Tweet
Greetings fellow pickup makers,
Today (and today only) I have decided to share with you the culmination of some of my greatest studies on guitar audio. They are simple tricks that any of us can do, and those of us who live by their Extechs I encourage to try as well to watch the numbers wiggle.
All you need is a bit of imagination. When you play your guitar, the electrons go from the pickups through your cable and into the amp where it turns into pure bliss. But, what about when you're NOT playing? Generally our guitars are not plugged in and our controls are left up so there is effectively an open circuit. I started to wonder, what is happening to those? Well, the answer seemed pretty obvious. Sometimes when we pick up our guitars after sitting they sound a bit dull. They've developed what I call "electron malaise" and they've become rather lazy sitting still.
I did a six week trial of comparing two identical guitars stored side by side for the same amount of time, but with one with the volume control up, and the other with the volume control down. This allows the electrons to loop back through the pickup with no resistance. Sure enough, the one with the volume turned down during storage was smoother, louder, had more highs and lows, was less boomy and less brittle. The intonation even cleaned up a little.
There was one little problem that it had a slightly off phase tone to it for the first 20 minutes or so. I attributed this to the direction of the pot. The pickups were wound counter clockwise and the electrons clearly weren't losing phase alignment from constantly turning in the same direction. As an added experiment I wired in a dummy coil of opposite winding. The problem went away! Of course after a few minutes of the the guitar sitting the problem went away regardless, but it was a nice safeguard to the electrons getting too dizzy.
Y'all should feel lucky that I'm giving away this information for free! Now go out and make beautiful tones... but only for good, and never for evil.
Today (and today only) I have decided to share with you the culmination of some of my greatest studies on guitar audio. They are simple tricks that any of us can do, and those of us who live by their Extechs I encourage to try as well to watch the numbers wiggle.
All you need is a bit of imagination. When you play your guitar, the electrons go from the pickups through your cable and into the amp where it turns into pure bliss. But, what about when you're NOT playing? Generally our guitars are not plugged in and our controls are left up so there is effectively an open circuit. I started to wonder, what is happening to those? Well, the answer seemed pretty obvious. Sometimes when we pick up our guitars after sitting they sound a bit dull. They've developed what I call "electron malaise" and they've become rather lazy sitting still.
I did a six week trial of comparing two identical guitars stored side by side for the same amount of time, but with one with the volume control up, and the other with the volume control down. This allows the electrons to loop back through the pickup with no resistance. Sure enough, the one with the volume turned down during storage was smoother, louder, had more highs and lows, was less boomy and less brittle. The intonation even cleaned up a little.
There was one little problem that it had a slightly off phase tone to it for the first 20 minutes or so. I attributed this to the direction of the pot. The pickups were wound counter clockwise and the electrons clearly weren't losing phase alignment from constantly turning in the same direction. As an added experiment I wired in a dummy coil of opposite winding. The problem went away! Of course after a few minutes of the the guitar sitting the problem went away regardless, but it was a nice safeguard to the electrons getting too dizzy.
Y'all should feel lucky that I'm giving away this information for free! Now go out and make beautiful tones... but only for good, and never for evil.
Comment