What is pitch? Pitch is how “high” or “low” a given note sounds. In guitar effects, pitch is commonly manipulated to create new kinds of sounds. One of the easiest and most familiar ways to alter the pitch is to change the speed of a recording. Faster will increase the pitch, while slowing down the […]
Making Single Guitar Pickups In this article, we’ll discuss making single guitar pickups, and how building them from scratch can be such a rewarding and worthwhile experience. The design is simple and the steps are easy to follow. Another benefit of the design is that winding the coil by hand offers the opportunity of having […]
Dynamics and gain are the most basic of guitar effects. They deal with Volume, and they’re designed to help control how loud or soft your signal is. The Volume control built into your guitar might not seem like it, but it fits into this category. What might seem like even less of a fit in […]
Coil-splitting humbuckers Many of our mini toggle switch FAQs begin with an inquiry into whether or not you can coil-split just any humbucker. Theoretically, any humbucker can be split, but in practice, it’s dependent upon the way the manufacturer has built the pickup. To split a humbucking pickup, you need one with four lead output […]
Power Tube FAQ: What Are Power Tubes? The first Frequently Asked Question on power tubes is, of course, about what they are. Also known as an output tube, a power tube is an electrical component, very similar to a transistor, that is built inside of a vacuum-sealed glass tube. Inside the glass tube are a […]
Push-Pull Pot FAQ What is a coil-split pickup? A coil-split pickup is a humbucker that is split in such a way that it only uses one of its two coils. This is useful to guitarists who use humbuckers but occasionally want a single-coil sound.
Welcome to Part 3, on how guitar pickups work and how you can build your own. In the last article, we discussed the way the magnets and coils work, and the way they work together to create the sound that you hear. This time around, we’re going to look at the tools, pickup parts, and […]
Overdrive Overdrive is usually a naturally occurring clipping of the signal. It’s often created by turning the volume up too loud on the gain stage of the amp, or by using a gain-boosting pedal that makes the signal too hot going into the amp or another pedal. Often, this will drive the later stages of […]
Modulation effects are those that change the pitch over time. Parameters of the effect are tied to a Low Frequency Oscillator (LFO). If you don’t know what a Low Frequency Oscillator is, think of a clock and a light bulb. When the hand is on the 12, the light is all the way Off. As […]
Delay is created in many ways – including electronically – with springs, or tape (like in a cassette or audio reel).
Equalizers are one of the most common effects in the Filter category, and you can find an Equalizer almost everywhere that you find a Volume Control. EQs are built into your amp, your mixing board, and almost everywhere you look. They work by using different values of Capacitors to target a certain range of frequencies, […]
In the last section, we discussed the different kinds of pickups available to the guitar player. So now, we should have a good idea of why we would use each type and we should also have a rough idea of how each type works. And from that last article, we probably also remember that the […]