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Guitar Electronics Lab
A pickup is one part of a larger circuit, and what we hear is never the pickup on its own. Everything between the string and the amp input, simulated together: the pickup's own resonance, the controls in the cavity, the cable, and what the amp's input does to all three. Change a potentiometer, change the tone-control arrangement, or load a whole guitar — thirty-six presets across eight guitars, and a schematic you can edit by tapping a value. Open the note under the controls and every switch tells you whether that setting is stock for the guitar you loaded.
The resonant peak is not the whole story, but it is very important. Where it sits and how tall it is tells you a great deal about how a pickup behaves in the circuit around it — and that circuit moves it: the volume pot, the tone cap, the treble bleed, the cable, the amp's input. Other things matter too. The magnet, the cover and the steel shape the magnetic field, so each string is picked up a little differently, and the pickup's position under the strings changes the sound more than any of it. That position is not modelled here, and the tool says so itself. For the conventional wiring this does cover, working the electrical side out is what gives you a mechanism to predict the sound.
The height of that peak is loss. Every pickup calculator I have seen models a coil as an inductance with a DC resistance and nothing else. That model is roughly right for a Strat and badly wrong for a humbucker: the steel pole pieces and the cover are shorted turns, and they eat 7 to 10 dB off the peak. An alnico-rod single coil loses 1 to 3 dB. That loss depends on frequency, it is in this model, and it is most of the distance between a calculation and your guitar.
Honest numbers
What is exact and what is estimated
The circuit solve is exact for the model it is given. The honesty lives in the model. Every preset says where its numbers came from in its own “why these numbers” note, field by field — a published measurement, a maker's spec figure, or an estimate from construction — instead of presenting all of them as equally solid. Two things are left out on purpose, and the tool says so where it matters: where each pickup sits along the string, which is what the comb filtering between two pickups comes from, and hum. There are no active pickups here — the tool models passive guitars only.
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Measured something unusual? Send the readings.
The presets here come from published measurements, makers' figures, estimates from construction, and my personal measurements. I want this to grow into the biggest single place of measured guitar electronics and pickup characteristics, and that needs instruments I am never going to have in front of me. If you own an LCR meter and can find your way around a control cavity, measure the odd ones — the old, the rare, the rewound, the home-made — and send the readings. I read every submission, check it against the model, and implement the ones that hold up. Your figures become part of the library everyone here uses.
Reading the bench
Three things this makes visible
DC resistance tells you almost nothing
It is the one number everyone quotes, and it is the one that decides the least. Load two pickups with the same DC resistance and the curves are not close to each other. Inductance is what you hear — it sets where the peak sits, and the loss sets how tall it is. Both are editable here, so you can watch the number people argue about do nothing.
The loaded peak, not the datasheet peak
A pickup measured on its own and the same pickup in a wired guitar are two different curves. The volume pot loads it, the tone cap parks a second corner below it, the cable drags the peak down in frequency, and the amp's input finishes the job. The plot here is always the loaded one, because that is the one you hear — and one checkbox puts the lossless model on the same plot, so you can see how much the textbook curve was promising you.
Two pickups on together get brighter, not softer
Everybody describes the middle position as soft and scooped, so people assume the two coils damp each other. They do not. Put two pickups in parallel and the resonance goes up in frequency and up in height, every time. The soft sound is real, but it comes from where the two pickups sit along the string, and that is one of the things this tool deliberately does not model. So it will show you the electrical half honestly and tell you the other half is missing, rather than draw you a curve that agrees with the story.
Another free tool
The same discipline, amp side
Guitar Electronics Lab stops at the amp's input jack, because that is where the guitar stops. Tone Stack Lab picks the signal up there and does the same job for the amp's tone controls — real component values out of real amps, with the response moving as you turn them.
Free, donation-based
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Everything here is free and stays free — no account, no paywall, no ads. It runs on donations. If a tool saved you an afternoon of work, consider supporting the time and effort that went into building it.
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Pickup Coils in Parallel: Why Not?
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The Pickup Equation: Resistance, Inductance, and Capacitance Demystified
Rewired it every way this tool allows and the guitar still fights you? I take a small number of one-to-one consultations →