What you'll need for this session:
Screwdriver for height adjustment
Does your guitar make tones that you really didn’t ask for? Dual “out of tune” tones? Mushy tones? Weak outputs? Hmmm… sounds like your pickups need to be at the right height. Not to worry, in most cases, we can fix that.
First off a quick “how duz it work” explanation. Most Electric guitar pickups are nothing more than a magnet with very thin lacquer coated copper wire wrapped thousands of times around it. The two ends of the coil go to a potentiometer with lets more or less voltage pass through. The magnet which has a field of electrons “floating around it in a field, they get “excited” when the steel string is plucked, going back and forth, and the electrons move through the coil of wire at a certain speed (frequency!). After they go past the potentiometer, and to the amplifier, the frequency of the electrons, the voltage, creates the sound. Your high school science teacher helped you to become a rock and roller! Depending on the location of the string to the pickup, is your sound.
Weak output or mushy sound. Most of the time this means the pickup is just plain too low. Using your screwdriver, tighten the screws located next to outside edge of your pickup. If you have two screws on one side, adjust each one accordingly so that the pickup is parallel to the strings. Rule of thumb is about ¼ “ from the strings.
Dual “out of tune” tones. Jimi Hendrix used this quite a bit. This was the sound on his strat with stock single coil pickups because the pickup was too high and created a false harmonic so to speak. Almost like having the string pressed down at the pickup. Again it has to do with the physics of how a pickup works. The magnetic field creates this false note. Instead it adds the extra tone… usually not in tune with the plucked note. Don’t get me wrong, Jimi did great no bones about it. However, that may not be the sound you are looking for. So, lower the pickup or pickups on your instrument until it doesn’t have that sound. One note to strat players, in order to get the right pickup height, you may need to adjust the neck angle using a thin shim under the end of the neck in the cavity. If you aren’t well versed in how this is done, talk to your repairman. We do talk about this in our classes that we teach.
Anyway, this should help on the tone of your guitar.
THINK IT!
BUILD IT!
PLAY IT!
To learn about the ROCK n' ROLL GUITAR BUILDING SCHOOL and what you'll learn, click on this link:
http://www.leefairstudio.com/Guitar_Building_Classes_Build_Custom_Guitar_Guitar_Making_Course.html
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=RobertMaxwell_Lee
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