Dylan McKerchie

Setup!!!! Why is setup the second most important part of your tone? The first is practice... your hands. No matter what guitar, effects, or amp you have.... No matter how much money you spend on boutique gear, if your setup is bad, it can ruin the entire experience. You may always fight to get the ideas in your head to come out through your amp. Conversely, even low priced "budget" guitars can sound and play great in the right hands.... if they are set up well. We will spend a few days on the basics of setup. Truss Rod Adjustment......

No load tone Pots.... No load tone pots are another product or buzzword we often see in internet forums and chat pages. What do they actually do? The basic idea of a no load tone pot is that when the pot is turned all the way up to 10 (11 if you are Nigel), there is a bypass of the tone circuit completely. Usually this is accomplished by cutting the trace that is responsible for setting the variable resistance of the pot right at the end (where it corresponds to 10 on the Knob) This can be done by modifying...

Cloth Covered Wire Vs PVC This is an age old argument, but does it really make a noticeable difference in your tone? Why Do we see cloth used in guitars? In the late 40's and early 50's, when electric guitars were in their infancy, cloth wire was the common wire in use. In fact, it wasn't just in guitars.... it was in everything. PVC was mostly being used at the end of World War 2 in navy applications, because the commonly used cloth was not waterproof. It was not common to see it in consumer electronics for quite some time...

Does Cable Length matter? In a word..... YES... In our discussions about Scatter winding found here, we learned that anytime you have long runs of electrical conductors laying next to each other, there is a potential for capacitive loss. As we know, capacitors in their basic form are filters. The more capacitance something has, the more high frequencies it filters or cuts from the signal. Guitar cables, especially of poor quality are very susceptible to this. Cables longer than about 15 feet start showing signs of signal loss to a trained ear. When we add a pedal board, we usually almost...

Tuning Stability.... How? You may wonder.... How can one player bend and stretch and use a tremolo and somehow stay in tune, and I can't keep my guitar in tune for more than a few minutes. You may fight with tuning to the point of cursing tremolos forever and "blocking" them as many people do. You may want to resort to locking nuts and other extreme measures to stay in tune. Even if you don't use a tremolo, you may still fight with tuning.... There IS a way to win the fight. Lets look at two huge factors in tuning...