Lindy Fralin Blues Special Strat Pickups provide a thick, warm, and fat sound that’s perfect for the Blues. These pickups are overwound just a bit, generating 5% more gain and taking away about 5% of the highs, compared to the standard Lindy Fralin guitar pickup. Also, the bridge pickup is hotter, to compensate for the […]
The Seymour Duncan SSL-5 Custom Staggered Single-Coil Pickup, as the name suggests, is a high output single coil pickup designed to be perfect for Texas Blues, Rock, and even some Heavy Rock. This single-coil, single-conductor pickup features staggered Alnico 5 magnets.
As the name suggests, Fender Texas Special Strat pickups are designed to give you that Texas Blues sound. If you’re looking for replacement guitar pickups and you’d like to get a sound similar to Stevie Ray Vaughan, Bonnie Raitt, or Johnny Winter, then these are recommended. Texas Special Strat pickups start with staggered Alnico 5 […]
The Seven-Sound Strat Modification is an easy way for you to give your guitar more tone versatility, and despite its name, you can make this mod on any type of guitar that has three pickups and a five-way switch. The five-way switch already gives Strat players plenty of versatility in tone. Position 1 is the […]
To fully understand what we’re talking about when we say single coil and double coil, we’ll first take a look at the different parts of a pickup and see how they work together to produce a guitar signal. Then we’ll examine single coil and double coil pickups, the differences between them, and why you would […]
Let’s talk about the difference between germanium and silicon transistors and what it means to guitar players and audio in general, especially fuzz. The Fuzz Effect Fuzz is a type of distortion that guitar players use. It is most often found in an effect pedal and it creates a buzzy tone that’s associated with an […]
Why a Mini Toggle Switch? A humbucker pickup contains two coils, and with a simple modification, we can use a switch to “shut off” one of the coils, causing the pickup to sound and act like a single coil. The choice to use a mini-toggle switch is purely aesthetic; you can use absolutely any kind […]
HBS READER QUESTION: Hi, Can you help, please? I got this Marshall MG10, and I’ve had this buzzing and crackling problem when I play the Strat. I sent it back to them and they listened to the sound recording I had of the buzzing and they said I had a loose earth connection or the […]
Fuzz Fuzz is a type of distortion that was originally marketed in the early 1960s as a device that can be used to emulate the sound of Orchestra instruments such as the Trumpet, Cello, Bassoon, Saxophone, etc. It was a Saxophone sound that Keith Richards wanted for the beginning of “Satisfaction,” which prompted him to […]
This article will cover how to wire a humbucker pickup so that it can be split into a single coil, using a push-pull pot. For the split you need a four-wire humbucker; you cannot split a two-wire without first modifying the pickup itself. Each coil has a Hot and a Ground, and a determination must […]
In discussing the differences between overdrive and distortion, what creates them, and how they’re used, we’ll begin with the relationship between a device’s maximum signal level and its threshold. Every device in your guitar rig, or your home recording studio, has been designed to accept a maximum signal level. The maximum signal level that a […]
In this article, we’ll start with the basics of guitar pickup wiring by examining what it means when guitar pickups are wired in-phase, out-of-phase, series, or parallel. The first thing we’ll need to do is understand a little about how pickups are made and how they work.