> On every electric guitar, the pickups have dampening springs. From trolling online guitar forums, it sounds like these are pretty important for dampening some vibrations from affecting the pickup.
This is a strange statement. Many pickup designs have springs as part of their mounting mechanism, but it's not for dampening vibrations - it's to allow the height of the pickup to be adjusted.
Certain pickups (notably, off the top of my head, Fender Jazzmaster & Jaguar pickups) don't even use springs for this - instead there's a block of foam placed underneath the pickup that compresses as the pickup is screwed down.
Of course, it's possible some cork-sniffer guitar nerds will claim that they can hear the effects pickup springs have on tone (and the effects of different metals in the springs, no doubt), but these are the same people who will claim that they can hear the difference different glues make on tone, or will swear up-and-down that a real $5000 Klon has a richer and fuller sound than a $100 clone made from the exact same circuit with the exact same components, or that tube amps sound better because "electrons can't survive in a crystal lattice" [0] (so buy my $100K tube amp!), or...
"Tone" is the sum of many little things (and then some bigger things). There can certainly be differences between guitars that seem quite similar. Since part (most?) of "tone" comes from the player there can be subtle "UX" things that have an influence or even the mental state of the player and what they believe to be true.
I can believe that spring mounted vs solidly mounting to the body can make some difference (physics says there should be) but I can also believe the difference can be so small as to be negligible.
People gravitate towards combos that are known to be successful. Since they don't understand the exact mechanisms at work it's safe to say let's have a mahogany body, a certain pickup, mounted a certain way, a bone nut, certain fingerboard material etc. and expect certain results.
In rough order of significance, electric guitar tone is influenced by:
- technique (absolutely the most important)
- amplifier
- pickups + strings
- everything else (debatable whether you can even notice it)
I don’t know if there’s hard evidence but I think folks who think wood and nut types and whatever make a difference are nuts. The relative difference in stiffness between the strings and the body is so huge that believing that the neck and body effect tone seems to me like believing that asphalt vs concrete effects how a tennis net vibrates.
Most people don’t have a lot of speakers to swap in and out so don’t notice it, or they use combo amps, or they just leave an amp hooked up to the same speakers. If you switch between an open-back 1x12 and a closed-back 4x12 stack with completely different speakers, the difference is HUGE.
That's a good point, I've only ever used small 1x10 and 1x12 combos (Fenders). I've wanted to try a 4x12 Marshall stack for a while but have yet to find the opportunity.
If you're ever tempted to buy a 4x12, you may want to give the 2x12 format a shot first. It's a lot easier to deal with. I got a 2x12 from Avatar and I'm super happy with it.
In terms of the actual soud you hear, pickups, pedals and amps are going to make the most difference.
In terms of whether you want to listen to it, technique reigns.
The best gear in the world won't make you a good player and a good player can make even crap gear sound ok, but I'm not sure I agree with technique being most important to tone.
Not saying that technique isn't important
(obviously it is), but the same player with the same technique is going to sound completely different on a single coil going into a vintage combe versus an active humbucker going into a hi gain stack.
Keyboard wood choice creates subtle a difference. Bridge structure changes sustain amount, also the guitar building method changes the outcome.
I have an Ibanez BTB670 bass with neck through construction. In practice it's a very long, 35" neck with two big blobs of wood glued for body. Its sustain is amazing. It just goes on unless you mute it with your fingers.
Similarly pickups have a default tone, but it can be tuned upto a point. Out of the box, a BTB670 and Fender Jazz Bass sounds so different in their default, direct to amplifier configurations. Everything has an influence in that tone. Some things have bigger influence, some less, some negligible.
It’s a very complex dynamic system: the strings pull the neck, the neck pulls the body, the body is also pulled by strings. The pickups make noise because they vibrate with the body while the strings vibrate in their magnetic fields. And this means pickups influence the way strings vibrate closing the loop. Add the details of the way PUs are wound, the way their cores warp over time, the way wood dries (or doesn’t) depending on how and what lacquer was used, different woods laminated together etc. and the result is a very complex dynamic system. With all such systems, predicting behavior dependence on a minuscule parameter change is a fools errand without modeling. I certainly can’t make any claims about wood affecting things or not. All I know is, that otherwise identical instruments feel and sound different to me and that’s all that matters. Maybe psychology, maybe physics, maybe math plays a role. Let others work on that while I play the blues on my favorite LP.
> I think folks who think wood and nut types and whatever make a difference are nuts.
I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt here and assume that you meant “solid body electric guitar” and not just “electric guitar”.
However, anyone who has even come close to an archtop knows your statement to be false - any guitar which does not sound good acoustically will generally also sound poor electrically. This is definitely _more_ noticeable on guitars with air inside them, but is also true of solid guitars.
Yes, I meant solid body guitars. As soon as acoustic resonance becomes part of the sound, you start getting feedback on the strings and a lot of other phenomena. Wood makes a huge difference with acoustics, or else all acoustics would be made of plywood.
It does matter though.. you can tell that a strat is a strat whether it has humbuckers or single coils, and you can tell that a les Paul is a les Paul with any pickups too. The body of a guitar does resonate; you can feel it vibrating against your body. Whereas as long as they’re new, clean strings I can’t hear much difference between brands. Clean vs dirty strings makes a huge difference though.
Of course, you can make something rather NOT like a Strat that sounds like a Strat, too.
I've got a guitar that is pretty unlike a Strat headless, neckthrough, full floating trem with a wide range...and it sounds pretty straty. Of course, I specced it with single coils, a maple neck, an alder body.
The type of wood the guitar is made of seems to make a big difference, from what I can tell. The shape, less so. I’m on the fence about bolt on vs set necks.
BB King used his whole big body: his guitar resting on his belly with only one finger holding the note and doing a vibrato let the entire entity vibrate in unison.
Tried to second your comment about playing quietly on a very loud amp but looks like it was deleted. So I'll say it here: at some point I tried playing out of a very high headroom amp, fingerstyle, and it completely changed my playing and understanding of the guitar. I "wasted" so many years on small tube amps that break up right away.
Get a decent acoustic guitar. If it sounds good on it you’ll probably be able to make it sound excellent on an electric. Every little imperfection in technique shows on an acoustic. Being more difficult to play only helps when moving the piece to an electric.
Pickups and amps are by far the biggest difference. In an acoustic guitar, sound is produced by the whole body of the guitar resonating. In an electric, sound is produced by the string vibrating in an electromagnetic field above the pickup poles. The ideal guitar string contacts the body at three points along the body (nut, fret, saddle), on ideally as narrow a surface as possible at each of those points.
Energy transfers back and forth between the strings and body, which is why the body can generally be expected to have some impact on tone. How much energy transfer goes on? I don't know, but you can use a mechanics stethoscope to at least hear what the vibrations sound like when they transition into the neck and body.
I also suspect that bridge placement makes a big difference in the amount of energy transfer that goes on. Electric guitars generally have the bridge near a node, so that limits the energy transfer somewhat. Basses have the bridge further back; partly that's due to ergonomics, but it also has the effect that more vibrations transfer to the body, which ought to reduce sustain. In a guitar you usually want more sustain, but in a bass too much can be a problem.
Nut material makes more of a difference on open strings, but in general a plastic nut is squishier and it absorbs more energy than something like bone, causing the note not to sustain as long. The saddle is the same way, but plastic saddles aren't typically used in electric guitar so it's not usually an issue.
If you ever get the chance, try putting together a strat with one of those cheap paulownia bodies and compare it to.. well, anything else that is exactly the same except for the body material. To me, the difference is glaring; the paulownia is so treble-heavy it's intolerable.
By what principle does it make it more treble-heavy? This is the part that I haven't had explained to me and I don't understand it. I have a basswood Mustang and it sounds fine with decent humbuckers in it.
High volume and high gain are two different things, often found working together.
Under extreme conditions the little steel adjusting springs are free to rattle at all frequencies and resonate at some. They are so close to the permanent magnets of these high-impedance pickups that you can really hear it sometimes.
Once you know your desired pickup heights, some players have these springs replaced with precision-matched lengths of flexible plastic tubing instead. Gives a much more limited range of height adjustment though.
Somewhat like the whammy-bar springs in a Stratocaster, if you really crank it with their cover off you can hear it if you "strum" the springs. They can also be dampened.
Bad news is that the most important connections to be well-soldered are in the guitar where everything should be solid as can be, with all dissimilar metals encased by the molten lead alloy.
Changing pickups and changing speakers will still have the biggest effect compared to the slight nuances.
I don’t think you’ll see much criticism of people’s personal preferences or habits for their own guitar playing, even for things that are pretty eccentric or obviously superstitious. What is legit criticism in my view is when people are trying to convince other people of these things (and especially selling these things at exorbitant prices by making dubious claims).
One of my favorite "did you know?" relates to early shoegaze bands using "vintage" jazzmaster and jaguars. The bands would buy those, sometimes original 60's instruments, because they were cheap. And the foam under the pickups would be almost gone so the pickups would be almost bottomed out and be much further away from the strings than originally intended. The guitarists didn't know this of course, but that became part of the "shoegaze" sound so people now buy brand new jazzmasters and dump the pickups all the way to the body.
You don't have to be a cork sniffer to hear small things affect your tone. You just have to play very loudly on half-broken instruments - which isn't everyone's cup of tea.
I'm an electric bassist, and springy pickups unnerve me. For one thing, I sometimes rest my thumb on the pickup. So I've replaced the springs with hard spacers, cut to the desired length. As a result, my pickups are solid, and not adjustable.
For another thing, the foam turns into goo after 40 years, which is how long it's been since I set up the instrument.
I think you don't want your pickup to vibrate. Not sure what happens if it does, is there some interference. I bet you could test it, just take the strings off, vibrate the body somehow and listen to the signal closely.
Guitars with dogear P90’s don’t have any springs at all. They’re just screwed right to the body of the guitar. They were made that way because it was cheap, (and then of course as you say it became magic mojo later..)
I don't know about dampening screws on pickups as I don't think I ever saw them; they use springs on each screw to keep them pushed up and reduce screws play, but I'm not sure they're the same thing.
Anyway, guitars with a spring vibrato bridge, have this faint but audible natural spring reverb inside their body which by contact affects the strings too adding more warmth to their sound.
It would be worth experimenting with a set of all different springs so that the force applied to the bridge is the same, but they would resonate on different frequencies therefore making the reverb effect bandwidth wider.
> The basic difference between these two similar terms is that trawling involves a net and is typically done for commercial fishing purposes, while trolling involves a rod, reel, and a bait or lure," and is typically done by recreational fishermen.
As lostlogin noted, words have different meaning in different contexts, and the fishing definitions do not apply to online discussions - except perhaps on a fishing forum!
Here's an example:
I went trawling through your HN comments to find something I didn't like so I could downvote it.
Naw, I didn't really do that, I'm just trolling you!
The definition misses a common usage - to antagonize (others) online by deliberately posting inflammatory, irrelevant, or offensive comments or other disruptive content.
I wonder though, based on the professional/enthusiast fishing definition, could you call someone who is paid for (digital) trolling, a trawler?
Are you sure that tube amps don't sound better than solid state amps? This is such a common knowledge in the "guitar world" that I can't believe that it's not true. And I swear that I've heard the difference myself...
Edit to further elaborate I've heard that solid state amps are used in metal more commonly because they have a different tone then tube amps which would be more common in a bluesy type sound.
> Are you sure that tube amps don't sound better than solid state amps? This is such a common knowledge in the "guitar world" that I can't believe that it's not true.
Poets around the world throughout history have tried to quantify beauty and failed. I always find it humorous that guitar players think they can succeed when they are far less well-equipped to the task.
However, a couple of points:
1) Old solid-state amps were mostly built to be cheap, so they sucked. Modern ones are constructed significantly better.
2) Vintage tube amps often have more variation (and may or may not have been repaired faithfully which increases the variation) so you occasionally get one that has "magic".
The downside is that most of the amps don't have that magic--you will probably never encounter the "stage queen" personally. Another downside is that you can lose the "magic" pretty easily.
This is something that the vintage amp guys all gloss over. If you got the "stage queen"--congratulations! Of course the other 300 in the production batch don't sound anywhere near as nice.
3) Dimebag Darrell, for example, liked his solid-state Randall sound very much. Who are you to argue?
4) Modern modeling amps are getting REALLY good at mimicking the tube amps. This means that you CAN have that "stage queen" that you will never encounter personally. And you can create sounds that the stage queen can't. Whether they're "pleasing" is a different story.
5) Each individual amp has a "sound"--whether solid-state or tube. The question at the end of the day is: "Do you, personally, like how that amp sounds?" And, if the answer is "Yes", plug your guitar into the amp, play what you want, and tell the poseurs to go pound sand.
Those Randall JFET amps sound like "chainsaws" when they break up, and I'm pretty sure he liked that. And he used them from way back when he wasn't famous.
The KRANK stuff came MUCH later in his career and KRANK paid him quite a lot. And there's lots of discussion about how he didn't really like the KRANK stuff all that much.
I will bet you $1000 that not a single person can reliably determinate which tone is from a real tube amp vs a solid state Axe Fx 3 in a blind A/B test. Why spend 6k on a real tube amp when you can have hundreds of physically modelled amps and pedals, not to mention all the effects and "fake" things you can do like modify internal circuits and stuff... makes no sense
This is just my two cents, but if you break it down into two components - frequency response and latency - then it's easier to imagine. With the latest modelling techniques (neural nets etc) it's possible for solid state amps to get very, very close to the frequency response of pretty much any tube amplifier in my experience. Expensive modelling amps and plugins are really nice.
The second issue though is latency - when players say it "feels" different playing through a tube amp, my hypothesis is that they are noticing the latency (or lack thereof). Any kind of digital processing is going to impose some kind of delay compared with a tube amp which is a direct electrical signal. I'm aware that the delay will be on the order of milliseconds (sound travels roughly 1 foot per ms through air) and the effect could be replicated by moving the amp further away etc. It would also help to explain the change in sympathetic vibrations within the instrument. Shorter delays and high SPLs could have a non-trivial effect on the resonance of the guitar body for example.
Emotion. I have been able to tell a difference between a digitally modeled amp and a tube one but I have failed to do so for my own amp modeled by a Kemper. I suspect good players will be able to tell even that difference. Playing a tube amp is a different experience, you feel the sound as well as hear it, your instrument works with it as well altering the sound further. Also, the pedals as well as the guitar form a singular circuit (when they are unbuffered) that acts in unison. I don’t think there’s an off the shelf model of my ac15, my sunface fuzz and my LP working together. Too many combinations. Once again, music is a very emotional thing. If the knowledge of playing a good roaring tube amp makes you feel better, you’ll play better. If the knowledge of having a reliable tone stack on a usb stick works for you, awesome.
Experienced guitarists can and they have videos all over YouTube. Most common giveaway? Aggressive pick attack. Valve amps and modeling amps respond in subtly different ways. They also respond differently to volume - that's important for guitarists who set their amp near the breaking point and use the volume pot to control their tone.
Having said that, for the average bedroom/small gig player these subtle differences are too minor to bother with. Especially when a modeling amp can accurately emulate so many different valve amps. Sounds good and you can save a lot of money!
BUT - I would be remiss to say that you shouldn't own at least one valve amp. Take the one you emulate the most and buy it. You'll be happy!
"...I've heard that solid state amps are used in metal more commonly because they have a different tone"
Partially false. The general trend in metal has gravitated towards tube amp distortion (and digital modeling of it) precisely because of the different tone and responses vs solid state amps.
As a guitarist there's a certain response you get with a tube amp vs digital and solid state.
As an HN reader, I struggle to describe and quantify this quality besides the generic descriptors of 'response' and 'feel'.
You’ve also got stuff like the keeper modelling amp and newer axe FX models that can sound indistinguishable when coming through good full range speakers.
One thing that can make even modern solid state amps sound bad is crappy speakers. The bulk of solid state guitar amplifiers are combo amps with a single crappy 10” or 12” inch speaker in a cheap cabinet.
In the 90's they were trying to sell these to guitar players. Nobody seemed to care that if you sent a regular wave down the line and measured it at the receiving end, then did the same thing after chopping out the magical bit of fake electronics, the signal still came out the same.
Small point - 'tube amps' unconditionally sound better than solid state. It's a marked difference that doesn't really require a trained ear or anything, if you played a few chords on a 'warmed up tube amp' vs. 'solid state' to someone who's never seen an electric guitar in real life, they'd be able to hear the difference.
The difference is unambiguous and players overwhelmingly chose tubes, all other things being equal (i.e. cost, hassle). Unless you're playing maybe a very clean sound (jazz?) without the most remote hint of warmth or distortion, tubes are it.
It's ridiculous that someone would call out 'tubes' as somehow being a kind of nerdy/fake/poseur guitarist connoisseur melodrama. It's literally the most important point differentiation of amps, to the point that almost all tube amps sound better than almost all solid state (at least in the same class).
While someone might possibly take umbrage that 'tubes are not always better' - there's basically no room for someone to say it's a 'petty concern'.
I’m struggling to work out what you mean by “warm” here. By a musician’s definition, low impedance pickups and solid state electronics (usually those with input transformers) have produced some of the warmest guitar tones on record. Even a mid-tier archtop plugged directly into a solid state amp produces _incredibly_ warm.
A trained guitarist's ear might notice the difference, but I highly doubt a crow would care. Also you are overstating the difference, and by no means is your opinion uncontested (just putting this out for the non-guitarists in the HN crowd). Even for those who can identify and prefer the tube sounds, digital modellers like Kemper do exist and do exist and seem to do a fine job in blind tests (see for example Anderton's on youtube).
I don’t agree with that, but you don’t deserve the downvotes - plenty of people agree with you. I think the magic is in the way the output tubes interact with the speaker, mostly. But you can get the same responsiveness with a carefully designed solid state output stage. It’s just a lot harder. The coupling through the output transformer allows the speaker to push back against the output tube which adds a little resonance and changes the frequency response, to duplicate that in solid state you have to use a complex feedback loop.
I think yours is the most proper explanation in this thread as to why if anything is special about tube circuits. The more sane guitarists will commonly speak of "tube compression" - on the power amp side, coming into play as volume is cranked - being the key attribute that is sought after. It is dynamic and noticeable enough that a non-musician could most definitely tell the difference in an A/B test if given a demonstration.
The downside is that all of those 100W amplifiers sitting in hobbyist living rooms often don't get enough power to achieve this without being too loud. The solution is just to buy a smaller amplifier or apply attenuation to the output circuit.
Nice to see some electric guitar geekery on HN :). I started playing last year during the pandemic too, but I had learned a bit in elementary school and I played alto saxophone for around a decade in various school jazz groups.
Gentle suggestion: try to see how many different tones you can get out of one sole pickup by varying your technique (angle and strength of attack, angle that your finger is fretting the string, the part of your finger you fret with, amount of vibrato, type of vibrato, gentle bends, etc). Try practicing with the amp cranked so you can play notes at normal volume just by brushing the pick against the string and listen to the errors it reveals in your technique. The electric guitar is an extremely sensitive instrument. Pickups do make a huge difference (particularly switching between singles and humbuckers), but I got this advice from a teacher and it has totally changed my perspective on tone. If you can develop a deep understanding of the relationship your technique has to tone, you can find a tone that is yours on any guitar, I guarantee it.
Jimi went from a $5 acoustic in 1958 to being dead in 1970. That's less time than what it takes most of us to go through our GAS (gear acquisition syndrome) and just enjoy playing the darned thing.
Ooh that one is easier than mine. Would have been outside the scope for this project though (likely needs custom connectors).
Takes 30 seconds-ish to swap mine, you pull it out, unplug the jack, plug the jack into the next one, slide it in. Not "on stage" easy, but definitely "messing around in my garage" easy.
It's extremely tempting to try to speed up your progress on the guitar using your existing engineering skills (e.g. what we have here), mathematics skills (e.g. learning music theory), or other resources (e.g. buying loads of gear), but the only way reliably to make progress is practice, practice, and more practice playing the guitar itself.
Often the cheap necks can be made quite nicer with a bit of extra fret work. If the edges feel sharp then it's a matter of filing/sanding them to get them smoother. If there's buzzing then re-level and re-crown. There is a wealth of information on guitar building. If you want a bigger challenge, build your own neck. It is doable with hand tools though the right power tools certainly make it easier.
If you want to drill straight holes without a drill press there's this little guide doohickey you can buy that you hold against the piece and put your drill bit through the guide.
Another trick for straight holes is to put something on the bit (like a washer or something that moves freely) and it should stay in the same spot. If it slides forward/backward the bit isn’t level. This probably isn’t a good technique for drilling pilot holes for a neck but it works well for things where a Good Enough™ tolerance is acceptable.
Thanks for the tips! I actually tried the guide doohickey but I still failed to get good straight holes. The hard part was that the guitar is not a really level surface to rest the guide on, so I had some complication getting it to sit well.
> Lately I’ve been learning to play guitar. I wanted to be able to try out a bunch of different pickups on my guitar, to get a feel for what sound I prefer.
I've been playing for over 10 years, and I still don't really care. I have a strat with the standard three single-coil pickups and a Gibson with two humbuckers. I'm sure it makes some difference, but where I'm at, I can't hear enough of a difference beyond the big things that it just doesn't matter.
It makes a big difference if you have a good amp that doesn't have a dull preamp stage. Some of the newer tube designs are extremely responsive to a change in how they're loaded (same goes for all the shitty unbuffered drive pedals that inexplicably sound good).
In my rig I have an SSH guitar with a higher output neck and bridge with a coil tap and run it straight into a blackstar HT40. The pickup selection and volume knob give me all my clean/dirty/overdriven tones without pedals, so there's less noise and less that can fail. It would be really hard to achieve that without the time I spent to find a set of pickups that works.
I think Stratocaster single-coils and Gibson humbuckers cover almost all of the sounds you can get out of an electric guitar. The bridge pickup on a Telecaster is overwound and a bit louder than the bridge on a Strat, but the difference is pretty subtle if the Strat is setup correctly. The only other really distinct sound is the P-90, but it's not nearly as common as the other two, and it's also a variation on single-coil tone.
You usually split a humbucker rather than tap it. Either way, that’ll give you a lot less grunt than a P-90, which are just as hot or hotter than the average PAF-style humbucker with both coils going.
I'm 70 years old. My ability to hear subtle differences in sound is probably at least 20 or more years in my past. This is why I have no intention of buying a PonoPlayer, or any of the other outrageously expensive high resolution music players.
It’s awesome to see this—the post makes it look quite straightforward to build your own guitar!
But: As a guitar player myself I have learnt that GAS is ever-tempting, especially pickups.
Personally I think that if all the time I spent reading “sound descriptions” on pickup manufacturers’ websites I would instead have spent playing, not only would I play much better, I would also sound much better.
Sound comes out of your fingers more than out of anything else. Billy Gibbons would sound like Billy Gibbons no matter what pickups one puts in his guitar. He would surely notice the difference, the vast majority of his audience wouldn’t.
Good point. In fact, since a large portion of my day job consists of teaching, and teaching involves a substantial portion of helping students allocate their time, I would probably have loads more time for playing if I stopped doing that.
Problem is, I wouldn’t have any money to pay for gear, let alone a roof over my head.
By the way I thought I had expressed clearly in my comment that I found the post amazing. Sorry if this didn’t come through.
Somnium Guitars [0] also makes guitars with easily hot swappable pickups. They have a mounting system where you can put most pickups into their mounting module and click it into place from the back of the body. It’s still a bit pricey, but starts at a less expensive $2,495 MSRP vs $4,500 from Relish.
Very cool DIY. Was hoping to see what it looks like from the back with all the electronics in place? And maybe a video of how the swap works in practice would be helpful to illustrate.
An interesting idea, but not convinced, as they don’t look very adjustable for height, for example, my Tele pickups are higher on the treble side, compensating somewhat for the higher output of the bigger strings. You could cut this into the mount, but that defeats the purpose of being able to test things quickly, the moment one variable is fixed, you have an instant constraint. This experiment is a trade-off, I get that. He’s not an experienced guitar player and wants to fiddle with pickups. Fine, enjoy, EVH was all about getting the sound to match what’s in his head anyway, whatever it took.
They have the same height adjustment options that most guitar pickups do, the pickups are held on to the mount with two screws and you can screw in/out to adjust the height accordingly. It works in reverse of the normal system since the screws are backwards, but it works
There’s zero mention of this in article, unless I missed something? He expressly stated that he wanted to switch pickups without removing screws, so unless pickups have to be pre-set and stuck to a mount that is stuck to the guitar body, I don’t see it? My Tele neck pickup is actually not attached to the body, for example, it is attached to the pick guard!
For those like me who didn't know: a pickup is a thingy that generates a tiny electrical field around a string. This allows electronics to translate string vibrations to an audio signal.
One thing missing (for me) from the article is a rough idea of what the effect could be. Why would you care about easy swapping at all? Why not find the right one(s) and stick with that/those? Why does changing speed matter - would you change them between songs?
(Yes, I didn't know about pickups before this article)
It's a laborious process that has a significant impact on tone. You usually have to restring the guitar when you change them out.
The biggest change would be between dual coils ("humbuckers") and true single coils. Most modern humbuckers have four leads (you only need two to make a sound, you get two leads per coil) which allow you to wire a switch on the guitar called a "coil tap" which allows you to disengage the secondary coil. This allows you to have a dual coil that functions sonically as either, and it is very desirable for musicians that need a diverse range of tones for their set list (good example is if you ever play a wedding and take requests).
You're also never happy with it. I've changed all the pups on my three guitars multiple times.
Coil splits are very useful, but they never REALLY quite get there. Even when the secondary coil is off, there's still additional magnetic drag/pull on the string.
A good true single coil has this chime to it that I never get from a split (or tapped) 'bucker.
Perhaps for a bit of additional explanation, a guitar pickup is a variable reluctance sensor. It's a coil wrapped around a magnet. The magnet sympathetically magnetizes the string, and then the vibrating magnetized string induces a voltage on the coil. The strings have to be made of a magnetic material such as steel, nickel, or one of the magnetic stainless alloys.
Beyond what was mentioned about single and dual coil, each pickup has a unique resistance and inductance, which at first glance might affect the frequency response of the typically crude circuit in the guitar. And the magnetic field may also produce some damping of the string motion. Those are some things that might affect tone quality.
Because we guitarists enjoy the wild goose chase that is the never-ending quest for ultimate tone, and thus need to try as many pickups as possible.
But on a more serious note - it's because woods sound very different, and pickups will sound very different depending on what guitar they're in. It's a pain to take the strings off, de-solder a pickup, solder in a new pickup, and put on the strings - only to discover that the pickup doesn't sound any good. Being able to swap them out in mater of seconds is an all-around improvement.
Faraday’s law of induction: when a magnetic field (generated by the guitar's pickups)is changed (by the metallic strings) a current is induced (this current is the signal that is created in the pickup and goes to the amp).
Might want to look at Somnium Guitars for a more refined (not DIY) version of this. They have a really nice system. Not cheap, but the build quality is excellent.
Not an expert, but I did recently upgrade the pickups in an older guitar. I learned that not all pickups are wired to the guitar the same way. Seymour Duncan HotRails had to be connected differently than Seymour Duncan VintageRails, for example. This would be a complicating factor to any hot-swapping system.
One could get a Line 6 Variax and play with endless variations on body types, pickups, tunings and recordings of vintage guitars. Old ones can be had for very little these days.
This is a strange statement. Many pickup designs have springs as part of their mounting mechanism, but it's not for dampening vibrations - it's to allow the height of the pickup to be adjusted.
Certain pickups (notably, off the top of my head, Fender Jazzmaster & Jaguar pickups) don't even use springs for this - instead there's a block of foam placed underneath the pickup that compresses as the pickup is screwed down.
Of course, it's possible some cork-sniffer guitar nerds will claim that they can hear the effects pickup springs have on tone (and the effects of different metals in the springs, no doubt), but these are the same people who will claim that they can hear the difference different glues make on tone, or will swear up-and-down that a real $5000 Klon has a richer and fuller sound than a $100 clone made from the exact same circuit with the exact same components, or that tube amps sound better because "electrons can't survive in a crystal lattice" [0] (so buy my $100K tube amp!), or...
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVTj08qTwGw