Gorilla Pickups - Via delle sette chiese 60, 00145 Roma - P. IVA IT15589641008
INSTALLATION GUIDE
FIRST THING
The following informations are provided to assist you with the pickups installation and wiring. Before going any further keep in mind that a basic understanding in electronics is required along with proper tools and working space. For this reason, if you're not a tech, we recommend to let a luthier do the job and avoid damages to the product.
INSTALLATION REQUIREMENTS
Make sure that the pickup fits the holes for the mounting screws and the pickup's housing on your guitar. We design our products to match the market standards but sometimes, expecially in the case of 7 and 8 strings, some differences between brands arise and small corrections on the instrument are needed before starting with the installation.
INSIDE THE BOX
We provide springs and screws for both ring and body mounting plus polyurethane soapbars to prevent the pickups from moving inside the housing.
OUR CABLES
Each Gorilla pickup has a 4-conductors shielded cable in case of humbuckers or a 2-conductor shielded one in case of single coils (or bass humbuckers). This allows you to perform any kind of configuration, phase shifting, coil splitting, ecc.
HUMBUCKERS WIRING
SERIES:
Solder the white wire to the volume pot tag, the black and the red wire together, the green and the bare wire to a fixed grounding point. For coil splitting you'll need a standard (or pushpull) DPDT swith to ground the red/black wires, leaving only the north coil working.
PARALLEL:
Solder the white and the red wire togheter to the volume pot tag. The black, the green and the bare wire together to a fixed grounding point. For coil splitting you'll need a standard (or pushpull) DPDT switch to disconnect the red wire from the volume pot tag.
Our humbuckers are designed to work with 500kΩ potentiometers when you have volume and tone and 250kΩ when you use only volume. Choosing only one 500kΩ potentiometer for the volume (when the tone is not installed) will boost the output and midrange presence.
SINGLE COILS WIRING
Solder the white wire to the pot tag of the volume control, the black and the bare wire to a fixed grounding point. When you buy a full set the neck pickup, or the middle one in case of strat replacements, will automatically be reverse pole and reverse wound. For this reason always use the white wire as signal and the black and the bare ones as ground to avoid phase problems.
Our single coils work with both 250kΩ and 500kΩ pots, expecially when the pickup is expected to be paired with an humbucker. The rule to apply is that raising the value of the potentiometer increases the output and the presence of high-mids.
NECK HUMBUCKERS ORIENTATION
We design our neck humbuckers to be installed the same way as the bridge ones. For this reason we recommend to never rotate the pickup and follow the natural position of the cable, you can use the logo under the baseplate as reference for the positioning. Be sure to leave at least 5mm under the pickup baseplate for a safe routing of the connection cable.
PICKUP HEIGHT ADJUSTMENT
After all the installation and wiring operations we arrive to the most important setting. The distance between the strings and the poles of the pickup drastically changes many of the components of the sound, from equalization to volume and sustain. The first rule is to keep a safe distance from the strings of at least 3/4 mm to avoid sustain loss and bad overtones due to the magnetic pull of the pickup. Remember to place the foam under the pickup to make the sound as free as possible from unwanted mechanical noises. Once you have a starting base you can chose to eventually lower the pickup to adjust the equalization or balance the volume between the neck and the bridge. Placing the pickup further from the strings will reduce the output and overall power making it cleaner and less focused on the instrument's transients.