Pickup Placement

[Dale Goble]

Ted is sending me some of his pickups for my first build.
How does pickup placement effect the sound.
Close to the bridge ?
Close to the neck ?

Want an ole dirty blues sounding kind of thing.
Teds pickup sound great and he's winding them to give me that ole Delta dirty sound.

Thanks for your help.

[Tim]

to my ears the bridge pickup gives a clearer cleaner sound. the neck being fuller and richer but also muddies up quicker when you start to use overdrive/distortion. i personaly dont like a lot of overdrive and cant stand straight distrotion. so i tend to play on the neckpickup a lot.

[The Phrygian Kid]

the fellow a page ago who asked about a pickup on rails, yeah gibson did a bass with this called the 'ripper'

you can get a real appropriate rail if you pull apart an old computer cd drive

im of the opinion that the closer to the bridge you put the pickup the more you emphasise odd order harmonics and the closr to the neck the more you get the even order harmonics, which is why the neck pickup sounds rounder and fatter and the bridge pickup is spiky and crunchy.  also the closer to the bridge it is the closer to the strings you gotta go because the amplitude of the singing string is narrower at that point.  I like old lap steels where the pickup IS the bridge

[Mungo Park]

As a side not this thread links to the Ed Roman site, lots of writing their about his passion to build great guitars. I unfortunately was wooed by his rhetoric and  bought something from him. I bought overpriced crap!!!

 I figured his best advertising is his customers. I have bought a lot of things from the net but this was the first rip off.

  Sorry to hijack the thread but I did not want people to see his site and mistakenly buy anything from him.

                                                                  Cheers Ron.