Pickups In Church


Introduction

    This is where I share my experience with electric guitar pickup selection in church.  Hopefully this will help church guitarists who are honing their craft.

Caveats

    Where would we be in life without caveats?  First off, I play mainly Seymour Duncan passive pickups.  I am not against active pickups, but I prefer to not worry about a battery.  I am also not against other pickup makers, just that I prefer Seymour Duncan.

    Also, I realize not everyone thinks the way I do, and not everyone's ears are the same.  That's ok.  I'm just here to share my own opinion as to what constitutes good pickup selection or at least some guiding principles.

First: Tone

    Tone is absolutely essential.  One should always pick the best pickups for their electric guitar, as well as the best electric guitar construction, that they can afford.  You can make good clean sounds dirty for crunch and lead tones, but you can't make dirty or bad tones clean.

    Worship music is one of those styles where one will need electric guitar pickups that sound good clean.  There's always some professional church musician that is using a clean bridge pickup, for example, and you may be tempted to emulate them.  If you get an Ultra Destroyer bridge pickup, though, your clean tone will sound horrible, thus defeating the purpose.

    So in my opinion, start off with a good clean sound.  Your neck (and perhaps middle) pickup(s) need to sound good clean.  For instance, I played the Seymour Duncan JB bridge pickup for a long time.  It got old, though, because to my ears the JB has horrible clean sounds.  So I sold the last guitar that had this pickup.  It was a difficult decision because the Seymour Duncan JB is a very versatile bridge pickup and one can hear it on all kinds of styles from Jeff Beck to KISS to Megadeth to the Deftones.  But in the end, I stopped using the JB for its cleans.  I read some review like 10 years ago about someone saying they liked the Full Shred bridge for church music and it stuck in my head, so years later I tried it and I found they were correct.

    I tried the Full Shred bridge for the first time in my Showmaster QMT HH and fell in love with it.  Finally, a pickup that could do heavy tones including metal (think Rob Zombie) but also sounds good clean.  So my advice is generally to pick pickups that sound good clean because you'll need good cleans in worship music.

    Thus, I also recommend a more vintage (low) output neck pickup for balance.  Eventually, in worship music you'll stray into jazz and clean tones.  In my experience in worship music, I've never run into a song that required a neck pickup like a Distortion to get the sounds: again, you can always make the output dirty using overdrive and/or distortion effects.  But you'll want to sound good clean, to be able to get bell-like tones, as there are a lot of worship songs that use this type of sound.

    So if both the neck and bridge sound good clean, but the bridge is medium output, that will give you enough flexibility to play heavier tones with the bridge when needed, but to play nice clean tones in both positions.  Some examples for HH guitars would be a '59, Jazz, Seth Lover (in my opinion, wax potted), Pearly Gates, '78, Alnico II Pro, Full Shred neck, or Anitquity models, to name a few.  I have experience with the '59 and Jazz and they are both excellent for worship music.  I recommend, generally, the '59 for most guitars except basswood or body woods that are very mid-range heavy, in which case the scooped sound of the Jazz (a favorite of mine) is what I recommend.

    Then, to round out the selection, a moderate-output bridge in an HH guitar.  For this, I recommend the Custom 5, Full Shred, or Screamin' Demon.  I have experience playing the Custom 5 in a guitar shop and the cleans were good, so I can recommend it.  I own a Full Shred and it is probably the best Seymour Duncan bridge pickup for church due to its articulation and tight lows.  I have a Lil' Screamin' Demon for my Showmaster SSS, so by extension the Screamin' Demon should be good for church.  I have tried the JB in church, and it is more of a high output bridge.  Again, the JB cuts through great but it has poor cleans to my ears.

    Here is perhaps the best group of bridge humbuckers in a YouTube video.  You can hear that the Full Shred and Custom 5 can still handle metal while also sounding very good clean.  In case not being able to play harder styles is a concern you have, you have nothing to fear.  Indeed, to my ears, the Full Shred sounds the best in this video.

Second: Hum Cancelling

    Churches are not usually rich.  Most churches in the USA have an average size of 100 or less people in attendance.  They often meet in older buildings that don't have good (modern) wiring, and may have gotten their lighting used from some school that was upgrading to LED.  This means that church environments often have a lot of sources of 60Hz hum.  I played a Fender Lite Ash Stratocaster (3 x Alnico II Pro) for a long time in church and no matter the wireless or new cables or other things you can do to prevent the hum, it almost always happens with true single coils, or at least it did in the early 2000s.  It may have gotten better, but I still prefer to take the precaution of having an electric guitar with a setup that permits hum cancelling pickups.  For these purposes, humbuckers still tend to reign supreme, and even the Gretch players have humbuckers in the sense that Gretch pickups cancel hum.

    On the other hand, the dynamics and beauty of single coil pickups are hard to ignore, with famous players like Lincoln Brewster.  So then what should a guitarist do if they are experiencing hum problems in church?  The first option, in my opinion, is to check the wiring and improve the shielding of the guitar, whether yourself or having a shop do it for you.  You'd be surprised what guitars, even more expensive Fender guitars, don't have the best shielding.

    But then what do you do if that doesn't fix the problem?  In my opinion, hum cancelling pickups.  Seymour Duncan has some excellent hum-canceling single coils such as the Classic Stack Plus (a favorite of mine).  And if you are upgrading your guitar's pickups, you might as well go that direction.  Seymour Duncan has other good hum-cancelling single coils like the Custom Stack Plus, Hot Stack, and of course strat-size humbuckers like the Lil' Screamin Demon.  My experience with these pickups is not as extensive, so I recommend the Classic Stack Plus pickups.  I upgraded the bridge on my Showmaster FAT SSS to a Lil' Screamin' Demon, a medium-output bridge that is capable of handling metal but sounds good clean.  Again, there are pickups from other manufacturers as well, such as Fender Noiseless, but I prefer Seymour Duncan.

    I generally recommend, again, a vintage (low) output neck pickup and a medium output bridge pickup.  But in a Stratocaster, for example, you have the medium pickup.  I usually recommend a vintage (low) output middle pickup that is also hum cancelling.  But this can give you options.  For instance, you could get an Alnico II Pro middle RWRP and then use a 5-way super switch so that your neck and bridge pickups "split" when combined with the middle in the 2 and 4 positions of the switch.  Then you'd have at least one true single coil in the middle.  Or you could go crazy and make the middle position pickup a super hot output type and only use it for certain songs (not really something I recommend).

    And because I want you to see what I mean, here is a video of the Lil' Screamin' Demon bridge for harder styles:

Third, Switching

    Finally, the topic of switching.  I love Seymour Duncan pickups and their switching options.  My Showmaster QMT HH came with a 5-way switch from Fender (stock) that splits the neck and bridge to give you a quack position in 2 and a Telecaster position in 4.  For church music, this is incredibly valuable, as plenty of songs are clearly being played on Telecasters in the recordings.

    As for the Showmaster FAT SSS, what would I do with just a normal 5-way switch?  The temptation was to split all pickups in positions 2 and 4 but that's not feasible in my opinion.  And with Seymour Duncan Classic Stack Plus pickups, it's also not necessary.  I was surprised that in positions 2 and 4, the guitar still sounds good.  So all around, it's convincing as a Stratocaster sounding guitar.

    I generally recommend switching options that are easy to use and playable.  Try to pick options that require only one "action."  For instance, if I have to move my 5-way or 3-way switch and also pull out a push-pull potentiometer knob, that may be too many things to be able to reliably switch in church quickly.  This is, in part, why 5-way switches can be incredibly important for worship music.  If the controls are too complex, it's not going to be useful.

    Some people prefer to wire a push-pull "kill switch" for shutting off the guitar.  I can see the usefulness of that in worship, though I've never done it.

    Lincoln Brewster has a boost wired to his guitar so that pulling the volume knob out turns the boost on.  This can be useful for quick solos in church using any pickup (rather than how I typically play, switching to bridge).  However, one can also just put one's volume knob at 5 during normal playing and 10 during solos, so I can't say that a boost is a completely necessary option.

    On guitars that use a 3-way switch, some prefer to wire a push-pull so that pulling out splits both the neck and bridge pickups (think humbuckers).  I used to play that way, and I found it a bit useful.  There are also 3-way switches that are designed to be able to split both pickups into a "third humbucker" mode in the middle.

    Some also use options like a push-pull that adds the neck pickup to the bridge (think on SSS guitars) to give sound similar to a Telecaster.  And there are a plethora of Mega 5-way and 3-way switches out there that have many other useful combinations.  Generally, I recommend switching options that are easy.

Conclusion

    So for worship music, I recommend a good clean tone in all positions, hum canceling and shielding, and easy to use switching options.