Dylan McKerchie — electric guitar

Hard Mounted Pickups Vs Rings.... Hard Mounted Pickups Vs Rings... What does it do to the tone? Lately we have seen a lot of guitars being released with the pickups mounted straight to the body with no pickup rings or pick guards. Some people really like the cleaner look, but wonder if it affects their tone. The first thing to remember is the basic workings of a guitar pickup. We discuss this in detail HERE. The short version is that the string disturbs the magnetic field and causes an excitement of electrons in the coil wire that creates an AC...

Acoustic Guitar Vs Electric Guitar... Compression Vs Transverse Sound Waves Understanding how sound travels through an acoustic guitar Vs an electric guitar will help a lot in our understanding of setup, materials, and even how we play the guitar. Sound... Air is a Liquid? In order for sound to happen, we need an object to move at an audible frequency, and we need a medium for the sound to travel through. The vibrating object "pushes" on the medium, compresses the medium and one molecule pushes the next... the next... and so forth. We don't normally think of air as a...

Tone Caps... Highly Debated yet Very Simple Some people don't use their tone knob at all... Others constantly are fiddling with it. How does it work? First off, the tone circuit in a passive system is a filter. It can only cut frequencies from what is available from the pickups. Anytime we speak of "boosting lows" for instance in a passive system, we are cutting other frequencies to accentuate the lows. The tone circuit in your guitar usually consists of a pot that is used as a variable resistor that sends the signal through a cap (filter) to ground. The...

One of the hottest topics on the internet is 250k vs 500k pots and why we choose what we choose..... The answer seems simple... But WHY? The common answer to this debate seems easy. 250k pots for single coils and 500k for humbuckers. Let's get into why these have become the most common choices. Basic Rules of Electronics 1. Electricity always takes the path of least resistance to ground... ALWAYS. 2. Anytime there is a path to ground for your guitar signal, high frequencies are the first to go. The simple guitar circuit would consist of the pickup, two wires...

What does Scatter wound actually mean? The term "scatter wound" is one of those buzzwords we hear all the time. I have clients ask me regularly "How Scatter wound are your pickups?" So what does this even mean? As we saw from our blog post on handwound pickups, the tension, traverse, and speed (at least at our shop) are all controlled by hand. This differs from a machine wound pickup where all of these variables are automatic. For this discussion we are mostly concerned with traverse. This refers to how many winds per layer are put on the coil and...