Category Archives: News

When it comes to neck humbuckers I’m a fan of fairly bright, cutting tones with no mud. A neck pickup needs to have a fairly clean sound, even when under a lot of distortion. I like for it to have a bit of attitude too. I have no time for ‘friendly’ sounding pickups. But they do need to clean up nicely and split well too.

In Guitar Wiring 104, we saw that the standard Stratocaster 5-way switch is an evolution of the 3-way switch. It doesn’t actually have five separate contacts for the five positions. Instead it has three switchable contacts, and in the “in between” positions on the switch connect two of these contacts at the same time.
This works fine if all you want to do is wire a Strat completely as standard. But as soon as you want to change something, the structure of the 5-way switch can become a problem. Wouldn’t it be nicer if we had a similar structure to the three-way switch – so that we had five switchable contacts, one for each position on the switch.

In the last part of this article, we tried flipping the direction of current and the magnetic polarity in pickups to see what effect it had on the signal and hum being picked up by the coil. We found that flipping the direction of current inverted both the hum and the string signal, but flipping…

The guitar pictured is a collection of parts that Brad Henderson personally picked out. The main components and the key to its tone are the candy apple red strat body, Warmoth flame maple neck, and a Seymour Duncan JB SH-4 humbucker in the bridge position.

The most unique pickup when it comes to name giving is perhaps, in my idea, the big single coil pickup that is now being linked to the unique and amazing Charlie Christian.

On August 30th, at 7pm, a large crowd gathered into the Lobero Theater in Santa Barbara to enjoy good music & support music education for kids. Last year we decided to put on a benefit for Notes for Notes, a local group that empowers kids to explore making music to their hearts desire. They can…

When we’re designing wiring schemes for guitars, one thing we can take into account is whether certain configurations will be hum-cancelling. Of course, you know that when we select a humbucker on its own it will cancel its own hum. And you probably know that two single coils combined, where one is RWRP, will also form a hum-cancelling combination.

The man behind Megadeth is the one and only Dave Mustaine. After 30 years Dave is still able to rock and devote intense focus to putting on a memorable show for all of his fans. We figured it was time we had a chat with Dave about his tour, his guitars and his thoughts on the music industry.

This is the second part of my two-part article about the options we soloists have for being heard above the din when it’s our time to shine. In the first part I covered some of the more tried-and-true methods for boosting a solo: the guitar volume, switching pickups, and using an overdrive, distortion, or compressor pedal. In this part, we will explore some of the more refined, “professional” options for making your solo stand out.

In the previous article we looked at on-on switches, and on-off-on switches. There’s one more kind of toggle switch for us to look at. DDPDT On On On Switch Guitar Wiring The last type of DPDT switch we’re going to look at is the on-on-on switch. This is another three-position switch, and the connections it…