Category Archives: News

We all have our guitar heroes, and our buddy Wes Hauch has been quite upfront about his love of Dimebag Darrell.

When it comes to low-tuned, high gain metal many people think a high-output humbucker is the best type pickup to go with. It’s certainly great for some styles, but what if your style involves a lot of complex chords? Sometimes a high-output pickup and high-output amp can turn your well-chosen combination of notes into complete mush. And…

There are many different factors that go into the playability of a guitar, including the string height, the quality of the frets, the smoothness of the fretboard edges, the shape of the neck – the list goes on and on. One often-overlooked aspect for bolt-on guitars is the neck angle; get it wrong and you…

When it comes to playing punk there are a lot of people who would say that the only important thing is attitude. You don’t often hear about the guitar, its pickups or the amplifier being played through should matter, and to worry about this things is not punk. This may have been the case back in punk’s formative…

I am often asked by students about compressor pedals. What do they do? Do you use them for solo boosts? If I want a lot of sustain, do I crank the sustain knob? Sustain is good, right? I always tell them more or less the same thing: Compressors aren’t sexy. They don’t make your guitar…

This Daemoness Valkenbyrd VII. It’s finished in “Skeletorburst,” echoing the hues of the foreboding skies above Eternia’s Snake Mountain.

As a guitar teacher, I get asked this question a lot. Since pickups can radically change or expand the tonal options available from an electric guitar, would it be better to just change the pickups or save up for a whole new guitar?

Let’s face it, we can’t all have a half dozen guitars with us everywhere we go. We’d all like one for the rude and and fat single-coil sound of a P-90 that is perfect for blues, rock and punk; another with single-coils with the brightness and snap for rock and blues; and yet another for the fat and…

We discussed the anatomy of humbuckers in a general sense a while back, and because there are so many varieties of single coil pickups, we thought it was time we should take a look at single coil designs too. Let’s have a look at the internal structure of the single coil in general as well as the various main…

While I wasn’t playing guitar in the 1970’s, I certainly was around. I mean, I started playing in 1979 on a cheap nylon string (I still have it) and progressed to my older brother’s late ’60s Japanese electric that never quite played in tune. In the 1980’s, a friend of my parents got me a…