Angled pickups

[skankr5150]

I was watching the movie, "The Last Waltz" last night about The Band. I noticed that the guitarist for The Band, Robbie Robertson, was using Fender Strats with an angled humbucker pickup, like Eddie used to do. I don't remember reading it anywhere, but did Eddie get the idea to angle his pickups from seeing Robbie Robertson?
Just curious. Never really saw anybody else use the angled humbucker outside of Eddie and just about every 80' metal band.

Hank

[solo-ed]

EVH: Making the neck fit the body. Another problem with a Gibson pickup, or any humbucking-style pickup, is that the bridge on a Strat is wider than a Gibson, so the strings don't line up with the pickup poles. I've tried slanting the pickup, the double-poled humbucking, so one of them would pick it up if the other one didn't. If you slant it, the high E would be picked up by the front pole, and the low E would be picked up by the rear pole, wherease if it was straight, the high E and the low E would lose power. I tilt it with the bottom part towards the bridge. To me, for the sound I like, it's also important to do the space between the bridge and pickup almost like a Les Paul. The pickup placement has a lot to do with how it's gonna sound. If you put it up too far, you get the Grand Funk-Johnny Winter tone. And if you put it too close to the bridge you get a real trebly Strat-style sound. So I move it up a little from the Strat sound to get a little beefier tone.

[AT]

The pole/string alignment story is correct. There are "F-Spaced" pickups made now to accomodate the wider string spread of a Floyd Rose bridge. But back in the day, when Eddie wanted a Les Paul tone out of a Strat style guitar, he used a Gibson PAF and it angled it to line up with strings. I've often wondered--but have never confirmed--if a part of the theory might also have been that there would be more "chunk" out of the low strings by having the pickup sit further away from the bridge on the low-E side.

And of course, like every other accident-turned-trend (like zebra colored humbucking pickups), a LOT of 80s rock guitars started doing the angled pickup thing.