Performing live is harder than it seems. Sure, the band makes it look easy, and everyone has the perfect parts at just the right time. Bigger acts know just where to stand for certain lighting effects, and the guitarist is always under the spotlight for The Big Solo. However, what you might not know is that for every minute of stage time, there could be dozens of hours of rehearsal that goes into making those songs into a performance and that performance into a show. Continue reading “My Top 10 Tips for Effective Rehearsal”

Even some of the nicest guitars are not above the fray of guitar upgrades.

In most cases a guitar, right out of the box, isn’t going to be perfectly suited to your own preferences and playing style.

Like an archer tweaks and adjusts his bow, so a guitarist will customize and upgrade their instrument until it sounds, feels and reacts exactly how they envisioned. Continue reading “The Complete Guide to Guitar Upgrades”

Let me begin by saying that I have absolutely no qualms about admitting my love for all things rock and metal, including the various bands that rose from the streets of Hollywood’s Sunset Strip in the 197s and 1980s. Along with that love, comes my admiration for some of the most beautiful and well-built instruments ever made in the United States: Hamer Guitars. Continue reading “Friends of Seymour Duncan: Hamer Guitars”

To many guitarists, the major scale is something they simply don’t use. However, in Western music (that is, music that originates from the Western Hemisphere), it is the scale that is the basis of all others. If you learn the notes of the major scale, you can find all sorts of scales lurking beneath just by altering the notes. Continue reading “Theory Basics: Intervals of the Major Scale”

As a founding member of the bands Clutch and The Bakerton Group, Tim Sult has been making righteous noise for rock-minded listeners since 1991. His riffs are catchy, potent, and they resonate with a certain pragmatic personality that is both approachable and immediately identifiable. Over the last 25 years, Sult has refined and honed his style from the more raw aesthetic of the early days, but certain elements have remained constant. Continue reading “How to Play Like Clutch’s Tim Sult”

One of the earliest and most popular effects for cleaner styles is reverb. When Fender started making amps with a reverb unit built inside the amp case, we had the birth of surf music, and instrumental rock. This was a huge influence on guitars sounds for decades. and fueled the British Invasion bands that swept over the US and the rest of the world. Music that influences people to pick up the guitar today does not rely on this effect nearly as much as music of the past, and the ultra high gain amps of today rarely include it. Reverb remains the most popular effect that we take for granted.  Continue reading “Effects Basics: Reverb”

I read online forums a lot and I always have to laugh to myself when I read that someone wants a chime-filled single coil sound from their hot humbucker, or when someone wonders why their Les Paul sounds nothing like their Strat. True, I didn’t know these answers when I first started, and there were no forums to ask. Wood/scale length/other factors aside, there has been a constant battle to make a Strat sound a little heavier without sacrificing the Strat tone we grew up with and drove us to buy the guitar in the first place. Is a Strat that doesn’t sound like one still a Strat? When we install a hotter pickup, what tonal factors do we give up? And what kind of pickup is better? These are the types of questions we hope to solve with this article.

Vintage output? Do you mean low output?

What we mean when we describe a pickup having vintage output is a pickup made like they use to be made back when Leo Fender was still band-sawing chunks of pine into a Telecaster shape. These pickups had a lot less output than many modern pickups. When the Telecaster and Stratocaster were finally realized into production, they came with bright sounding pickups that really made the guitars stand out in music of the time. Over the years, some tweaks were made to Fender’s pickups, sometimes for production reasons ($), and sometimes for tonal reasons. However, at least in case of the Strat, there was no such concept of neck/middle/bridge pickups. They were the same in every position. Even though the strings vibrated a lot less where the bridge pickup is located didn’t bother Leo. That’s what the pickup height adjustment screws were for. Our Vintage Staggered Strat is the realization of this design. It is built like they were then. No fancy hum-cancelling or reverse polarity is needed here. Think about every classic Fender sound from the 50’s through the early 80’s (this covers a lot of players and tones). These are the sounds of lower (vintage) output single coils.

Within this design, there can be a few variations, though. Pickups were tweaked slightly in the 1960’s for a little less treble, and it complemented the rosewood fretboards available at the time. Sounding (and looking) a lot like our Antiquity II Surfers, they were made for the larger string gauges at the time, including a wound G string (like an acoustic guitar). The radius (curvature) of a fretboard was much smaller at the time too, and remained that way for almost two decades. These factors are all part of the formula of why the single coils of the day had a lower output, and staggered polepieces with a very specific stagger. Today’s more modern, flatter radius fretboards and smaller string gauges don’t quite sound the same with these staggered polepiece designs, so the Vintage Flat Strat was created for those that wanted the sound of the 50’s-70’s on modern instruments. Guitarists today have many choices to get the sounds (and feel) that we really are after, and should remember that every player is different and the gear available back then was pretty crude by today’s standards. But it starts with a clean & clear sounding pickup with a low enough wind that doesn’t overdrive the preamp of the amplifier, and doesn’t provide any compression. In other words, vintage output pickups are very touch-sensitive, and translate every nuance of your playing to the amp.

More is better, though. Always. Right?

This is the age old challenge: If you desire more output from your amp, you have a few choices. Add more gain via a pedal, preamp, or EQ, or add more windings to the single coil pickup to produce more current hitting the pedals and preamp in the first place. All produce different sounds. Focusing just on the pickup, a funny thing happens when you just wind more wire around a single coil: you get more output, but you start to lose the brightness and chime that brought you to choose single coils in the first place. You start to lose the touch-sensitivity (dynamics) that vintage single coils provide. This sound leaves the guitar with more lows and mids, with a compressed, singing quality that, doesn’t sound like a single coil at all. Thing is, this is just what some people want!

Remember that the strings around the bridge vibrate a lot less than around the neck pickup. Hotter single coils were designed first to combat this problem (like in the Custom Flat Strat).  By adding more windings, the thickness of the sound counteracted the extreme highs of the normal bridge pickup, and let solos (which were becoming more popular in music) stand out more. Pickups like the Quarter Pound for Tele were developed, to get the fat, thick sound of a P-90 out of an otherwise stock Telecaster. Suddenly Strat and Tele players could mimic other, thicker sounding guitars by just changing pickups. Soon, pickups like the Hot Strat were wound even hotter than many humbuckers at the time, which provided singing, smooth overdrive to Strat players who couldn’t compete before.

There is a limit though. Only so much wire will fit on the bobbin, and just because you can fit more doesn’t always mean it sounds good. There comes a time when you have to give up on the idea that you want a single coil at all, and must consider a P-90 or humbucker as a better choice if you need more power and still need clarity. Also, don’t forget that the more power a single coil has, the more hum you will hear.

Are both horses dead?

When using single coils, you have to figure out what works for you, period. Consider your guitar, your amp, your pedals, your experience, and the sound you are after. You will almost certainly find the output level that is the right balance of touch-sensitivity, output, and tone. Currently, I am in love with the Classic Strat Stack Plus and the Five Two, both pickups that have a more vintage output with some modern twists. I combine those with a higher output humbucker in the bridge. Your choices would and should be different.

What is your perfect balance between power and output? What players have the ultimate Strat tone?

Few pickups are so amazingly well designed that they take on almost any magnet you throw at it as the SH-5 Custom. There are three totally unique pickups available in the Custom family, all of which share the same basic ‘DNA’ – the coils and baseplate – but differ in its type of magnet. Continue reading “Meet The Custom Family”

This year’s winner of the 2015 Musician’s Institute/Seymour Duncan Bass Scholarship is Santa Clarita CA’s own Jeremy Bauer. As a student of MI’s Bass Program, Jeremy says his goal will be “to soak in every bit of knowledge I possibly can from all my instructors and fellow musicians. I would like to leave MI as a confident and versatile bassist so I can take my skills into the career field.” Continue reading “Fall 2015 Seymour Duncan Bass Scholarship Winner”

KISS’s Tommy Thayer has one of the coolest jobs in the world: he gets to hop up on stage every night and occupy the persona of the Spaceman, one of KISS’s four classic characters. Although the role was originally inhabited by Ace Frehley, and Thayer is mindful of paying tribute to the classic guitar parts that came before, as time has gone on Tommy has brought more and more of his own personality to the role. Part of this is injecting his own spirit into the solos of classic tracks without totally changing their original intentions. Part of this is in his songwriting, playing and vocal contributions to newer KISS material. Continue reading “KISS’S Tommy Thayer And The Seymour Duncan JB Model”