Here’s another excellent article on guitar pickups, courtesy of Pete Biltoft at Vintage Vibe Guitars. This makes a nice companion piece to Pete’s article on Pickup DC Resistance.
Thanks Pete for the permission to post this here!More
My 2012 series on DIY Guitar Pedal building continues to draw visitors to planetz. I just went through and updated a few stale links, and I noticed that I never really posted entire table of contents for the series. So here it is. I also added these links to the top of each page. Better late than never!
I also made a youtube playlist: DIY Guitar Pedal Building
I was super-excited to get my new Blackstar Stage 60 earlier this month. But immediately after plugging in and firing it up for the first time, I noticed some strange noise issues. I plugged the guitar in directly, with no other pedals and no effect loop. On all 3 channels, I heard some very obvious gungy badness on certain notes. The problem was not evident when listening through the speaker emulated output. More
I often refer to (and recommend) Helmuth Lemme’s article The Secrets of Electric Guitar Pickups. The author succinctly describes the guitar circuit and discusses how each component of the circuit contributes to the resulting guitar tone. More
My pedal board is flush with overdrives, but sorely lacking in distortion. I’ve never loved my RAT – it has scurried on and off my pedalboard over the years, never finding a permanent home there. I’ve really been needing a solid traditional distortion lately, to use with my band covering tunes by Green Day, Blink-182, Weezer, etc.
I love my Vox Ice-9 overdrive, so I decided to try out the Vox Satchurator. It’s apparently a boutiquey version of the classic Boss DS-1. When I received it, I immediately plugged in and lost myself in its glorious tones for an hour or so. It sounds really really good. Very different from my overdrives and fuzz. It has a big, saturated, overtone-rich distortion. Excellent for thick heavy leads, but also equally good for massive chunky rhythm.More
Answer: when it’s 13V!
As I mentioned previously, my pedal board’s power supply died, so I’ve been temporarily using an old Korg 9V power supply.
I’ve been getting some hum from Ryan’s Fulltone Fat-Boost, and finally decided to do some sleuthing to figure out why.
Fortunately, before I even cracked open the Fat-Boost, I hooked up a multimeter to measure the voltage output of the Korg supply, and it turns out that this little guy is really putting out 13V, not 9V. Well, that’s annoying. Is it mislabeled, or just over-compensating for something?More
The night before my St Patrick’s Day gig with the Drop Daddies, we were setting up at a rehearsal space for a last minute practice. I powered up my gear, and none of my pedals were working!
After a bit of trial and error, it was clear that my ancient SKB PS-25 pedalboard power supply had finally keeled over. I never use batteries, but fortunately a couple of the pedals had old 9V batteries still in them, so it was enough to scrape by for the rehearsal.
The following morning, just a few hours before the gig, I went through my box of old guitar gear to try to find a replacement 9V DC negative-tip power supply.
Hey, here’s the power supply for my Digitech Jamman Delay which I’m not currently using in my live rig. It says 9V, 1.3A. Strange, it doesn’t show a polarity, but it’s a power supply for a guitar pedal, and the plug barrel fits, so it must be good, right? What could possibly go wrong?
You wouldn’t believe how often I get asked this, in the comment-responses to my electronics videos. (I’ve just added this to my FAQ)
In the US, solder is pronounced “saw-der” (ˈsɑːdər) without the L. My family is Australian- I grew up doing electronics projects with my Dad, pronouncing it with the L as “sole-der” (ˈsɒldər). I have to really make an effort to say it the American way.More
In this article, Pete Biltoft at Vintage Vibe Guitars gives an in-depth explanation of pickup coil wiring options. Note this information is provided in the context of humbuckers, but applies just as well to a pair of single coil pickups that are RWRP relative to each other. You may also find my earlier posts useful: Humbucker Wiring and Coil Splitting, and Pete’s previous article on Coil Splitting/Tapping.
Thanks again to Pete for the permission to post this here!
January 2013
Howdy!
In this Tech Tips newsletter I would like to discuss the wiring options possible with a single humbucking pickup which has a four conductor output cable with an independent ground lead.
The following information applies not only to conventional humbucking pickups with side by side coils, but also to stacked humbuckers and humbuckers in other size formats or configurations.
In this newsletter I do not plan to cover the details of wiring one or more switches to accomplish the possible coil configurations described below. A great deal of useful information on this topic is provided on the Stewart MacDonald website, the Guitar Nuts website and on www.deaf-eddie.net
First, let’s start with the basics:
In my tone capacitor video, I demonstrated the typical use of the capacitor as a low-pass filter in a guitar tone control. On a home stereo, this would be called a treble control, as it is used to roll off the high-end treble frequencies.
But what if you also want a bass control- a high-pass filter to roll off the low bass frequencies?
In the circuit diagram shown here, from the G&L S-500 guitar, you’ll find both a treble and bass control. They call it their PTB system (which presumably stands for passive treble bass, but I’m just guessing here).