Several months ago, I got a bit frustrated with the sound of my custom Slash L Apache “Katie May” (shown to the left). To me, the bridge pickup, while it sounded fine, didn’t seem to have the volume of the neck pickup, and it also sounded a bit thin and reedy.
So I raised the pickup to be closer to the strings, thinking that it would give me more volume. It didn’t really improve the situation. And that’s what I get for making adjustments and pulling the solutions out of my ass!
But still, I persisted to play around with the pickup heights, not really understanding what I was doing until I felt I dialed it in with the amp I was playing at the time, which was a DV Mark Little 40. Then I got my BOSS Katana 50 and got an absolutely rude awakening. That was yesterday.
I hadn’t played Katie May in awhile, so I decided to pack her up for my weekly church gig, along with my Katana. I figured that I had made the tweaks to the pickups so she’d sound just fine. Man! Was I wrong! Once I had everything set up, my tone sounded like SHIT! I spent most of the time during rehearsal and even during service tweaking my EQ. In the end, I had to pump up the bass and really roll off the treble and mids to get a useable sound. Pissed me off!
Granted, Katie May has a naturally bright sound. The neck-through design combined with the mahogany strip sandwiched by hard rock maple is bright; like Telecaster bright. That’s okay. I expect that. Plus the Lollar Imperials generate a fairly strong magnetic field, so putting them closer only brightened up the sound because of the Gauss effect (basically, the stronger the magnetic field, the brighter the sound).
As far as Gauss is concerned, I only found that out by doing a little research this morning. So I lowered the pickups back to where they were first installed. Luckily, I had put pencil mark on each side of the pickup those many months ago. And the guitar got its voice back.
Okay… so silly me for messing around with my gear in a completely brainless way, and being way too cute for my own good! Lesson learned.
Guitar Gear 
Yeah…Been there, done that!