Staggered pickups with flat necks. Opinions?

[Teleblaster]

Hi
What are your experiences with using staggered post pups with necks with a radius of 12" or more? Fender seems to do this a lot. Any problems?

[Andy]

My hamer has a 14" radius,and somewhat thin profile, very comfortable,very playable.

[marnold]

Hi
What are your experiences with using staggered post pups and necks with a radius of 12" or more? Fender seems to do this a lot. Any problems?
By "staggered" do you mean with the A and D pole pieces slightly higher than the rest, or do you mean with all of the pole pieces forming an arch shape to follow the contour of a vintage radius?

My Squier '51 had the latter and I didn't like it. I lost a lot of volume on the E strings. I swapped it out with the Jackson neck pickup that was in my Charvel Model 7 and the problem went away. The Jackson pup has the staggering with the A and D slightly higher.

My Area 61's in my Floyd also have the A and D slightly higher and the Floyd has a 12" radius. Works great.

That's my limited experience.

[Teleblaster]

By "staggered" do you mean with the A and D pole pieces slightly higher than the rest, or do you mean with all of the pole pieces forming an arch shape to follow the contour of a vintage radius?

My Squier '51 had the latter and I didn't like it. I lost a lot of volume on the E strings. I swapped it out with the Jackson neck pickup that was in my Charvel Model 7 and the problem went away. The Jackson pup has the staggering with the A and D slightly higher.

My Area 61's in my Floyd also have the A and D slightly higher and the Floyd has a 12" radius. Works great.

That's my limited experience.

I was referring to pickups that are staggered all the way across. That is good to know about raised A & D pickups though. Fender puts a lot of staggered strat pickups on 12" radius necks which seems off to me. I'm building a couple strats right now and I'm trying to decide what would go good with a warmoth 10-16" radius neck. If staggered posts are a concern then it really limits my options.

[Duff]

Done plenty of that! But no more. Reminds me of that song, "Things I Used To Do".

Actually, a lot of pickups are non staggered, obviously. I would think that non staggered pickups would be excellent on a flat neck. If you raise up the pickup with the staggered pups you might experience strings hitting the highest poles or being too close and sounding bad and then the outer strings being farther away from the tops of the poles will cause a differential in the picking up of the pickup, an unevenness. The staggered pups are for small radius necks, right? If you lower the staggered pup down where the high poles sound right, the lower pole pieces might be so low that you experience a noticeable output difference from the outside strings. On a ten inch radius this would not be noticeable I wouldn't expect, but on a sixteen inch radius I think there would be a noticeable difference to your ear.

I might be wrong on this, but I think with a flat neck you would be better served by a non staggered pickup. If only from a mechanical viewpoint as in the strings hitting the higher poles if you raise up the pups or sounding poor because they are too close to the strings.

Just some ideas,

Duffy

[tot_Ou_tard]

My hamer has a 14" radius,and somewhat thin profile, very comfortable,very playable.
Which Hamer is that, Andy?