What’s The Deal With Pickup Polarity?

Imagine this heartbreaking scenario: you just purchased a Bridge pickup for your guitar. You’re excited to throw it in and rock out, so you get it installed and plug it in. The pickup sounds great on its own, but when you combine the Bridge with the Middle pickup, it sounds like crap! It seems thin, hollow, and weak. What happened? What went wrong?

Your Bridge pickup is out of phase with the rest of your pickups. Now, you have to take it out, send it back to us, and pay for shipping again to get it back in phase with your other pickups. Not cool. If you had known about pickup polarity beforehand, you would have avoided this issue altogether.

Fear not! We are here to educate you – we want to make you an expert on Pickup Polarity so you can avoid these pesky problems in the future. So, if that sounds like something you want to avoid, read on!

WHAT IS PICKUP POLARITY?

When you play an electric guitar, your guitar pickups create a voltage that get sent to the amplifier and then to the speaker. The signal you create is like a sine wave – and the wave can either “push” or “pull” on the speaker.

In reality, there are a few things that contribute to the overall polarity of your guitar’s pickup: Magnet Polarity and Coil Direction (or Wind Direction). A magnet can only be either North or South, and the Coil Direction can either be clockwise or counter-clockwise (don’t worry, we’ll explain these further).

The ideal situation is to have your pickup In-Phase and Hum-Cancelling with other pickups. You’ve probably heard the term “Reverse Wound / Reverse Polarity” (RWRP) – well, that’s what we’re talking about. We’re talking about an In-Phase and Hum-Cancelling set or pair of pickups. There are four important considerations when making a pickup. Let’s break them down:

1. Magnetic Polarity: The top of the magnets could be North or South. We call this “North to Strings”, or “South to Strings”. You may find other manufacturers call it something like “South up” or something like that.
2. Coil Direction: Once again, there are two options: Counter-Clockwise and Clockwise. Generally, we’re talking Clockwise from ground, or, the black lead on your pickup. You’ll hear us refer to this as either “clockwise from ground to hot”, or “counter-clockwise from ground to hot”.

Now that we’ve discussed what polarity is, let’s break down how you can find your own pickup’s polarity so you can avoid mixing out-of-phase pickups in the future. This may seem a little daunting, but with the right tools and our handy guide, you’ll be able to identify your pickup’s polarity in no time!

DETERMINING MAGNET POLARITY

Magnet Polarity is super important – unlike coil direction, you cannot easily reverse it if things are out of phase. At the shop, we can magnetize a pickup any way, easily – it’s much harder to do after the pickup has been made, depending on the style.

Your pickups either have North or South aimed at your strings. If you have a compass, it’s easy to do: hold the compass on top of your pickup, on its side. This will allow you to observe which way the compass pulls.

Tricks to find Magnetic Direction:

1. Use a compass! Opposites attract, so, if you hold a compass to the top of the pickup, it will pull the opposite towards it. You can get a cheap compass online or at a local hobby store.
2. Use a Magnet marked North and South. Just like the compass, you’ll feel and see what orientation attracts your magnet.

Determining Coil Direction:

When we wind a pickup, we wind it one of two ways – “clockwise from ground to hot”, or “counter-clockwise from ground to hot”. Here’s what that looks like:

Illustrated above is where the coil starts and ends. As you can see, the coil starts on the left on Bottom To Winder, and on the right with a Top to Winder pickup.

The Start of the coil is always shown by our Black lead, and the last turn is denoted by our White lead. For a real-world example, see below:

In the above image, the Strat Pickup on the left was wound counter-clockwise from Ground to Hot. The Tele Bridge on the right has a clockwise coil direction, from Ground to Hot.

Tricks To Find Coil Direction

How Pickup Polarity Works in a Guitar

Let’s put all of the concepts of Pickup Polarity together with a common example: Stratocaster wiring. With Stratocaster pickups, positions 2 & 4 of the 5-way switch are both in-phase and hum-cancelling.

When the Bridge and the Middle pickup combine, their coil directions and their magnetic orientations reverse. This cancels hum and keeps pickups in phase:

The same applies for virtually any instrument that uses Single Coil pickups: Telecasters, Jazz Basses, Mustangs, and Jazzmasters…the list goes on.

Correcting Phase Problems

If your pickups are out of phase, you might be able to fix it yourself. You can try to reverse the coil direction, for example. However, reversing only one “attribute” of a pickup can cause some unintended side-effects. Here are some potential problems, and how to diagnose them:

Hum-Cancelling Pickups

Hum-cancelling pickups are a little easier to identify, as one part of the puzzle is already given to us. A Humbucker (this can be our hum-canceling P-90’s, Hum-Cancelling Jazzmasters, Split Blades, etc.) has both magnetic directions already. So, you don’t need to worry about Magnetic Orientation. What you do need to know is Coil Direction. This is really easy – just order your pickup with Multiple Leads, or, your can reverse your coil direction by flipping the leads:

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As you can see, Polarity can be a little confusing. We hope this helps break it down. If you have any questions, give us a call! We’ll do our best to help.