Category Archives: Tips and Tricks

One of the trickiest things about bass tone is nailing a good distorted sound. Unfortunately it’s usually not just a matter of stomping on a distortion pedal and having a usable tone come out of the speaker. The low frequencies that a bass dwells in don’t tend to play very nicely with distortion. So let’s look at one way of getting some serious grindage along with your rumble.

Let’s explore the possibilities you have in setting up your guitar – with the trussrod as the centerpiece – so grabbing that key and turning the nut will be less daunting.

A brief summary: P-Rails are a special pickup design that incorporates two different pickup types: a P-90 and a rail single coil. The Triple Shot Mounting Ring incorporates two 2-position switches per ring, that allows either the P-90 alone, the single coil alone, both coils in parallel and both pickups in series, like a traditional humbucker. Combined with a 3-way pickup switch, that is a lot of sounds!

Breaking strings can be stressful at the best of times. But in the middle of a concert, in front of an audience of critical eyes? Forget it. It’s enough to reduce grown men to tears. What on earth do you do if you pop a string mid-gig without a backup? Call for a drum solo while you duck off to the side and change it? What if you don’t have a spare for some reason? What do you do?

Being a dude who’s changed a pickup or two, I’ve amassed a lot of pickup boxes over the years. Sometimes I use them to store spare pickups, but after I started storing spares in a little compartmentalised drawer (a sort of wunderkammer of tone) I realised I’d have a whole bunch of clear plastic pickup boxes sitting around. So now I use them to stash various pieces of guitar gear.

The music industry is a difficult industry to break into. For every successful band, there are thousands of failed ones. Many young musicians sit in their rooms dreaming of making it big, like the idols covering their walls. They see the money, the girls, and the larger than life lifestyle and want it all. The problem lies in that they have no clue how to obtain it or even where to start.

Picture, if you will, two terrifying scenarios. You find the humbucker of our dreams, but it doesn’t have a nice, shiny nickel-silver cover to complete the look of your guitar. Or you’re looking to class up your axe with some covered humbuckers, but you don’t want to go through the hassle or expense of replacing the pickups. What now? I’ll tell you what now: you go out there and you buy a cover for that ‘bucker!

For those that read my last review of the 59/Custom Hybrid and the STK-S7 used as an S/H combo (or as a primer for anyone that didn’t), l love Strats with Floyds and S/H pickup combos. That’s probably my No.1 favorite pickup combo, followed by a S/S/S combo with a vintage Strat bridge, and then any LP-style two humbucker setup (Floyd optional!).

In an effort to make his Telecaster more versatile Leo Fender designed the Stratocaster. A radical double-cut design with a truly unique vibrato bridge and three single coil pickups was what the major changes entailed. The guitar Leo designed is still one of the most popular guitars in the world. The tones are unmistakable ‘Stratocaster,’ and the clear yet warm tones have been embraced by, literally, generations of guitar players. But is that reputation really an earned one, or is the popularity of the Stratocaster nothing but a simple reaction to having nothing else available in the fifties and sixties, with as its penultimate result being embraced by millions of players?

Building your own Strat-style guitar is one of the most fun and rewarding experiences I’ve discovered. I started as a teen, inspired by Eddie Van Halen, and never stopped. I was mesmerized by all the inner workings and details that came together to make a killer sounding, classy-looking guitar that played great too.