Category Archives: Tips and Tricks

At the heart of every pickup, whether it’s a humbucker or a single-coil, is one or more magnets that define the fundamental character of the pickup’s tone. Learn how a pickup’s magnet type impacts its tone to help you choose the best pickups for you and your guitar! Read on for info on a few…

You’ve played em’ and you’ve heard em’ but have you ever wondered how exactly a 5-way Strat switch works? We’ve put together an in-depth 3-part series that pulls back the pickguard on one of the most common switches you’ll come across. In Part 1 we take a close look at how a 5-way Strat switch…

Traditional Strat guitar pickups have their time and place. When you want that quintessential, glassy, bell-like chime—nothing does it like a classic Strat single coil. But sometimes we want more, more power, more output, more authority, more aggression out of our Strat. Often times, this is where traditional, vintage Strat guitar pickups don’t make the…

You know the old saying, “There’s more than one way to wire a Les Paul.” Well, okay, that’s not the saying you’ve surely heard before, but we like it better. The Gibson Les Paul, SG, ES-335 and countless other guitars use a two-pickup/four-pot setup. Traditionally, this consists of two dedicated volume controls and two dedicated…

There’s a standard way of stringing a Les Paul or other stop tailpiece-equipped axe, and it works perfectly fine. And so it should! The darn things were designed to work that way! But there’s another method that some players swear by, often called ‘top wrapping.’

Back in the days before we had direct recording outs and stereo effects loops, if a guitarist wanted to take his favorite amp’s tone and make it LOUDER, it was done by something called amp slaving. This is accomplished by taking the signal of one amp and boosting it via the power section of  another…

One of the great things about the Telecaster is the fact that there are so many cool alternate wiring schemes you can use. I want to tell you about three of my favorites.

Coil splitting is the practice of shutting off (or otherwise fading out) one coil of a humbucker, leaving behind a single coil for a brighter tone. Coil splitting is often confused with coil tapping, in much the same way that the terms ‘vibrato bar’ and ‘tremolo bar’ are considered interchangeable even though only one is technically correct. So what is coil tapping, and how is it different to coil splitting?

If you’re upgrading your guitar’s pickups for the very first time, here’s a tip which will help you maximize your tone and get the most out of your investment: Seymour Duncan offers most humbucker models in two sizes: Humbucker and Trembucker. But what do these mean, and how do you know which is right for…

It is well known that a 500k pot will give you more highs than a 250k pot. But the “why” remains a cloudy subject. So let’s get to the bottom of it: why does the value of the pot matter?