I Discovered the Secret to Vintage Pickup Tone

Full disclosure: I didn't believe it either. But I tried it. And it actually works.

For years I chased THAT sound. You know what I'm talking about if you've ever heard a real '58 Les Paul or a '62 Strat live. It's not just "good tone". It's airy, open, almost acoustic. Super dynamic. It feels like the guitar is breathing. Woody, three-dimensional. A dream tone.

And yet, I kept thinking: how can that guitar cost $300,000?

What's really inside a pickup?

Let's frame it. A pickup is ridiculously simple. One or more coils of enameled copper wire and one or more magnets. That's it.

Today and back in 1958, they are made the exact same way with the exact same components. Nothing mysterious or magical. Even that wonderful 1958 Les Paul has pickups made just like that. So why does it sound so magical?

Fig.1: The first and the easiest thing to do is to remove the black protective tape around the bobbin. Must be clear that you have to be very delicate doing anything over a pickup. It’s easy to broke the wire and make the pickup go dead.

The legends we've all been told

For years we've heard everything: the famous scatter winding, the hand-wound irregular pattern. The AlNiCo magnets made from a different alloy that you can't find today. The different enamel coating on the copper wire, Formvar vs. Enamel, and many other legends.

If you want to understand what I'm talking about, go to YouTube and search for "real 1959 PAF clean tone" or "original 1962 Strat pickup". Close your eyes. It's not a compressed, flat sound. It's open, airy, acoustic, incredibly dynamic.

Trust me, the winding pattern, the enamel and all the rest make a minimal difference. That's not where the secret is.

The real culprit: wax potting

What is the one element that has truly changed and makes a huge difference? I'll tell you what it is: wax potting.

Vintage pickups were not potted at all, or they had a very light potting. Plus, over the years, the wax goes away. Anyone who has disassembled a real vintage electric guitar knows you find wax scattered all over the pickup cavities.

Fig.2: The pickup is enclosed into a thick shell of wax and paraffin. This makes the pickup silent and it prevents feedback. On the other hand it also prevents the pickup to “listen” to the wood offering a very compressed sound and just getting the sound from the strings.

Today, the industry standard is to pot pickups very heavily, sometimes in an autoclave under vacuum, to prevent feedback at high gain. And that's totally correct for modern high-gain players. But have you ever noticed how hard it is to get a controlled, Hendrix-style feedback with a modern, off-the-shelf guitar? You have to crank the volume to insane levels. With an old guitar it happens almost by itself, at reasonable volumes. The reason is that heavy potting.

How I lightened the potting: The oven method

WARNING - Read this first

This is an extreme tweak for tone-chasers looking for that last 10% of vintage character. It's irreversible and will void your warranty. There is a risk of burns and of destroying the pickup if you exceed the temperatures. Do it at your own risk, in a ventilated area, and if you want to try, always start with a cheap test set.

This is how I did it:

1. Remove the black tape. Often there's a black protective tape around the coil. Just removing it already makes the sound a bit more airy. Be extremely gentle.
2. Get a small oven. NOT your kitchen oven where you cook food. Use a small electric lab / toaster oven with a precise thermostat. Never a microwave, never a gas oven with an open flame. Set it between 60 and 75 degrees Celsius - 140 to 167 Fahrenheit. No more. If you go higher you risk melting the enamel coating on the wire and the pickup will short out.
3. Wrap and position. I personally wrap the coil in laboratory blotting paper, an extremely absorbent and expensive paper. If you don't have it, you can use simple paper towels. Place it under the pickup and, if you want to maximize the effect, loosely around the copper coil.
4. Bake and watch. Put the pickup in horizontally on the paper and wait. After 10-15 minutes you'll see the paper start to get saturated, becoming transparent. That's wax. When it's saturated, change it. You can repeat the process several times depending on how much wax you want to remove.
5. Cool down, reassemble and... MAGIC!

Fig.3: Applying a controlled amount of heat the potting melts draining out from the pickup.

What happens? And my personal test

When a pickup is heavily potted with modern methods, it's not microphonic. It mostly captures only the string vibration. It's precise, but flat.

By removing part of the wax, the pickup gradually becomes microphonic and starts to capture the wood vibrating as well. By finding the sweet spot, you get the perfect compromise between feedback and microphonics. You'll be able to trigger controlled feedback by getting close to the amp even at relatively low volumes. The effect is incredible.

Let me be crystal clear about one thing: Musiclily pickups already sound great out of the box. They are well-voiced, balanced, and fantastic.

So far, I personally tried this on two sets I have at home: the ST60 set and the Wilkinson flat-pole set. They were already great.

Fig.4: A pickup almost free from the wax becomes slightly microphonic and gets the sound from all the vibrating parts of the guitar. The sweet spot is to have just a light wax potting to prevent fool and unpleasant feedback.

But with these tweaks, they went from "great" to "mystically magical and fantastic boutique vintage pickups". That's the woody, natural and expressive tone I was looking for.

Bonus trick: Try setting your pickups noticeably lower than factory specs. Fender, for example, recommends about 2.4mm and 2.0mm on the bass and treble sides respectively, while fretting the last fret. Increase by half a millimeter at a time and find your sweet spot. The closer the strings are to the pickup, the more compressed and "stringy" the sound is. Lower them, and it becomes more acoustic and open.

I know not everyone wants to mess with an oven, and that's totally fair. It seems that in the future Musiclily will offer pickups that are already lightly potted or completely unpotted, specifically for those of us chasing this ultra-vintage character without any mods.

This is my personal holy grail and I only just discovered it.

You have to try it to believe it.

You’re welcome.