Category Archives: News

Kids have an amazing ability to absorb and learn at a speed that’s nearly unheard of for adults. Some kids are just pure naturals at playing guitar and at a young age they can make seasoned guitarists’ jaws drop against the floor. In this article we look at some kids who had exceptional playing ability well beyond their years.

In the last article, we got our first look at a true five-throw switch, with two poles. This allowed us to create some different wiring schemes for a Stratocaster, rather than just the standard one. This week, we’re going to go a step further and look at a true “super switch.”

There are two types of Telecaster lover. The first insists on vintage twangy purity all the way, and won’t put anything in their Tele other than the pickups Leo intended. The second type demands more from their beloved Tele: more output, more harmonics, more mids and lows, and more of that raunchy attitude that only a hot-rodded Tele can deliver.

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.