Where do I place the pickups? © Leonardo Lospennato, Berlin, Germany Checkout his great book and work at lospennato.com. Plucked strings vibrate in a complex way, a superposition of several vibration modes activated simultaneously. Slanting is not recommended for humbuckers, though. Placing the pickups in an analogous way will likely produce an analogous dynamic response (not necessarily a similar tonal response, though, unless you use the same pickups). The string width at the bridge is the distance along the bridge from the center of the first string to the center of the last string. In a place that allows each pickup to better fulfill its mission. In order to place the bridge saddles in the correct location, you're going to have to hold the ruler on the 12th fret (on the actual metal fret, not in between the two) & then measure the distance from here to the inside of the guitar nut at the top of the neck, where it meets the wood. This will also provide you with nut-to-fret and fret-to-fret dimensions. In short, trying to avoid (or meet) any tonal node is a non-issue. Bridge pickup: in electric guitars the bridge pickup is placed a few millimeters away from the bridge. If 12 th fret intonation for a string is flat then you'll need to move the point where the string actually contacts the saddle back towards the nut a little. If you are installing a Tune-O-Matic bridge, the bridge is often tilted slightly on the bass side, by roughly 3 degrees or so. The nearer the bridge, the more "trebly" the tone will be, with lower output level (due to the shorter amplitude of the string vibration at that point). Our Fret Calculator also gives you compensated bridge placement -- only at stewmac.com! The free Fret Position Calculator at stewmac.com does the math, but can I trust its numbers for placing a Martin bridge? Most of the pieces of the guitar are glued together, so it might not seem at first that lengthy and detailed instructions would be needed for gluing on the bridge of the flattop acoustic guitar. The four vertical grey bars mark the location of the pickups' magnets, and show how each pickup "reads" the different vibrations. Is all about testing different angles, and checking the results. The placement of pickups along the guitar scale is undoubtedly one of the most influential factors of the sound of the bass and the electric guitar. In the next figure, the sinusoidal curves represent the first eight vibration modes: The biggest curve represents the fundamental mode, and each subsequent overtone has less amplitude and higher frequency than the previous one - ad infinitum. See the page entitled Calculating Fret Positionson this site for more info on fret placement. 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