Dylan McKerchie

Magnets and Output.. In our blog on Pickup output, we learned that output is more than just resistance.... The strength of the magnet has a lot to do with output. Remember that when the string disturbs the magnetic field, it excites the electrons in the wire and induces an AC voltage. Learn more about how pickups work HERE. The force or how hard the "push" is on the electrons is mainly determined by two things. The strength of the magnetic field, and the position of the coil inside it. If we were to move the coil wire to the very...

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...

 Readers Questions... When you have questions, we answer them. Humbucker Hookup.... We covered the basics of humbucker construction and how humbuckers work HERE and we covered the basics of coil Splitting HERE. We also covered phase HERE. We had a few people write in and ask more about a couple different connection possibilities... 1, Parallel- You can basically treat the two coils as separate single coils and use them at the same time. This will give you a very similar tone to a single coil,but it will be hum cancelling 2. Out of Phase- you CAN hook a humbucker up to...

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...