pattern of lateral movement, and use copper wiring of a consistent gauge and insulation material/thickness. Manufacturers are well aware of the factors that go into shaping a pickup’s voice but the need for a model’s consistency will prevent less precise winding techniques (tension, patterns) from being used, which is actually the primary reasoning for buying a set of custom pickups in the first place.

The basic principles are still taken into account; more winding = more output, darker tone, and easier breakup. Particular gauges and insulations have resistance levels that can be calculated and the sum of a pickup design’s specifications can give a fairly accurate description of how a pickup may sound before it’s made – even when there’s so many materials and gauges to choose from.

Insulation

There are almost 20 different types of insulation: polyurethanes, nylons, poly-nylons, polyester, Teflon, Formvar, plain enamel, etc. The amount of DC resistance is the most important statistic when trying to measure the tonal effect of different insulation materials. The thickness of the insulation material will add another factor in the amount of resistance. The tonal differences are due to the insulation’s resistance, which affects the overall capacitance of the coil. Heavier insulation can maintain more high-end detail.

The Way of the Wire

The way the wire is wound affects the amount of capacitance in the signal that helps shape the pickup’s voice. If you’ve read the article on understanding capacitors, you know how much of a difference this can make. Some of the larger companies have had the opportunity to observe how variations in the wrapping pattern can be used to steer the pickup’s tone one direction or another, which is quite impressive.

But more impressive is the fact that someone without a clue could wind a pickup by hand and create something spectacular and unique that a larger pickup manufacturer would have difficulty recreating simply because of the lack of control in the winding process. The tension held on the wire, the lateral movement and distribution pattern during the wrapping, and little loose spots are going to affect the tone much more than you may expect.

These sound like mistakes and sloppy work, but it actually often creates a harmonically rich voice that can be as intricate as the thousands of wire wrappings that built it. Variation in the winding process is what separates a ’boutique’ or ‘custom’ pickup manufacturer from a larger one. That doesn’t mean you can’t call up Seymour Duncan and ask them to build a set to your specifications, they will fulfill requests for custom pickups.

Alternate Wire Materials

Silver is used occasionally, and has a significantly different tone from copper. Silver is said to be the only metal with a lower DC resistance than copper. The tone is much more harmonically diverse, has a quicker attack, and is generally just more responsive than copper. Unfortunately, it’s too expensive to be a practical material for mass-produced pickups.

Magnets & Pole Pieces

Different magnet types can affect tone as well as the output depending on strength. Alnico magnets are made from a combination of nickel, cobalt, and aluminum. Ceramic magnets are made from iron and a few different earth metals compressed together. There are a few factors that will change the shape of the magnetic field and the way the string’s vibration is inducted – the magnet’s composition, the spacing of the pieces, use of a single ‘blade’ magnet, and use of pole pieces attached to a magnet.

Generally, we can say that Ceramic magnets are stronger and higher gain than Alnico magnets, and that Ferrous Steel poles give you a wider/looser tone. Pinning down the tonal differences is a little more complex though, due to so many variables – the chart below should help when it comes time to make a choice:

Strength	Bass	Midrange	Treble
Alnico II	2	3	1	2
Alnico III	1	3	3	2
Alnico IV	3	3	2	3
Alnico V	4	2	1	4
Alnico VIII	5	2	3	5
Ceramic	6	3	4	4

Description
Alnico II	Smooth, “Vintage” – Soft attack
Alnico III	Pronounced midrange, “Vintage” – Very soft attack
Alnico IV	Flat, even response – pairs best with specific instruments
Alnico V	Tight low-end, sharp/bright highs – Strong attack
Alnico VIII	Tighter low-end, high output, aggressive mids
Ceramic	Tightest lows, high mids/highs – best with over-wound sets – Sharp attack

I’m sure there’s a lot of differing opinions out there from pickup manufacturers, so the best way to truly know is to hear each of them on the same instrument with the same pickup specifications…which is a pretty immense task to arrange. Maybe I’ll see if I can make recordings for comparison some day though – I know Seymour Duncan has a few available on their site, but it’s not a wide selection.

Wax Potting

When the pickup is dipped in wax it will reduce feedback simply by keeping the pieces from shifting around and vibrating against each other. In most cases, particularly with people who are playing with high-gain amplifiers, this is necessary.

Purposely having the pickup un-potted allows microphonic sounds to be picked up from the air within the pickup’s magnetic field and amplified along with the string’s vibrations. This is pretty much only found in older pickups and vintage-style single-coil pickups, and can be the deciding factor for some – it’s a prominent difference in tone.

And now you have a very solid base of knowledge to make informed decisions the next time you want to buy a set of custom guitar pickups or even build your own…that’s for another article though!

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