Lollar Pickups Blog

Welcome to the Lollar Pickups Blog, where we share in-depth information and stories about the pickups we build.

The Mystery of the ‘59 Jazzmaster Tone

The mystery of the ‘59 Jazzmaster tone.

I still see discussions on internet forums about whether the wood in an electric guitar has any effect on its tone, or if it’s all in the pickup. There are some people who insist the instrument itself makes no difference in its tone.

There was a good series of articles a few years ago in the Guild of American Luthiers quarterly magazine about how just the body shape of a solid body electric guitar affects nodal patterns of vibration at different frequencies—just the shape of the body!

Continue reading

Welcome To The DULLhouse

We get asked all the time, “Why does my old pickup sound dull?” There are many reasons the tone can suffer on vintage pickups.

These p'ups aren't just *playing* dead... They're dead!
These p’ups aren’t just *playing* dead. They’re actually dead!

We can’t resurrect or improve every beaten, tired, old pickup that we come across. Some of them, like the ones seen above, are just too far gone. Only a complete rebuild, with brand new parts could bring them back to life, but at that point, you may as well just replace it! You can’t shine a turd, as they say — and even if you could, you’d still just have a shiny turd. But, just maybe, your dull sound isn’t the turd you thought it was, so in this edition, we’ll address the possible causes and potential solutions.

Continue reading

Tone Chasin’: The Skinny on Capacitors and Potentiometers (Or Caps and Pots)—Part 1

Tone Chasin’: The Skinny on Capacitors and Potentiometers (Or Caps and Pots)—Part 1

By Jason Lollar

Finding your guitar tone involves a mix of science and voodoo. This alchemy includes the role of capacitors and potentiometers, also known as caps and pots. In this article, we focus on pots, and separate fact from fiction and explain how they are typically used to give you greater tone and volume control.

Choosing the Right Control Pot

There are some standard assumptions concerning pot and cap values and their use for different pickup designs, like single coils or humbuckers. These conventions can be useful, but you don’t need to blindly follow them.

Take the pot values first. Pots with higher resistance — like 500K compared to 250K — prevent higher frequencies from bleeding through to ground more than lower ohm pots. This means a 500K pot provides a brighter overall tone than a 250K pot. Higher ohms also give you a cleaner and punchier sound on the bass strings.

Continue reading

If you don’t talk to your pickups about potting, who will…?

"I learned it from watching you..."
“I learned it from watching you…”

We will, that’s who!

Potting is the process of soaking the pickup in melted wax, in order to saturate the components, which will isolate them and reduce movement of the coils. Because of this, potted pickups have reduced likelihood of excessive handling noise, microphonic feedback or mechanical failure. However, if a pickup is potted too much, the pickup can often sound lifeless and dull, lacking character and “vibe”.

Continue reading
© Copyright 2024 Lollar Pickups. All Rights Reserved.