Quote:
Originally Posted by jeepthing07
One more question... I bought a relatively cheap guitar so the pickups aren’t the best if I replaced them with Seymour Duncan's would that help sustain any or is it purely tone?
|
Hotter pickups (more windings, stronger magnetic field, or both) tend to have better sustain, although magnet strength is a double-edged sword; too strong of a field can actually kill your sustain, as well as putting you at risk of "Stratitis," where strings produce dissonant tones on top of the intended notes. And using a good overdrive will compensate somewhat for use of lower output pickups. So may moving your pickups closer to the strings, up to a point.
Different guitar bodies and necks will have some impact, too. A light guitar with a loosely bolted-on neck, for example, would tend to have worse sustain than a heavy, 1-piece guitar.
But these aren't insurmountable problems, or Hendrix, playing a lightish Strat, with bolted-on neck and vintage single-coil pickups, would have had lousy sustain.