Typically, when we start researching and designing a new humbucker, we wire the pickups in the simplest and most common way possible: in series, with no coil tapping, phase switching, or parallel options. We want to hear the purest tone possible from the pickup in its essential form. Sometimes this takes many hours; sometimes it takes years.
Continue reading →The mystery of the ‘59 Jazzmaster tone.
I still see discussions on internet forums about whether the wood in an electric guitar has any effect on its tone, or if it’s all in the pickup. There are some people who insist the instrument itself makes no difference in its tone.
There was a good series of articles a few years ago in the Guild of American Luthiers quarterly magazine about how just the body shape of a solid body electric guitar affects nodal patterns of vibration at different frequencies—just the shape of the body!
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When replacing potentiometers (pots), there are differences in shaft size you’ll need to be aware of. The shaft we are referring to is the part of the pot with threading that sticks through the guitar top or pickguard where it is held down by a threaded nut. First, there are differences between metric vs imperial shaft diameters, with metric being about 1/4” in diameter and imperial being 3/8” in diameter. In my opinion, if you have the smaller diameter shafts, it’s worth reaming out the hole to accept a 3/8” shaft. The larger diameter pots are typically higher quality in all aspects. Fortunately, you will usually only find small diameter pots on the cheapest guitars. Always use a reamer to enlarge the holes because a twist tip drill can crack the wood of the guitar top.
Continue readingWe get asked all the time, “Why does my old pickup sound dull?” There are many reasons the tone can suffer on vintage pickups.
We can’t resurrect or improve every beaten, tired, old pickup that we come across. Some of them, like the ones seen above, are just too far gone. Only a complete rebuild, with brand new parts could bring them back to life, but at that point, you may as well just replace it! You can’t shine a turd, as they say — and even if you could, you’d still just have a shiny turd. But, just maybe, your dull sound isn’t the turd you thought it was, so in this edition, we’ll address the possible causes and potential solutions.
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By Jason Lollar
In my previous post, I wrote about choosing the best pots for your sound (If you haven’t done so already, you can read it HERE). In this post, I will focus on capacitors (or caps), the different types/values, and how they work to affect and influence your guitar tone.
Choosing the Right Capacitors
Tone capacitors are wired to the tone pot so the signal from the guitar pickup will pass high frequencies to ground when the tone pot is rolled down. The higher the value of the cap the wider the range of frequencies that get rolled off to ground. With lower value caps only the highest frequencies get cut off.
As a secondary effect, the higher the value cap, the more frequencies are rolled off with a shorter throw on the pot. So, with a high value cap the tone control can act more like an off or on switch. With a lower value cap, you can throw a lot farther on the pot, so you can dial in the tone with finer adjustment.
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