Pickup question - technical'ish advice

samzadgan

I have a guitar with 2 pickups, humbucker in the bridge and P90 in the neck.

I find that I dont use the neck pickup at all, im kinda use to 1 pickup guitars these days.

However, i dont want to remove the pickup as it would leave a hole which i cant cover.

So my question is, if simply unsolder the neck pickup will it be completely inactive, or is the magnet still pulling on the strings? I usually wouldn't care, as i would lower the pickup into the cavity, but in this particular guitar the cavity is really shallow so the pickup is pretty close to the strings.

WezV

The magnet will still be there, that will have more effect on tone than it being removed from the circuit.


you could remove the magnets and reassemble the pickup as a dummy coil.   Or if you don't want to risk damage to the pickup just buy a DIY P-90 kit and assemble the bobbin without any magnets or wire, or buy a dirt cheap one to strip down

Adam_MD

Edit - Wez got in there before me.

The magnet will always pull on the strings unless you could drop it low enough or remove it altogether.  How about buying a cheap p90 from the forum it could even be a broken one and remove the 2 magnets?  It would fill the gap and look right at least. Then you could save the one you remove so you can always put the guitar back to stock if you need to.  

gusman2x

Is this in your Millimetric?

guitarfishbay

I seem to remember thinking it wasn't too difficult to remove the magnets from P90s when I had them, as I'm sure I did some swapping. 

WezV

guitarfishbay said:

I seem to remember thinking it wasn't too difficult to remove the magnets from P90s when I had them, as I'm sure I did some swapping. 

It's not that difficult to remove them, only a bit more fiddly than a humbucker.

but it is worth marking any magnet you remove from a pickup to help put it back in the right place if you need to. 

samzadgan

hmm...not a bad idea bout the fake p90...
ill look into that...thanks for the suggestions guys.

@gusman2x yeah its the milli. Its not a permanent thing, but right now i find myself not using the neck pickup at all, not because it sounds bad, the middle position is actually really nice for cleans...but im doing more doomy stuff...

gusman2x

Good to know, as I've ordered the same configuration!

guitarfishbay

It's worth doing the dummy thing just to maintain the look... HB/P90 does look cool, especially in that guitar