Dylan McKerchie — singlecoil

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...

Pickup Output When we are pickup  shopping, this seems to be the Thing we are most concerned with. Usually, the DC resistance of the pickup is what we refer to as the "output" of a pickup. Is the the only thing we should be concerned with when pickup shopping? What affects pickup output? The DC resistance of the pickup refers to the resistance of the wire that is used on that particular pickup. More wire resulting in more resistance is one possible measurement of output of THAT PICKUP. There are other factors that affect output. The strength of the magnet...

Why Pickup Height is Important If you feel like you are not getting the tone you want from your electric guitar, the first place to start is setup. It is possible that the current height of your pickups isn't letting you hear the tonal potential of your guitar. If you recall our blog post about how electric guitar pickups work, You will remember that correct placement of the string within the pickups magnetic field is important to your tone. Too close to the pickup and the string can literally "stick" to the pickup. Too far away and you can lose...

Coil Splitting Vs Coil Tapping.... These are two terms we often hear when discussing pickups and switching options on electric guitars. More commonly we hear the term "coil tapping", but it seems that most people use them interchangeably. What is coil splitting vs coil tapping and how do we use them? Let's start with coil splitting, because even though it is commonly mislabeled as "coil tapping", it is more often what we actually mean. Coil splitting is used on humbucking pickups to basically turn off one of the coils so that it acts as a single coil. This gives the...