CHEAP vs EXPENSIVE Guitar Pickups! - Can You Hear The Difference? 

Always making good, useful & genuinely interesting comparisom vids. Keep it up man!!

Every time I watch this video... the little voice inside me goes "stop shopping for pickups and practice!"

NIce demonstration of the fact that it's always the last 10% of sound costing 90% of the money.

The secret is 500$ amp Edit : wow I got 100 likes but I'm a *small youtuber 😢😥

actually it's absurd that we still pay some hundreds of dollars for a 70yo technology. it's more or less as if you were gonna pay 600$ for a nokia 3310, just because there is a strong brand logo. it's a magnet with some cables around, c'mon! by the way, great video, as always!

I’m a custom guitar builder. I use $40 Wilkinson ceramics as standard equipment in all my builds. I’ve yet to have someone complain about the sound. It’s all a scam.

Too funny. My son and I watched the video together. He's a HS senior and I'm an old man. We listened, paused, discussed and both agreed that the neck pickup was the less expensive pickup. Thought it was pretty simple. Then we listened the the bridge pickup and paused the video. He said it was the more expensive Fender pickup. I said no way, it didn't have the bite/energy (I like your term - clarity) that a strat bridge pickup should have. When you said it was the expensive Fender pickup, my jaw hit the floor. My son got up and walked out of the room, giving me that "what do you know, old man" look. I had to call him back in to let him hear the real answer.

Pretty damn good for 15 bux

I spent years replacing pickups on MIM Strat and a made in Indonesia Squire Strat. After a lot of money being spent on Seymour Duncan and Dimarzio, I went back to the stock pickups and realize they were the best sounding pickups of all. A Friend of mine did the same thing with his. Live and learn. The grass is not always greener on the other side. Its just a different shade of green.

Yeah, the extras cost for expensive pickups gave me ability to hear the fret buzz :)

Closer than you'd expect given one costs as much as a sandwich while the other as much as a new entire entry guitar (or many sandwiches!).

**Be sure to watch the riff comparison after the solos to hear some clean tones** Let me know if you'd be happy with these super affordable pickups or if you would prefer to spend the money on a more expensive set :)

The real question is: During a Live setting would you be able to tell if the guitarist was playing on $5 pickups or $150 pickups? I wouldn't.

This is the beauty of the internet today. 25 years ago, looking through catalogs and listening to guitar salesmen, you'd be inundated with so much marketing garbage. Tonewoods, "vintage voiced" pickups, resonance and sustain (which.... lol--if the body is resonating a lot it means it's absorbing a lot of the vibration, which means less sustain) etc. almost mean absolutely nothing, and even if there were any discernible difference, you'd have to be playing alone in a room and listening extremely carefully to really notice anything. But A/B tests of pickups, woods, expensive and cheap pedals, etc. just proves that much of what goes on in the industry is pure BS marketing, or differences that are so negligible that there are massively diminished returns after surpassing certain price points for specific items (pickups, pedals, amps, etc.).

This tells me that Fender pickups are way overpriced.

4:34 Darrell's bandmates: Hey man amazing tone on that solo! Darrell: Thanks! That's a Fender custom shop pickup, especially on the harmonics in the beginning you could just hear how they flew off the strings, the string definition...JK, I recorded it with the cheapest pickups ever made!

The more comparison videos i see the more it makes me wonder why people buy into all the hype of expensive gear unless your a musical genius and are doing all kinds of recording there is no need to blow 300 bucks on a set of pups i love to see the guy with a 3000 dollar guitar playin through a 100 amp in the bedroom tryin to read tabs i mean hell a 200 dollar guitar will do just as good its all in the hands imo you either have good tone or you dont a good player like yourself can jam a 100 dollar pos and make it sound awesome its all about makin a good sound with what you have not breakin the bank to sound like whoever because you will never sound like them all great players tone comes from the hands heart and GREAT TIMING well i hope this dosent offend anyone its just my honest opinions

I thought the cheapo pickups would be a joke but they weren't so bad. Love the white Strat, love my artic white HSS.

Dawg when you said the second solo was the fender pickups I was about to puke

Hi Darrell, could you please do a cheap guitar with expensive pickups vs expensive guitar with cheap pickups comparison? I think that would be super interesting!

The $150 pickups overall are maybe 30% 'better' sounding to me. Not 10x, or 1,000%, relating to the price difference. lol.

According to my ears the difference between the $15 ones and the $150 ones is $135. Thanks Darrell, I own a Squier Strat and the neck is the best on any guitar I have played & it sounds great, all stock.

Fender did sound better, but not 10x better. Not even twice as good.

The reality is, pick ups should never be 150 bucks.

The Fenders did sound a little better but not enough to pay for imo. BTW, most impressive to me is that you can remember--and play--the same riffs twice in a row. I forget a good riff as soon as I play it.

Fender PU's at 10 times the price sure didn't sound 10 times better!

Great comparison. The Fenders sounded better to me, but certainly not ten times better.

Seeing as to how simple of a design a single coil guitar pickup is, I see this as more a comparison between ceramic pickups and alnico. I personally prefer alnico, it's easier to dull the tone down than to try to add chime/clarity to the slightly duller ceramic pups. And this will be true throughout any price range. And as I mentioned earlier, a single coil pickup is a simple design, so as long as you do your homework and are able to figure out as many details about a particular pickup you're looking at (number of winds, alnico or ceramic, and what the output reads on a multimeter) you are pretty safe just finding the best deal. Obviously there are some factors which are less noticable to the ear but are more just the sentimentality of it, like handwound pickups from a particular maker (i.e. Abigal or something), in which case, yeah, you're going to have to pay a premium for that, and if that's what you're into then in my eyes you got just as good of a deal as anyone else getting any other pickup at any other price range. It's your money, your preference, and at the end of the day YOUR guitar tone.

expensive pick-up's = snake oil,

I have put many of those Guitarfetish $15 Strat pickup sets in my project Strats. It started when I was bought an MIM Strat body(unloaded) and I wanted to try to keep my costs down. I saw the $15 GF pickups and I thought, as you said, Darrell, for $15, if I don't like them, I can get different pickups and replace them. Well... I installed them and when I tested them out, I was blown away that a $15 set of Strat pickups can sound so good. I started buying two sets at a time just to have ready for another project. It became really hard to justify paying $150 for a set of pickups when I can use these $15 pickups. I found it hard to justify $70 and $80 sets, too. Yes, if you are a professional musician with an amazing ear and can hear really subtle differences, then I can see paying whatever it takes to get the sound you are looking for, but if you do not have that rare ability, and most of us don't, these $15 pickups are excellent. Now, just to clarify, as I see in the comments many people making this mistake. These are NOT GFS pickups. These are clearance section pickups on the Guitarfetish web site. They don't come with screws or height adjustment springs. They are not packaged in any way. They arrive wrapped in thin foam-like paper. But they are excellent pickups. BTW, Guitarfetish also has a set of Tele pickups in the clearance section that are just as good. They are $20 but worth every penny.

If Darrell plays it , what's the point of comparison . Everything gonna sound amazing :P

Fantastic video. Thank you for making as close to an empirical comparison as possible. In a live gig setting, even the most exquisitely refined ear could not possibly discern a difference. Even in a careful, delicate studio recording, it would impossible to hear any difference if the guitar were mixed in with drums, vocals, or any other instruments. The only remote possibility of hearing a difference is in a side-by-side solo comparison, which is what you gave us. Again, thank you for approaching the subject with wisdom, sanity, good ears, and excellent chops!

The funniest thing about most markets is that people tend to thing more price = more quality, which is horrifically UNTRUE! More price really only means there's a more prolific name stamped on it. This couldn't be more evident with Apple products! As for pickups, I've noticed through my quest to find the perfect PJ setup for my wrecked eBay Ibanez project, that a pickup is a pickup, unless you start messing with the actual physical properties (like Duncan Quarter Pounds with the HUGE magnets in them)......

I'm listening through a good quality headphone amp, using high end well broken in headphones and, understanding that the audio has been compressed at least twice (once from video editing and once from RU-vid), I honestly couldn't tell much difference until you got to the pos 1 comparison. I was surprised, great video!

Those cheap pups are insanely awesome. Oh wait................. you're playing so it really doesn't matter what pups are in that guitar. :-) The cheapies might be an easier 'tell' are lower gains.

Spotted the cheapo in the bridge, but the neck one sounded good, I thought.

If you're going to sit around in a quiet room with your tube amp listening to sparkles get the expensive pickups, for everything else get the gfs ones :)

I buy my pickups off ebay. They are all clones that sound decent.

No difference. Almost the same sound in all positions and every pickup. Pickup is not atomic physics. It's a bit of plastic, a bit of copper wire and a bit of magnetised iron. The differences in the sound of all pickups are minimal and depend more on the amplifier and the player than on the type and price of the pickup. I have an ARIA-STG 006 and the stock ceramic pickups sound just a shade worse than the Fender alnico pickups which I bought for upgrade. They sound 10% better and are 200% more expensive

imo Outstanding vid! I think the expensive pickups sounded better but not 10X better. Frankly, the cheap pickups surprised the living cement outta me! imo

it sounds like the cheapest have more body but the Strats have more crystals

What a true canuck. you give Canadians a good name in my book

Amazing how close the two sets are for a ten fold difference in price! I preferred the clarity of the Fender, but I could not justify the price difference. Just goes to show why even budget guitars sound so good these days. I have a Squier Standard Strat that I love the sound of (through the right amp). It was bought used for an absolute bargain price, so testing out other reasonably priced pick ups is a future option.

Not enough of a difference to make me spend $150. It really is how well you play that counts. The average listener won't be impressed by your pups just your chops. Plus, with all the tweeks you can do with FX it doesn't really matter. Good video dude, excellant playing.

I have been buying the guitar fetish $15 pickups for the past several years putting them in a squire bullet, standard squire strat and other strat copy guitars and i think they sound very good! The original single coil pickups in my squire standard were too bright and thin sounding and when i put the G.F. pickups in the squire it sounded less harsh and thin with a nice rounder tone! I would recommend anyone doing a project upgrade for a cheaper strat style guitar to buy these pickups,at $15+shipping you cannot beat these pickups for this price!

Interesting single coil comparison Darrell.... Makes you wonder if a set of cheap vs expensive humbuckers behave any different.

Those cheap pups actually have a completely viable tone! They're pretty damn good. ESPECIALLY for the price.

guitar demo on youtube without 7 pedals, processors and DAW challenge: IMPOSSIBLE

I picked up a £25 loaded pickguard from Amazon a while ago just to have something to temporarliy install and test a Partscaster while I was deciding what pickups I wanted for it. They're still there, they sound great. They're a tiny bit on the bright side, but that's what a tone control is for.

The cheap pickup sound better to me.

Very interesting! Pickups are just wire wounded around magnets. A magnetic field from Alnico or Ceramic is The same, what only changes is is strength. Don't be fooled, guitar is a simple instrument, no need to cost the price of a car...

I agree that the Fender pickups were a little better, but the difference doesn't justify the enormous difference in price. There is far too much voodoo in talk about pickups: this kind of test exposes the reality, which is that you pay a hefty premium for the 'right' pickups. One point I would make is that it's rare to hear cheap pickups on a good guitar, played through a good quality signal chain. Few players ever get to hear what a cheap pickup can do when it isn't handicapped by the cheap woods and parts of a cheap guitar, and blind A/B tests are difficult to arrange - which is one of the reasons why videos like this are a real service. It's in the interests of high-end, premium-cost pickup manufacturers to exaggerate the qualities of their pickups. Another issue is that many of the differences between pickups that are audible in a clean comparison audition of the guitar in isolation are greatly reduced when any kind of distortion is added, and the guitar is heard in a mix or a band situation. Others can be eliminated with careful use of compression and EQ. Laboratory tests only show so much. I think players should pay some attention to the core tone of a pickup - what it sounds like clean, with flat EQ - but it's easy to pick up obvious flaws like dull top end, poor bass definition, or excessive noise. Beyond that, it's a maytter of personal taste and the style of music you play, and the law of diminishing returns sets in fast.

If I play my Ultra Tele, Darrell Squier Bullet Tele, guess which one would sound better? 😂 I can definitely hear the difference but I think I just go and practice more... Pro tip: if you're not a pro, buy a cheaper guitar/gear and use remaining money to get some good lessons 😅

What you tell me is “Cheap is not always bad” Thanks man!!

In other news, store brand acetaminophen is cheaper than Tylenol.

I'm shocked by these results. Honestly, if you were playing with a band, I don't think there would be any discernible difference. I've got a project I'm working on that I had planned to buy expensive pups for, but you just saved me money.

I think both pickup have their own characteristics. The cheap one has more bass and less treble. So, it's a bit muddier. Especially when you use fuzz. The expensive one has more treble. And it sounds clearer in any position. In the end, this simple test makes me question my own taste. Why I prefer buying branded pickup than a cheap one. Is it because the pickup itself is nice or I just following other people, who say that brand is nice ?

Well actually if they use the same material for the magnets, the same string gauge, the same string isolation and the same number of loops there's little chance to have a different result. The only thing that might differ is the regularity in the winding. Unfortunately both are most probably very regular as both must be machine winded. Only a hand winded pickup such as old fender pickups could make a difference. Hand making a pickup takes roughly 20 minutes if you get used to it. Maybe less. Nothing justifies the price of either pickups. 15 or 150 are both extreme prices for what you get.

GFS makes some damn good pickups for the money. Wouldn't trade my Fat Pats for anything.

As always, 90% of tone is from the most important part of the guitar... the fingers playing it.

This is a great video. Very helpful as I am 15 and am redoing a guitar. And looking for pick ups on a budget.

Cool comparisons! can't beat that deal from GFS

Copper wire wrapped around magnets...right? As per physics, there really can’t be any massive difference? Right?!

Not that im any sort of expert But i did not hear $135 worth of difference , If any at all. In my opinion people are paying through the nose for a brand names. Save money, Buy cheap, Get same if not better sound.

6:18 Every Breatthhh You Takkeeeee

I thought they sounded identical except the expensive ones were lower output

All I can hear is Gomer Pyle "Surprise Surprise Surprise" Lol Great video Darrell and great eye! Peace!

The original Fender pups did sound a bit better...but NOT 10x better...this could be proof that the player and the amp are more important than the guitar :) :)

Second time I've watched this, 2 years later. Even more impressed with both content and style. PS I own a slick sl57 from guitar fetish, great guitar .

I like the cheap pickups best. Made that guitar sound more "Fender". I base my opinion in being a professional guitarist for many years and having owned mutiple strats and played 100's of gigs with a strat.

Just found you recently, looking at cheap guitar videos, killing some time. I built solid body electric guitars for about ten years, and to be honest, although I never put in pickups from the GFS Clearance Section, I did use a lot of GFS pickups, to great success. Yes, the more expensive pickups in this video have a hair more chime, and maybe just a hair better note definition, but to be honest, save for in the studio, this is pretty much irrelevant. When on stage or practicing, most of this would be lost in crowd noise, amp noise, and white background noise. And truth be told, in today's digital realm, MP3 players, cutting off about 20% of the digital "digits" to save space would probably kill off any tiny bit of extra chime you're getting from the more expensive pickups. Back in the analog days, these would be better. Now, just more money... Overall, now not building guitars but still active in repairing all kinds of stringed instruments in SE Tennessee, I always tell my customers that unless they have a real need to spend huge amounts of money on pickups, they will find that there are numerous pickup companies out there that build great pickups for small amounts of money. GuitarHeads, GFS, the list is long and wide. And one of my personal favorites, now gone, was a bass I built for a guy in Kentucky years ago, and I put in a huge pickup I found off Amazon for $15. When I got it, it weighed one pound! Who builds a bass pickup that weighs one pound?! And it sounded great! He loved the guitar, but the pickup company disappeared off Amazon a few months later. Oh well! Thanks for a great video!

I guessed cheap on the second test and you still made me doubt my judgement based on the pinch harmonics comment. Nice one.

The expensive pups aren't 10x better. They sound different but that doesn't mean better. I can EQ the cheap one to sound like the expensive ones.

Yeah the expensive ones sound a little better but only negligibly so. That basically means that super expensive pickups are not really that wroth it.

It's odd. While the Fender pickups were definitely not 10 times better, I would pay 10 times more for how much better they were. If that makes any sense whatsoever!

Actually, I like cheap bridge pickup more, it sounded a bit beefier.

2:55 thanx

The question I have is, is the ohms resistance the same between the 2 styles. Strength of magnet would be the other issue that comes to mind

Moral of the story. Buy a cheap guitar and an expensive amp.

Dude, for that price I can't hear the difference - lol... no, really, these are awesome and the price it's the best part, probably I change the pickups of my old Squire '92 (Korean) for these pickups :) Great review, Best.

Awesome vid, mate! Do another one with the cheapest set of Humbuckers!

Again this proves that most of the tone really comes from the player not the gear 🤑

The $15 pickups sound hella good for sure, especially compared to $150 competition. The more expensive ones do sound a little... wider? Like they have a little more presence overall. It's a pretty slim difference though, in terms of comparing the actual sound. Once you got them in a mix with other music/effects, you'd probably never even notice it.

Lesson taken out of this: -Go Practice, your pickups won't save you -Save those 150$ for a more expensive guitar, cause paying +100$ for a little tiny tweak that you can only hear it while playing in ur room by yourself is pretty useless

The thing I have learned here is that I have spent a lot of time and money on boutique pickups for F*** ALL! I must have cloth ears because if I shut my eyes I couldn't tell which was which. Time to take up painting, I'm off to Boss Ross's channel.

Seems to me that the smartest thing to buy to cover ALL your bases is simply an 8-band graphic EQ pedal. Put that as the first thing your guitar is plugged into and you can create at least 50 different pickup sounds. 😎👍👍

That demo caused me to make my first order from GFS! I ordered the overwound set to drive my tube amp a bit more since I don’t use many effects. In fact, I ordered several items from them while I was at it...nearly a whole Strat remodel coming up! Nice playing by the way...believe it or not, you are the only person I subscribe to on here.

I actually liked the cheap ones the best, felt like the Fender ones were too sharp

Both sounded great to me..id be happy with either, just goes to show..

It's long overdue, and I know this is an old video, but I really owe you and this video and need to give you my thanks. I bought an old, massively screwed up squier bullet from a work buddy for $20, just to mess with and kinda customize and rebuild. Took me four hours late into the night, using almost every tool I own (filing and sanding the frets and neck edges, opening out the headstock holes for the tuners, which I replaced, soldering in a new loaded pickguard, resoldering the input jack, e.t.c.), about $60 or so in parts (the loaded pickguard and tuners), and a lot of sweat, but it's now a sweet strat (which I affectionately call my ratocaster) and is easily my favorite guitar in my collection, and is pretty much always my go-to now. I went straight to guitar fetish for my loaded pickguard based on this video. So once again, my lovely ratocaster and I give you our thanks.

The cheap ones sound better to my ears! What a surprise! thanks for the video Darrel!

Listening this as a non - musician, I think in live situations the pick ups used would not matter since the venue alters the sound of the guitar & amplifier anyway. As long as the chords and solos are in the right place and if you dig the band, having a good time can be possible.

I’ve had very good luck with a couple different sets of GFS pickups.

FInally someone brought this up with the width of pole pieces, which Fender never has aligned. I asked once in a workshop of Landgren pickups Sweden why the stagger is important in height only, and asked why the bridge pickup of any Strat / Tele (even more on tele) is SLANTED so that the pole pieces does align up NEXT or OUTSIDE to certain strings and not rightly in a 90 degree angle below each string. Got no reply, or something like "not important". When trying to play the devils advocate with "why does stagger matters at all then, they stagger them to follow radius and get closer to the string right below it..." well, a moment of silence, and then an answer in the vein of "...yeah..well...but, these goes to eleven anyway". :-) The bridge pickup is slanted where the string spacing is the widest. It ought to be the other way around. Beats me, and I have still to hear something even remotely logical to all this. My experience in the past with the cheapest single coil pickups is mostly their longevity. Single coils from the lowest bottom of price, are very much more prone to microphonic squeal and feedback after a while (not when brand new) and they have a little more hum. And are harder to get controlled feedback from too. Now there are not only the most expensive or most cheap single coil pickups around. Not everyone of them have to be Seymour Duncan Zephyr, or DIY 15 USD pickups. The only one I've experienced so far for not charging extortionate prices for pickups, is Bill Lawrence. I mean the "real" ones. He's not around anymore but he had sound taste in everything. Not too cheap, not too expensive. And he had this eleventh amendment: Thou shalt not hum. Also, the actual lack of DYNAMICS of a cheaper pickup is mostly heard totally clean. As fast as you turn into slightest distortion, everything compresses, and sounds like dirt and garbage anyway. Fender vintage single coils are more prone to MSP (Magnetic String Pull) than any pickup with a magnet bar on the bottom. It's because the pole pieces are the actual magnets. Specially with "modern" string gauge sets like 10-46 roundwound. The low E goes "uh-uh-uh-" and sounds out of tune. One have to back the pickup down to increase the distance but then output and headroom is compromised.

Expensive pickups are better, but not in 10 times. If you have a lot of money, you could buy more expensive pickups, but you can't buy fingers or ears to play better or hear better. Thanks for author for clear English, I'm from Russia, and my English is bad, but your speech very clear and understandable, thanks!

I hear quite literally no difference between the two.

4:53 that was pretty funny! I was so sure those were the expensive pickups.

Bare in mind I didn’t use headphones, I liked the $15 set more. They sounded rounder and fatter to me. The Fenders sounded similar but with a bit more twang to them. For the money $15 Chinese made pickups are hard to beat. In the end am I going to setup a $1,000 Guitar with $15 pickups? No I’m probably gonna buy the American made pickups because I only buy American stuff to support my country, but that’s another topic all together!

I don't understand people saying that they can't notice the difference between the two sets of pickups... For me the difference is just absurd. Great video man! Cheers.

Ha-ha Darrell, you had us all fooled there. Like cheap guitars, cheap pickups have got so better over the years to the point it's getting harder to hear the difference. Some of my later Squiers are actually nicer to play and sound better than the 70's Fender I used to own. Those budget pickups sound great although I expect that you could probably make many budget pickups sound good. Great video and a very good point made here, I'm off to practise my playing so many thanks.