P90 pickups, although single coil pickups, offer a tone that many describe as being half way between the clean, crisp twang of a Fender style single coil and the smoother darker midrange focus of a humbucker. P90’s have been manufactured by Gibson since 1946, and although having fallen from favour in the late 60’s and early 70’s regained popularity in the mid-70’s and remain popular to this day with many manufacturers offering P90’s alongside their standard single coil and humbucker models.
P90’s are available in three configurations – soapbar, dogear and a humbucker sized casing. While the models using the soapbar and humbucker case support height adjustament similar to single coils and humbuckers, dogear pickups mount directly to the guitar body and so are at a fixed height. The individual pole pieces can be adjusted for height but this is only meant to be used to eliminate volume differences between strings and can affect the sound of the guitar if raised too high. (Raised pole pieces will tend to produce a brighter tone whereas raising the entire pickup moves the tone more towards a humbucker sound).
As the P90 dogear pickups are not height adjustable, many players raise the pole pieces instead and end up being unhappy with the resulting tonal changes, and in extreme cases even getting strings caught on the raised poles while playing.
The easy solution to this problem is to install shims or spacers between the pickup and the guitar body to raise the entire pickup up to the desired height. That’s why MGP Guitars supplies P90 pickup height shims in a selection of thicknesses to enable you to find exactly the right height to give you the sound you want.
These 3D printed shims come in thicknesses of 1mm (3/64″), 2mm (5/64″), and 3mm (1/8″) which, by using them in combination, allows you to set your pickup height in 1mm increments.
Important: Please check your pickup dimensions against the diagram below before ordering to make sure they will fit. If your pickup’s dimensions do not match any of the diagrams please contact us as we are able make shims to suit your pickups.
As well as black or white, these shims are also available in cream (also sometimes described as “Ivory” or “Antique White”). As every guitar manufacturer seems to use a slightly different colour there is no guarantee that these shims will exactly match the colour of your “Cream” coloured pickups, but should be less obvious than our black or white shims. If you want to check the colour before purchasing, the filament used to print them conforms to Pantone P726 / RAL 1015.
Epiphone P90 shim
MGP Guitars original P90 shims fit Epiphone Casino and Epiphone Wildkat pickups. (All dimensions in millimetres)
