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Gorilla Pickups - Via delle sette chiese 60, 00145 Roma - P. IVA IT15589641008

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INSTALLATION GUIDE

WELCOME

 

If you are here is probably because you bought one of our products so thank you for choosing Gorilla Pickups and supporting our work. Your set or single pickup is handwound and handmade by our team, following your customizations, in our workshop in Rome, Italy.

WARRANTY

We warrant this product to be free of component and manufacturing defects for 5 years to the original purchaser. The warranty is not transferable. The warranty does not cover damage resulting from misuse, improper handling, modifications, or normal wear of covers, bobbins and poles.

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. If you need additional info check the support page on the website or contact us via email.

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 foam soapbars to prevent the pickups from moving inside the housing. The foam under the pickup will also free the pickup from unwanted mechanical noises.

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 or pickup selector switch. Solder the black and the red wire together and insulate. Solder the green and the bare wire to a fixed grounding point. For coil splitting use a DPDT switch/pushpull to connect the red/black wires to the ground (only north coil active) or to connect the white wire to the red/black wire (only south coil active).

 

PARALLEL:

Solder the white and the red wire togheter to the volume pot tag or pickup selector switch. Solder the black, the green and the bare wire together to a fixed grounding point. For coil splitting use a DPDT switch/pushpull to disconnect from the volume pot tag or pickup selector switch the red wire (only the north coil will work) or the white wire (only the south coil will work).

 

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 compared to the 250kΩ.

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 pickups 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 part, the distance between the strings and the poles. This paramether drastically changes many of the components of the sound, from equalization to volume and sustain so is important to keep a safe distance to avoid sustain loss and bad overtones due to the magnetic pull of the pickup. Press the last fret of the fretboard and check that the distance between strings and poles is no less than 3 mm for Alnico 5 pickups and 4 mm for Ceramic ones. Once you have a starting base you can chose to eventually lower the pickups to adjust the tone 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, adding low presence and reducing the hi-mids. Placing the pickup closer will result in a more compressed sound with more string presence and in some cases will affect the intonation and octavation of the instrument.