High vs Low: the eternal pickup output debate
Every guitarist has faced the question, usually at that dangerous late-night gear-browsing hour:Do I want a hot pickup that will drive my amp harder, or a vinta...
Read More →Expert articles on guitar sound, ear training, and tone mastery. Learn what 90% of guitarists never discover.
Inside almost every electric guitar, hidden under the tone knob, lies a small, s...
Every guitarist has hit that note that dies faster than the rest: the cursed dea...
Every guitarist has faced the question, usually at that dangerous late-night gear-browsing hour:Do I want a hot pickup that will drive my amp harder, or a vinta...
Read More →Ever since boutique builders in the 1990s started stamping “TRUE BYPASS” on enclosures, players have been locked in a near-religious war over whether it is inhe...
Read More →For decades, players have repeated a claim:“A heavier solid-body guitar will sustain longer and sound fuller than a lighter one.”It became near-dogma in the lat...
Read More →“Red guitars are faster.”“Black Strats sound darker.”“Fiesta Red has mojo.”Most guitarists know these lines as running jokes. Yet like so many myths in guitar c...
Read More →Most players think of guitar cables as plumbing: they just carry the signal from A to B. Tone nerds know better. That simple coil of copper is not a neutral mes...
Read More →Some swear the single-coil pickup is the only path to real tone: bright, articulate, transparent. Others argue the humbucker solved its fatal flaw (hum) and add...
Read More →In the late 1950s and early 1960s, many Gretsch hollowbody models (including the Country Gentleman and Tennessean) shipped with an unusual feature that players ...
Read More →Instead of the old shim method (slipping business cards, sandpaper, or slivers of wood into the neck pocket to tilt the neck) Fender introduced the three-bolt n...
Read More →The AssumptionIf you ask most guitarists whether they can tell a Stratocaster from a Les Paul, the answer is usually the same: “Of course.”The Fender vs. Gibson...
Read More →👉 Watch the short clip. Don’t scroll past: actually listen.Then, lock in your guess:Fender StratocasterGibson Les PaulThe ChallengeWe argue about tone all day l...
Read More →Walk into any vintage guitar shop and you will hear it whispered like gospel:“Nothing sounds like old wood.”To believers, decades of vibration, dried resins, an...
Read More →Every guitarist says, “I know my tone.”But what if you could point to it on a map?That’s the idea behind the Electric Guitar Tone Map, a way to translate subjec...
Read More →Every guitarist knows the Gibson PAF humbucker: the warm, fat, noise-free pickup that rewrote the sound of rock and jazz after 1957.But three years earlier, Set...
Read More →Today, nearly every guitarist knows the ritual: pull up the knob, and suddenly your humbucker is a “single-coil.”It feels obvious now. Almost expected.But in th...
Read More →The original plan (1954–1976)When the Strat launched in 1954, it came with a simple 3-way blade selector: neck, middle, or bridge pickup.That was it.Leo was an ...
Read More →Walk into any guitar shop and you will see nuts everywhere. Bone, plastic, brass, graphite. But sometimes, the nut is not really the nut at all. On certain guit...
Read More →At first glance, the Jaguar’s row of three slide switches looks like over-engineering.To many players, they remain an inscrutable quirk of Fender’s “offset” des...
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