[jtkung]

Pickups do make a big difference in tone compared to guitar body woods, but it depends on what you are doing to the guitar signal.

In the video below, the point he is trying to make is that pickups don't make a huge difference IF you are applying high-gain distortion or a lot of processing to the guitar signal. He is also showing that changes in speaker, cabs, mic and mic placement have a larger difference. This can also be easily seen when using guitar modelers and changing IRs (Impulse Responses) which model the speaker+cab+mic signal path.  Changing pickups in a high-gain sound just don't affect the sound as much as the IRs. 



For electric guitars, let's reiterate the signal chain:

Vibrating string --> Magnetic pickups --> Controls --> Signal out

People hear the guitar as

Signal out --> Pedals --> Amplifier (maybe effects in the loop) --> Speaker+cab --> Ear (In the room)
OR for recording
Signal out --> Pedals --> Amplifier (maybe effects in the loop) --> Speaker+cab --> Mic --> Mic Pre --> A/D --> recording --> speakers --> Ear

So you can see that there are a lot of points where the sound can be changed/manipulated. 

If you are playing very clean, the distortion introduced after the pickups is not as much, therefore the pickups are emphasized and probably can be differentiated more easily.

If you are playing high-gain and lots of distortion, this means the components after the pickups are changing the sound a lot but in a way that compresses the sound and shapes it towards a specific response that obscures the differences in the pickup response.

Physics can explain all of this because each component in the signal chain above has a function that changes the input. And some change the (dynamics, compression, frequency response, harmonic distortion) much more than other components. Hence this is why those components have more of a sonic effect at the end. 

Pickups are just one part of the signal chain. But can be obscured by components after it.

[jtkung]

Pickups make a huge difference however on specific tones. If you are looking at clean tones, then pickups and electronics make a large difference. But so do the other elements down the line such as amp, speaker, cabinet, and microphone and placement.

However, if you are only about very high-gain metal tones, the pickups mean much less and the speakers, cabinets, mics, and placement start to make a larger difference.

It all depends on the tone you are trying to achieve and seeing which components in the signal chain have the most effect.

Here’s a good video on this:


His previous videos also debunk many of the myths.

Recently, I discovered a somewhat definitive test that shows the differences between hearing an electric guitar acoustically versus through an amp (via either magnetic or even piezo pickups).

Setup a guitar so that the action is very low.  At some point, there will be some fret buzzing, even with a perfect setup. If you don’t have a perfect setup, low action will result in acoustic fret buzzing.  This occurs when a fret is too high and when the string is plucked, it hits the fret and the sound you hear is the this impulse from the string to the fret and it is the vibrating fret that you hear as it is a thin piece of metal which can make a reasonable sound when struck.  It is this extraneous acoustic sound that bothers a lot of people.

However, as the string is vibrating, the pickup senses this vibration and it does NOT pickup the acoustic vibration of the fret.  The hit against the fret does affect the string vibration, but it isn’t as significant and really only affects the attack transient and is not apparent in the amplified tone.

This is universally known – that acoustic fret buzzing is not heard through an amp.  Listen to an amp loud so that you can’t hear the electric guitar acoustically, and you will not notice this fret buzz at all. Or play the electric guitar through a modeler or amp attenuator into headphones so you only hear the amp -- not the acoustic sound of the guitar. You won't hear the fret buzzing at all unless the frets are very bad and there's fretting out. 

This essentially shows that the two sounds are not correlated and physics already predicts this. The sounds could coincide sometimes (the sound is brighter and similar, or it could be very different depending on the pickups, electronics, etc.) but it's a coincidence. But they are NOT correlated.