I'm sure we're all familiar with the debates and common wisdom about the difference in tone when the metal cover is removed from a humbucker (google it for considerable tone discussions 😄). Recently, someone studying music and audio production in college reached out to me for help with a project he was working on to test this topic.
He designed a solid experiment for this, even modding a guitar so that he could remove and work on the pickup from the rear, and he recorded a heap of tracks for A/B comparison. I went through these with him as a blind listening test and it was an interesting exercise. He'd hoped to get a wider view from some luthiers and luthier-adjacent folks so I added a link to an online listening poll to the Looth Group forum. He got some good data from that and shared it with me. I'm sharing it here because it's always interesting to bring a little science to guitar tone wisdom.
The online test was just two comparisons — a clean track and a distorted track. One part of each track is the covered humbucker and the other part is the same pickup uncovered.
Listen to the Clean Track (can you identify which part is the UNCOVERED humbucker?)
[audio m4a="https://dev2.loothgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/clean_track.m4a"][/audio]
Listen to the Distorted Track (can you identify which part is the UNCOVERED humbucker?)
[audio m4a="https://dev2.loothgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/crunch_track.m4a"][/audio]
The results are below. In case you want to have a proper 'blind' listen to these tracks before seeing results, I'll add a photo of some pickups (covered in this case) in a Les Paul to act as a break. Scroll past to see the results.
