string and pups heights

[ginchysurfer]

hi newbie ginchysurfer (aka) larry anderson. new to mosrite and computer. so please bear with me. i have lefthanded mosrite of classics. i have lusted after mosrites for more than 40 plus years. i only looked but never touched. never saw lefthanded until a couple years ago. so naturally i sold my wife and bought it. paid way to much! i have played strats all my life. ihave decided to put them under the bed and let my grand kids find them when im gone. i plan to play only the mosrite until they pry it from my (cold dead hands). gee thats scary! need a little info on string and pups heights. what is a good height at 22 fret from top of fret to bottom of high and low e strings? how close do you get the pups to the strings. its not that i cant set up a guitar its that some on the forum seemed to have spent a life time playing and working on them and have good starting points. its going to take some time to get use to this guitar. (small neck,scale length,how i rest my pick hand etc. thats why im putting my strats away. by the way. the name should be changed from "mosrite" to "pure sex". pardon the rantings of an old man!!!!

[dubtrub]

ginchysurfer, welcome to the world of Mosrite. Your question is generic because it is asking for an answer that encompasses a broad spectrum. The height of the strings and pickups are dependant upon the style of music you play and your own personal pic attack. There is no across the board standard. You have to decide what works best for you. A screw driver is your friend. Play and adjust accordingly.

[ginchysurfer]

thanks for your reply danny. i have spent a life time of adjusting and setting up strats for mostly righties and have used basic starting points that i found thru trial and error. i know you cant tell me exactly where to adjust to. i just thought some of you may have found a basic set up that mosrites may favor in general. i play only old style surf and ventures. tx. larry

[MWaldorf]

Larry,
One shmoe's opinion - get the pickups as high as possible and the strings as low as possible. To my ears, that makes things really percussive in a nice Ventures-y kind of way.
Mel

[zak]

what is a good height at 22 fret from top of fret to bottom of high and low e strings? how close do you get the pups to the strings.

The reply from dubtrub is 100% correct.

My own personal preferences are getting the action as low as physically possible without audible buzzing - I don't think that the tiny Mosrite frets are a good match for tall action. The idea is to get the most physically effortless setup possible and the lightest set of strings you can get away with playing cleanly. I think that Fenders work very well with the big strings/tall action setup, but Mosrites are a different animal entirely. I use 10s with barely any relief in the neck (literally a paper-thin gap). Typically action is measured at the 12th fret, not the 22d (from top of fret to bottom of string, not from the fretboard). My string height is approx. 3/32" at the low E and 1/16" at the high E - in other words very low.

As for pickup height - once again this is a personal preference - I like the Mosrite for its ridiculously high output and the way its exaggerated (compared to Fender) treble and upper mids pummel my brownface Super and blackface Showman. If you're used to Strats with their "sweet spots" and magnetic pull, the Mosrite does not play by those rules. I have the bridge pickup on mine adjusted as high as it can be raised without any of the strings hitting it when they are fretted at the 22d fret, and then I adjust the neck pickup until the best "middle setting" tone is achieved. To me this is more important than having a "balanced" perceived output level between neck and bridge pickups, because the neck pickup will always seem more powerful no matter what you do. It can be raised quite high without pulling the intonation out of whack the way Strat pickups do. On my guitar it ends up being pretty much flush with the surface of the fingerboard, tilted ever so slightly to be higher on the treble side. I find that the higher you raise the pickups the more sensitive they seem to be to picking dynamics, and they react better to the volume pot as well. As I said, they behave in a completely different manner from Strat pickups, so disregard all the common rules of Strat pickup height adjustment that take into account their magnetic pull and harshness when raised too close to the strings.

If you are going for the more aggressive sound Nokie Edwards has on the Ventures Live In Japan recordings, I suggest you try a similar setup. If you're after the more subdued tones of the Ventures studio recordings, experiment with moderately lower pickup heights.