Pickups

One of the most important parts that make up the sound of an electric guitar is the pickup.  The changing out of a pickup is also one of the best ways to upgrade the tone of your guitar.  These are the little modules that sit under the strings in the middle of the guitar.  They are bars of metal or ceramic wrapped with tiny wire in a plastic or metal casing.  The vibration of the strings when you play is "picked up" by the pickups.  This signal is fed through your guitar cable into the amplifier where it is amplified and run through your eq controls, etc, to come out as sound.

Although there are many pickup variations, The two main basic types are "single-coils" and "humbuckers".  Single coils are the original pickups.  They what are most commonly seen on a standard type of Stratocaster.  Look at one and you can see one row of poles that go under each string and most Strats have three.  Single coils are known to have a very clear and crisp sound.  They can be heard in all types of music.  Yet they have a "hum" which can be heard when you are not playing.

By experimentation, pickup builders found that if you wired two single coils together, the "hum" is cancelled out.  Therefore you get the term "humbucker."  Humbuckers are usually twice the width of single coils and may be open on top or under a casing.  These are more popular when using louder, distorted types of guitar tones as the hum of the single coils is even more evident when using distortion or overdrive, but are also heard in all types of music.  Humbuckers can be said to have a warmer, smoother sound usually. 

They now make combo pickups that can be switched between the two.  They also make single spaced humbuckers or wider double spaced single coils if you want to modify your guitar and need it to fit in the old space.

So when picking out an electric guitar for the first time, be aware of this difference and compare them.   Use your own ears to see which you prefer.

Here's my guitars:  Fender Hot Rod series Big Apple Strat, Epiphone G-400 SG,  Epiphone AJ-1 Acoustic, Gibson Les Paul Classic Premium Plus, Ovation Celebrity, and Epiphone '58 reissue Korina Explorer W/ Gibson 500T bridge pickup.

Here's a picture of my live pedal board.  The order of effects is;  Guitar--> --->Crybaby wah-->Washburn Paul Stanley distortion-->MXR Distortion III-->Behrenger EQ-->Boss Flanger-->Boss Super Phaser-->Ibanez analog delay--->Amp.  Plus a Boss analog tuner by itself.  I'm going to give a review on each component in upcoming blogs.

Right now, about the board itself.  It's by a company called Electar.  I got it from a now defunct website called MusicYo.  It was really cheap, but it's pretty cool for me.  It powers up to ten 9 volt effects.  It also has a couple effect loops and it has an input and output for you amp input, but I found that it saps tone if you use it like that.  So I just input and output through the pedals.  It has carpet you can hook velcro to.  It has a latching case top with some nice padding to help hold the pedals in place.  It has a lock too.

Lately I've only been playing an accoustic guitar after years of jamming with bands with my marshall half stack.  It's been pretty cool.  I've been playing a lot in the open G tuning.  That's from lowest string to highest: D, G, D, G, B, D. 

It's easy to go from standard tuning to open G.  First lower your low "E" string to D by sounding the E and D string together and matching the note (but of course a lower octave).  Then lower your "A" string to a G by sounding the A string and G string together lowering the A to match at the lower octave.  Then lower your high "E" string to D, again by matching using the sounding of the open D string.

When you play in this tuning, especially with a slide, you automatically sound like an old bluesman.  Or the Rolling Stones.  Keith Richards uses this tuning A LOT.  But he removes the lowest string from the guitar.

I really like this accoustic too, especially for the price I paid for it, which was only $80 on sale online at Musicians Friend.  It's an Epiphone AJ-1.  It plays and sounds great for the price.

One of my favorite songs in open G tuning is, Death Letter Blues, by Son House.  It's pretty easy to play.  He used a slide, but I just use my fingers on this one.