Jazz Guitar Pickups – Putting The Swing On The String
Traditional jazz guitar pickups are usually the P90 soap bar type or the humbucker pickup. If you look at the classic jazz guitar, it is a hollow body arch top type with the pickup on the neck.
Some Jazz Guitar Pickup Facts
The electric jazz guitar pickups are of the electromagnetic type. These transmit the vibration in the string to an amplifier. Electric guitars can have both single coil and humbucker pickups. While both work similarly, they sound quite different. Humbuckers use two single coil pickups that are wired together to produce a thick warm sound. Single coils tend to have a lot of electric interference and to avoid this a differential amplifier is used. Different Humbuckers produce different kinds of sounds. The jazz Humbuckers are rich with an even tone to produce the clean sound associated with jazz guitar pickups.
Selecting The Jazz Guitar Pickup
If you look at electric guitars, most of them have two pickups – one near the neck and the other near the bridge. By using the pickup selector switch, you can opt for the appropriate pickup to pick up the string’s vibration and send it to the amplifier. When the pickup selector switch is turned up, the neck or rhythm pickup picks up the string’s sound. When the switch is turned down, the bridge pickup picks up the string’s sound. If the switch is in the middle position, both the pickups pick up the string’s sounds. Usually, the pickup whose proximity is more to the next has a warmer and sweeter sound. The one near the bridge can sound brighter. It is easy to see from this which one jazz players will use – obviously the neck pick up. The bridge pickup is ignored.
To avoid the possibility of notes getting mixed when the player plays fast, today’s jazz guitar pickups are usually the floating type. Some jazz guitars don’t use any pickups. This helps them achieve a clean sound.
Instead of the parallel bracing commonly used, Cross bracing is used to tone down the sound and increase sustain. This results in the jazz guitar’s tone sounding like the traditional steel string acoustic guitar.
Some jazz guitar pickups are embedded in the instrument so that sustain is increased. These show limited acoustic response. Many jazz guitars have the pickup installed on the underside of the ebony finger rest. The finger rest fixes to the side of the guitar’s neck via an aluminum bracket and a couple of screws. The pickup is fixed with epoxy. The large contact surface strengthens the instrument. Large finger rests are not preferred basically because they block the F hole on the right side, and this completely changes the quality of the sound projection.
A common jazz guitar pickup used is the Benedetto S-6 mini humbucker, especially for the arch top design. A highly durable “ebonova” housing protects it. You also get jazz guitar pickups that can be fixed so as to not affect or change the acoustic characteristics of the guitar. Some fix with the help of screws at the neck.
Positioning the jazz guitar pickup in relation to the finger rest is very crucial because the sound is likely to be unclear if the pickup is too close to the strings. Being too far from the strings, on the other hand, can lower the output level drastically.
Jazz guitar pickups are a tricky issue in terms of the effect they can have on the sound output. This results in many jazz guitar players preferring to have theirs custom made. As mentioned earlier, many players even prefer to have no pickups at all.
By: Logan Young
Posted in: Jazz Festivals