What is the Pickup Selector switch?
If you are a beginner you may not know how to use the pickup selector switch or know what it does, so in this article I will explain how it works. Electric guitars have a pickup selector switch that you can move up and down to choose which pickup you want to use to get different sounds out of your electric guitar. I’m going to use the Fender Stratocaster with the five way pickup selector switch as reference because the Gibson Les Paul normally only has a two or three way pickup selector switch. However, I have included some notes for both styles of guitars to help you understand how to use your electric guitars pickup selector switch. The pickup selector switch can be placed in different places on your guitar, some are up near the top part of the guitar near the neck and others are placed down near the bottom next to the electric guitar’s bridge, regardless of where the switch is placed it will work the same on the guitar.
Changing Pickup positions
If you move the electric guitar pickup selector switch all the way down to the bottom position you will place it in first position, this will allow you to play from the bottom Bridge pickup. If you own a Les Paul style electric guitar the bottom position is still used for the bridge pickup.
If you move the guitar pickup selector switch up by one notch into second position you will be using both the bridge and middle pickups together. Move the pickup selector switch in the middle third position and you will be using only the middle guitar pickup.
-Note: I should point out that electric guitars that only have two pickups (Neck and Bridge) are sometimes designed where you can use both the bridge and neck pickups together in the middle position because they don’t have a third pickup to choose from.
Continue to move the switch up into fourth position and you will now be using both the middle and the neck pickups together. Last but not least, move the pickup selector switch all the way up to the top near the guitar’s neck and- you guessed it; you will be using the neck pickup in fifth position.
Sometimes the manufacture will make some mistakes when soldering the wires together and the order for the guitar pickups will be in the reverse order, if that is the case you can either take it apart to have someone solder it back together in the correct order or you can just leave it as is and get used to it.
The point of the guitar’s pickup selector switch is to get different sounds out of your electric guitar. The middle position gives an even sound, while the Bridge position is usually played for blues and jazz music. The neck pickup is normally used for rock and country, but people tend to throw rules out the window and use whichever pickup sounds the best to them.
