Pimp Out Your Guitar With New Pickups

To continue on with our Pimp Your Guitar series, in this post(part two) we will get some new pickups! Depending on what guitar you want to pimp out, you may be limited to either single-coil or humbucking pickups, or even a hybrid of the two.

Obviously you do have options to interchange different styles of pickups, including cutting holes in your old guitar as I have done in the past, but of course would only recommend it if you really know what you are doing. But for this post we are going to keep it really simple and cover a pimp for both single-coil and humbuckers.

What Pickups Work Best For You?

Our best advice is to give this step a little research before you decide on new pickups. You may want to visit a local guitar store and try different guitars with different pickup options to give you ideas. Or you may just want to visit popular guitar websites and watch some videos?

When changing out my own pickups for new ones, I decided to research my favorite guitarists and find out what they are using to get their own sounds. Many of those guitarists have signature guitars available which makes it easier for you to find out what pickups they use by visiting that guitars specs page.

Or, you might want to do a google search to find backdated information about the guitarist in question. You can pretty much find anything online today!

Humbucking Pimpin Pickups

For my humbucking choice I wanted a sound like one of my favorite guitarists, Slash! So I entered “Slash Pickups” into our website and got taken to a page full of different Slash pickup choices.

I came across this set of Seymour Duncan Aph-2S Alnico Ii Pro Slash Humbucker Pickups for $189.95! After some research and reading the 5-star reviews I was convinced that these pickups would give me the Slash sound I was looking for.

Now I just need to install them. For those of you that want to change out your own humbuckers here is a great video by Seymour Duncan on just how to do this.

Single-Coil Pimpin Pickups

I want that amazing Pink Floyd sound and tone that drives each and every track David Gilmour plays on! And it just so happens that Gilmour has a signature guitar with single-coils….

Doing a little research I found out that the Dave Gilmour signature is fitted with these pickups..

Pickups:
Neck: Custom Hand-Wound Fat ’50s Strat®
Middle: Custom Wound Strat®
Bridge: Seymour Duncan® SSL-5

In the perfect world three different types are needed here, but because this would make the install a little more complicated we decided to go with a set of the “Fat 50′s Strat” pickups for $169.95 to get our desired sound….

For those of you that want to go with the same pickups as included with the David Gilmour Fender guitar, here are the other options for you.

• Seymour Duncan SSL-5
• Custom Strat Pickups

Here is another very detailed video explaining the process of changing out your single-coil pickups.

Remember that pickups are a huge part of your guitars sound. They are the microphone that “picks up” your every move. So you want to make sure you are getting the right fit for your needs before you invest in a new set of pickups.

Also, don’t feel the need that you have to change them yourself. If you are not confident about completing this step even after watching the videos, then please take it to a local guitar store to get it done for you.

In the next post we will cover a pimp for our guitars bridge! See you next time.