Dylan McKerchie — wiring

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...

That Nasty Hum I am sure we have all heard the annoying hum from a single coil guitar. This is because the pickups in our guitars become antennas for radio interference. Any time you coil a wire it is possible for this to happen. Remember the old AM radio antenna? it was a simple coil of wire wrapped around a core. Our guitar pickups are the same thing multiplied by thousands. While it is not common (it IS possible) to pick up radio stations with our guitar, the most common noise we can hear is the 60 hz hum from...

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...