Wax potting pickups: is it necessary?

To understand what is really going on here, and how the wax is helping, we have to briefly review how the pick-up works. As its name suggests, wax potted pickups are made by immersing the pickup coils in hot wax.

Candle wax potting is a technique used in electric guitar pickups to eliminate air excess in the coil, which results in better sound and reduced feedback. Wax fills in any gaps and air pockets, improving pickup sound and reducing the risk of feedback. paraffin wax helps to concentrate magnetic fields, which, in turn, makes the pickups more effective at translating the vibrations of strings into electric signals.

As you may have guessed, one way manufacturers combat the movement of coils, and the microphonic noise they may produce, is to immerse their pickups in hot wax or another substance that solidifies rapidly rather than melting readily. Most pickups that you can buy these days are either impregnated with wax, or are coated in a wax-like material, in order to prevent the wires on your coils from vibrating and making an unwanted noise, usually known as microphonic feedback, or resonance. Yes, it is possible to have a pickup that is made of single-coil, and the process and reasons for doing this are the same as with a humbucker.

If you are struggling with a particularly loud pickup, you may have to have yours waxed, particularly if you installed the cap or changed your existing cover. The only tricky part is finding a way to keep wax under controlled temperatures without causing a fire or melting your whole pickup. Your pickup may need to sit there for a several minutes so that the wax penetrates into the wounds and moves out any air pockets.

There are several different types of wax you can use, but paraffin wax is the most common. Waxing is basically just dropping a pickup in warm wax (although other substances like nitrocellulose lacquer or epoxy resins can also be used).

During the potting process, the hot wax seeps into the components, and that is where the rigor comes in. Mopping is a process that immerses a pickup into molten wax in order to saturate the components, which isolates them and decreases coil movement.

Wax-potted pickups are pickups that are immersed into melted wax in order for all their components to remain stationary and unaffected by any vibrations or disturbances that might hamper their performance or cause issues like microphonic feedback or any other type of mechanical malfunction. The wax pot process was developed to address microphonics without changing the voice of the original pickups so drastically.

Is it necessary? That depends and this is one of the many discussion that guitar players have. Some players believe they lose some of the liveliness and prefer their pickups unwaxed. Yet many players feel that it does not make any noticeable difference. By the time you add your effects, gain and tune your amp to your favorite settings, any slight difference in tone waxing could have made on your pickups would not be a big enough factor to outweigh the benefits.