Best Electric Guitar Pickups

You don’t need a new guitar to dramatically improve your tone; choosing the right pickup for your guitar is the most effective way to enhance it. And the good news is there’s never been more choice out there with a huge variety of pickup types that allow you to make the right choice for your style of playing. We’ll guide you through the best electric guitar pickups here so you can make the right choice.

A pickup is essentially a metal coil wrapped around magnetic pole pieces that creates a magnetic field to reproduce frequencies. These are detected by the pickup when your guitar strings vibrate as you’re playing and then amplified. A number of factors can affect what frequencies a pickup listens to – including the type of magnet and number of coil windings – and this determines its character and the kind of strengths and weaknesses it may have for different musical styles.

Generally, a pickup with a ceramic magnet type produces a stronger magnetic field than Alnico with a response that can result in a hotter sound with stronger treble attack. Alnico magnets are more common and smoother with Alnico IIs especially good for jazz, with their smooth clean response, while the hotter and wider range Alnico V pickups prove the most popular with guitar builders.

The best electric guitar pickups: how to buy

If you find a guitar that you love the feel of but feel it's lacking once plugged in, new pickups can be the most effective way of trading up your tone for a fraction of the price of a new guitar. But knowing what you want and what’s on offer from various pickup types is a vital first step. That’s where this best electric guitar pickups guide can help. 

A pickup can contain one magnet – or even several magnets – that can vary in shape. Think of these magnets as a pickup’s engine. Traditional single-coil pickups found in guitars like Strats and Teles have rods made of magnetic material rising up through the pickup. These rods are called pole pieces, and they direct a magnetic field to each of the strings.

Humbucking pickups usually have an additional bar magnet under the pole pieces. Single coil pickups are more susceptible to noise from hum and interference due to having one wire coil, while the two coils in a humbucker create a reverse polarity that reduces or ‘bucks’ the hum. In humbuckers, both coils create a magnetic field, which increases the signal strength they produce and adds more sustain to your tone.

You might also want to consider a P-90 pickup. Think of them as a hot-rodded single coil with a wide coil that accentuates the mids; good if your tone is getting lost in your band’s mix. Gibson designed it in 1946 and it’s often referred to as a soapbar because of the rectangular shape. Billie Joe Armstrong, Pete Townshend, Neil Young and Tony Iommi have all harnessed P-90 power. 

Active pickups use additional circuitry in a preamp built into the pickup that usually requires a 9-volt battery to provide power. They have been adopted by players ranging from Metallica’s James Hetfield to David Gilmour. If you’re a humbucking metaller, or you’re looking for less hum and more compression to your single-coil tone, active pickups are well worth a look. 

The legendary tone of the Gibson ‘59 Burst Les Pauls is coveted by players for good reason – and Billy Gibbons’ Pearly Gates is an iconic example. So when one of the greatest pickup manufacturers sought to recreate its humbuckers, the results were always going to be special, and that’s why this is number one on our best electric guitar pickups rundown.

Whether you’re a Les Paul owner looking to supercharge your bridge position tone, or want some golden era vintage blues mojo for your humbucker upgrade – these won’t disappoint. 

A relatively bright high-end offers sustain with rich harmonics, while midrange raunch can be found too. The Pearly Gates comes with a four-conductor hookup cable to allow for a variety of pickup-switching options.

A best-selling design by Lindy Fralin, the Vintage Hot has been a go-to pickup for Strat players looking to upgrade for three decades now and its name is pretty suggestive as to what you can expect – an open sound but with sizzle in the higher end that’s ideal for lead players wanting to shine. 

The Vintage Hot is pitched between Fralin’s other two popular single-coils – fatter than it’s most vintage Read ‘54 but brighter than its Blues Special. It’s all about balance and clarity that many players regard as the ultimate Strat pickup.

As they were first to the table, EMG once had a monopoly in the active pickup field, and although competition is fiercer, its established models still prove to be popular with players - including metal’s greatest rhythm player. 

A longtime EMG user in his ESP models, it wasn’t until 2009 that Hetfield asked the company to combine its active tone with some of the character of a single-coil. This set was its response and an evolution of the popular EMG-81 bridge and 60 neck the guitarist used for 30 years. 

The JH-N’s larger core offers more attack and low end than the 60. The JH-B offers a clearer low end to combine with the 81’s attack.

If your entry level Squier or Fender Strat or Tele needs upscaling in the tone department, Fender have the answer here with one of the best electric guitar pickup options when it comes to value. 

Available in Strat or Tele sets, the Tex Mex bridge pickup is overwound and proves its beefier worth with overdrive – cutting through with grit and balance. Blues fans can also be comforted to learn these are the same pickups found on the signature Jimmie Vaughan Tex-Mex Strat.

There’s a lot to love about the vintage P-90s of the 50s – clarity and highs that cut with fat mids. Less appealing is the 60-cycle hum that can prove maddening in certain situations. Mojotone delivers the old school vintage spec 42 gauge coil wire, lower Gauss Alnico magnets and scatterwound coils for handwound character... but without the hum.

Mojotone doesn’t use stacked coils or active circuitry to get these results but their design works. And if you’ve been wary of single-coils before because you want more beef or gain and without the unwanted noise, these are an investment worth making.