Sarah Longfield can probably beat you up on guitar – and will use two more strings doing it. Since starting on the piano early and switching to guitar at the age of 12, Sarah’s interests have widened to include drums and keyboards. After learning the basics on 6-string guitars for a couple of years she transitioned to 7 and finally 8-string guitars as her musical interests turned toward heavy, down-tuned metal. Through her YouTube postings she became friendly with Keith Merrow, who mentored her in the mechanics and subtleties of recording, and encouraged her to write her own music. She’s also now using the Seymour Duncan 8-String Blackout active pickups in her guitars! I recently had a chance to speak with Sarah about her guitar-craft.
Continue reading “8-String Shred Alert: Sarah Longfield”

One of my favorite alternate tunings is Open C, or CGCGCE. As you can see, it’s mostly made up of a bunch of Cs and Gs in different octaves. What I really like about it is that it can be a brutal low tuning for aggressive chugging, but it also gives you a nice sense of atmosphere and additional harmonic complexity on the middle strings for prog metal. And it’s laid out on the fretboard in a way that invites some pretty interesting sweep picking patterns too. It’s pretty much the ultimate metal open tuning, at least for the stuff I play. Let’s look at some ways of spicing up your metal rhythm guitar with this tuning. Continue reading “The Ultimate Prog Metal Rhythm Tuning”

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. Continue reading “Sizzling Hot Texas Tone With The Pearly Gates”

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.

5 Way Super Switch

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. Continue reading “Guitar Wiring Explored – Introducing the 5 Way Super Switch, Part 1”

My auntie is a music teacher, and when I was about sixteen she gave me one of the coolest Christmas presents ever: a plastic box full of guitar picks. There was a little of everything there: thin picks, thick ones, pointy ones, rounded ones, thumb picks, jazz picks, and even those huge Jim Dunlop Stubby picks, which I probably never would have tried out on my own. It wasn’t until years later that I realised that the box she’d put them in was a Seymour Duncan pickup box. Continue reading “Recycling Your Used Pickup Boxes”

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 magnet’s polarity only inverted the signal from the strings.
I’m sure you’ve jumped ahead of me here, but what about if we do both these changes at the same time? If we flip the direction of the current, then we invert the hum and the string signal. But then if we also flip the polarity of the pickup’s magnet, we will invert the signal again, meaning it goes back to how it originally was, but this time we don’t flip the hum. Continue reading “How Hum-Cancelling Works, Part 2”

Chords can be a lifetime study, and a lifetime isn’t long enough to learn them all. To make matters worse, there are seemingly endless ways to play the exact same chords on your guitar. Most guitarists use about 3% of what is out there, but with some basic theory knowledge we can understand how to use them in our music. Understanding the rules will help us make better, faster choices when soloing, and there won’t be a need for so much ‘hunting for the right note’ when constructing solos.
Continue reading “Breaking Down the Barriers: Picking Chords to Solo Over”

Seymour Duncan pickups can make your guitar look and sound as cool as this one.

What is a key? We have all heard that term before, as in ‘What key is this song in?’ When we first start out playing guitar this all seems so complicated, but in the end it isn’t. The last Breaking Down the Barriers blog focused on the musical alphabet, and how it relates to guitar playing. This article with actually focus on how to use this alphabet in a musical way.
Continue reading “Breaking Down the Barriers: The Relationship Between Keys, Chords, and Scales”

The guitar pictured above is a collection of parts that Brad Henderson of Colt Ford 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.

Continue reading “Colt Ford’s Brad Henderson talks Frankenstrat”

Naming a pickup is no easy task. There’s currently a lot of debate on how to name the most recent brain child of the Seymour Duncan User Forum Group, but this issue is not a new one. Most pickups get named after their development or artist but some other pickups don’t have a name at all and are being named in due time. Gibson’s first humbucker didn’t have a name at all. Only years later it got its ‘name’ – the PAF – and only because it had a decal on the bottom reading ‘Patent Applied For.’ But 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.

Continue reading “Charlie Christian: Guitar Hero and Pickup Name-Giver”