Post Type Archives: SWD

Pickups that are properly adjusted for string gauge and balance will not need much adjustment for periods of time. Usually when a player is playing hard the pickups could vibrate and the height could be affected. If other repairs or modifications are done the repairman could change the settings that would make you instrument sound…

There are several tricks you can do and one example is listening to Jeff Beck’s recording “Cause We Ended as Lovers” on the “Blow by Blow” album. Jeff used the Tele-Gib (Telecaster with two Humbuckers) and you can hear him using the volume control on the intro of the song. Another song is “Train Kept…

The Duo Sonic (has two single coils) and Musicmaster (one single coil pickup) guitars always had flatwork (Vulcanized Fibre) similar to the Stratocaster. The magnets in the early Duo Sonics and Musicmaster are .625″ long and the early diameter was .197″ until the late 50s, then they were a .187″ diameter. The early ones that…

I often find musicians confused by the term tremolo and vibrato. Vibrato is the rapid slight alteration of pitch and tremolo is the rapid repitition of a single note. String pull usually happens when the pickup has a strong magnetic field. As the vibrato arm is moved in such a way to loosen the strings,…

There are several reasons: First the bridge pickup on the Telecaster has a 15 degree angle perpendicular to the string and the Stratocaster is 10 degrees. There may be other ways of determining the angle but placing theTelecaster plate on the Stratocaster pickguard you can see the difference. The angle of the Telecaster gives the…

This is a common problem not only dealing with maple but other hard woods as well. There are several things I have done to help correct this. I have tried using capacitors connected to the hot side of the pickup, and grounding the other side. Use a .0022 mfd capacitor or .0047 mfd capacitor. Using…

Ask any guitar builder and he will probably tell you it’s because of the different materials used in each instrument. I have found that the lighter wood makes for a smoother sound and the heavier woods tend to make the pickups sound harder and brighter. My favorite woods for instruments are Swamp Ash for Telecasters,…

You are putting both instruments in parallel with each other into the same input of the amplifier. When ever you or your buddy change settings it affects the other instrument. The pickups are working as if they were in the same instrument. This happened to me too during my early days of playing. One of…

They are both variable resistors that control the amount of volume or how loud a pickup will be when plugged into an amplifier and the tone control usually rolls the high end off a pickup or combination of pickups. On passive instrument that require no pre-amp or power boost in the circuit the values are…

The two slide switches turn on and off either the neck pickup or the bridge pickup. When the slide switches are both in the same position either towards the neck or bridge position, it puts both pickups on in parallel and in phase with each other. The sound wound changes to out-of-phase if the two…