Guitar Electronics Lab · Contribute
Measure a guitar, send the readings
Guitar Electronics Lab is only as good as the numbers inside it. If you have an LCR meter, a soldering iron and a guitar worth characterising, this is how to measure it so your readings sit beside everything already in the library — and the form to send them on.
Measure at the pickup, not through the controls
Everything after the pickup is part of the circuit and changes what the meter reads: the volume pot, the tone pot and its capacitor, the selector, the jack. Lift the pickup's two leads off the controls and put the probes on the pickup itself. A reading taken at the output jack describes the whole cavity, and there is no honest way to get the pickup back out of it afterwards.
The procedure
On the bench
Get the pickup on its own
Disconnect both pickup leads from the controls. Measure it with the hookup lead it comes with and say so in your notes — that lead is part of what you are reading. Keep steel away: a steel bench top, a vise or a lamp base a hand's width from the pickup joins the magnetic circuit and moves both the inductance and the loss.
DC resistance, on DC
Read it on the meter's ohms range, not as an AC resistance. An AC reading already carries losses that do not belong in this number, and it comes out high. Null the probe leads first. Note the room temperature if you can — copper moves about 0.4 % per degree.
Inductance at 120 Hz
If your meter lets you choose a test frequency, use 120 Hz. On 50 Hz mains, 100 Hz is the second harmonic of the strongest stray field in the room and a pickup is an excellent antenna for it; 120 Hz sits between harmonics. Run the meter's OPEN compensation first, with the leads laid out exactly as they will be for the reading. If the meter also offers 1 kHz or 10 kHz, send those too, each labelled with its frequency — extra information, not a substitute.
Capacitance
Same OPEN compensation, same lead arrangement, then read capacitance. It is a small number sitting on top of whatever your test leads contribute, so the compensation is most of the measurement. If your meter cannot read it, say so rather than estimating.
Humbuckers: one coil at a time
Take each coil separately, with the other coil disconnected at both ends — not just switched out of circuit. If you can also read the pair in series and in parallel, that pins the coupling between the coils, which is the figure most often guessed at.
Record the conditions
Strings on or off, and at playing height if on — the strings are part of the magnetic circuit. Pickup height. Cover on or off. Anything in the guitar that is not standard.
Name the meter
Make and model. The instrument is part of the measurement: two meters can disagree at the same setting, and knowing which one produced the numbers is what lets them be compared with the rest of the library later. It is a required field on the form below.
Before you send
What makes a submission usable
- The guitar and the pickup identified as closely as you can: make, model, year if you know it, and which position it came out of.
- Every reading with its unit and the test frequency it was taken at.
- The meter, by make and model.
- How the pickup was wired and how it sat when you measured it.
- Anything unusual — a rewind, a swapped magnet, an old repair, a pickup nobody publishes a figure for. Those are the ones worth the trouble.
- A reading you are not sure about, marked as not sure. That is far more useful than a confident wrong number.
I read everything that comes in and check it against the model. What holds up gets implemented, and those figures become part of the library. I cannot promise a reply to every submission. Every preset says where its numbers came from, so a measured one will say it was measured, and with what.
Send it in
Your readings
Back to the tool
Guitar Electronics Lab is where these numbers end up, and where you can see what a change to any of them does to the response.