What Does Phase and Polarity Mean for Your Guitar’s Pickups?

Your Strat plays great and sounds good, but it’s not quite right yet, so you’ve decided to spruce up the electronics to tweak the tone to your personal taste. You’ve spent months and countless hours researching. You logged onto Strat discussion forums and contacted shops and pickup makers. You interviewed your guitar buddies and your guitar teacher, subscribed to all kinds of blogs and newsletters about Stratocasters, and you read all of the PG articles and books you could find. Your YouTube algorithm is now full of Strat demos. Finally, after all this work, your shopping list is ready to go for a new Stratocaster pickup set.

For the bridge pickup, you decided to go for a certain model from the Smith company—one of your favorite pickers is using this one as well. On Smith’s website, you can read: output (DCR): 6.5k / magnet: alnico 5 / wires: plastic coated.

For your new middle pickup, you chose one from the Jones company. A lot of your new forum friends recommended this one because it is “super silent.” On the Jones pickup company website, it says: alnico 5 magnets / 42 gauge Formvar wire / 5.8k / middle RWR.

And finally, your dream neck pickup is one from the renowned Wilson pickup factory that is built just like they used to make them in the late ’50s. Searching the Wilson website, you found the technical specs of this pickup: alnico 2 magnets / DCR: 6.15k / treble 7.5, mid 5.5, bass 4.5.

Everything is only one click away now, and you pulled the trigger right away on your Friday evening. On Monday, your pickup set was delivered, but you had to wait until Friday to have the time to put them into your Strat. What a week, full of anticipation, and you can’t wait to heat up your soldering iron! After spending two hours on Friday evening putting everything together, you plug into your favorite amp, eager to reap the fruit of all your labor.

You start with the bridge pickup. It sounds marvelous after adjusting the pickup height a little. Now, the middle pickup—delicious. And the neck pickup—well, simply stunning. You can’t believe that it worked out so perfectly for you.

When you want to hear the in-between pickup positions, you start with the bridge and middle pickups, awaiting the total Knopfler experience. You strike a cool chord, but what the heck is this? The sound is thin and shrill with a lot of noise. How can that be? Switching over to the combination of neck and middle pickup, you receive the same thin, shrill tone, but dead quiet with no background noise.

You instantly open up your Strat again, checking all solder connections several times, but everything looks good. You start to post this problem on some forums, sharing sound samples and explaining what happened. After a short time, you’re told you have an out-of-phase problem and are given conflicting advice on how to fix it. It may seem, at this point, that you’re at an impasse.