Dylan McKerchie

Power Cables... Should You Buy a Fancy One.... Have you ever misplaced your amp cable or forgotten it for a gig and just grabbed the nearest laptop or computer monitor cable? We all have... Should we? Does it matter? How Important is your power cable? Something common to electrical devices is that they are usually only as good as their weakest link. What part does the power cable play? We know it brings the power from the wall to the amp, but where the power goes after that may be the most important. Usually the power goes straight from your...

Magnet Pull.... Math Vs Myth.... It is a common argument that the magnets in your pickups pull on the strings and if they are too strong, cause your guitar to go out of tune and kill your sustain https://youtu.be/SMiu3LfNNjc

Vibration and FeedBack... If you go back to our post about how pickups work, you will remember that we don't really want anything inside the pickup moving around. Because the entire guitar vibrates when we play, it is inevitable that the parts that make up the pickup will also vibrate. This can be a blessing and a curse. The downside is that when the larger metal parts vibrate, they can cause uncontrollable feedback. This usually is heard in the form of a squeal. Bad stuff. It is made worse when we play very loudly or use a lot of gain....

Series Vs Parallel Switching Usually when multiple pickups are installed in a guitar, they are connected to operate in parallel. This means that the signal passes through the pickup from ground and then on to the tone circuit, volume control, or straight to the pickup selector. Even when two pickups are on at once, you are hearing the sound of them working independently. When you wire two pickups in series, the signal passes through one pickup, straight into another pickup... and then back to the rest of the circuit. When wired correctly, these can be hum cancelling. You can have...

Vintage Vs Modern Pickups... Are "vintage" pickups really better? Are the materials they were made of really different than the materials of today? Wire There is a lot of debate about whether the copper of yesteryear is any different from the wire of today. There has been numerous studies that say that copper is copper, but the die-hards will say that it it different. One thing is for sure, the tolerances were looser in the old days because the lasers used today for measurement were not around. The insulation compounds have changed, although this has less of an effect than...