Nashville luthier and repair tech Dave Johnson from Scale Model Guitars leads you through a simple process to improve your guitar's playability by showing the steps to execute a neck adjustment, dial in your string action at the bridge, improve your nut slots, and lock down stable intonation.
Words of wisdom from the legendary engineer, proprietor of Chicago’s Electrical Audio, World Series of Poker champion, and, in the band Shellac, the compass for brutal guitar aesthetics.
“All day every day, we’re grinding it out,” says engineer Steve Albini of his team at Electrical Audio, the Chicago studio he built and has run since 1997. “We’re constantly in session, constantly under fire.”
While it might be tempting to geek out and ask Albini about all the iconic albums that he’s recorded with the utmost finesse—and surely, there would be value in rapping about recording some of the biggest names in guitar music—that’s all been done.
What’s much more interesting is the work that goes on every single day at the studio. So, when he tells me, “My colleagues at Electrical Audio and I are constantly having to interrogate our methods and validate the things that we’re doing and come up with arguments for why we should do things this way or that,” that’s the stuff I want to know about. If you want to learn about how he recorded In Utero, go listen to Conan’s podcast. (Albini was a guest, along with Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic, on the October 23, 2023 episode of Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, and it’s a thorough discussion that is totally worth checking out.)
The fact is, Albini has recorded countless records. I’m sure he has a tally in his books somewhere, but it would be exceedingly difficult to know for sure how many albums he’s engineered. That’s because, as extensive as his credits are in various record-collecting resources, he’s also impressively accessible as a for-hire engineer. All levels of artists—from superstars to harder-to-track, mostly unknown road dogs—have carved out their time with him. Plus, he’s been at it since he started renting four-track demo packages on the weekends during his high school years in Missoula, Montana.
The body of engineering work that Albini has amassed is monumental not just in size, but also in musical scope, which extends further than from Sunn O))) to Magnolia Electric Company, Cheap Trick to Neurosis, or Low to The Thing. And with those artists, he often helps capture a landmark album, or at least the record that fans refer to as “the one they recorded with Albini.”
Aside from his day job, there’s also his guitar playing. Albini serves as the compass for cutting, brutal tone in the punk and underground rock scenes. Since his early days in the hard-hitting Big Black through his continuing work alongside bassist Bob Weston and drummer Todd Trainer in the band Shellac—whose soon-to-be six (no info yet, but a new one is confirmed to be on the way) full-length albums and some other recorded odds and ends are maybe the purest documents of his overall sonic aesthetic—he’s used a fairly concise rig of well-suited esoteric gear to shape his incisive, metallic, and esoterically personal guitar sound in the creation of angular riffage and gnarly feedback.
Albini’s sonic mastery seems to know no bounds: He’s probably the most-cited proponent of analog recording. His live-band-in-a-room sound is unparalleled. And his drum sounds are peerless. But, while it’s not as if he never talks about guitar, it’s rare to see him dive deep on his guitar-specific processes.
So, we called up Electrical Audio and had a chat about his methods on recording guitars and how they’ve evolved, his take on modern guitar culture, and the definitive details of his sound.
In addition to his gear collection, Albini is also a good-bandname-T-shirt collector. (If this isn’t proof enough, go look up a photo from when he won his first gold bracelet in the World Series of Poker.)
Photo by Daniel Bergeron
When you’re going to record a guitarist, what’s your process of deciding how you’re going to choose a microphone, and how you’re going to mic their amp or cabinet?
Steve Albini: You have a conversation—what kind of sound are they shooting for? Who are some guitarists whose sound would be appropriate for their music? That sort of thing. And sometimes that’ll give you a clue about how to get started.
If they like a thick, bass-y, chewy, distorted sound, you want to make sure you’re using mics that capture that low-frequency stuff with good definition and not get muddy or soft. If the kind of guitar sound they’re shooting for is very bright and very crisp and dry, you’ll want to make sure to avoid using mics that can have some resonance or bloom to them that will soften that sort of precision.
I think it’s a bad idea to have a standard method where when whatever guitarist walks in you stick an SM57 on it and call it good. A lot of people do that as a default just because it resolves the issue quickly, and they can get on with their day and do more fancy stuff. But I think it’s absolutely critical to pair the microphone with the actual sound that’s coming out of the amp.
After having a conversation with the guitar player, understanding what their aesthetic is, I have them set up their gear and just play a bit, to get a feel what their playing style is like. Are they using a lot of feedback and sustain or are they hopping on a bunch of different pedals all the time? Is the sound derived from their playing style or from particular layering of pedals? Getting intimate with the exact specifics of the guitar style and sound and aesthetic guides you on what microphones to use and physically where to put them.
The main thing is not to have a preconceived notion about what mics are good for guitar. I’ve used everything from vocal-caliber condenser microphones to quite limited electret microphones to high-quality ribbon microphones to pawnshop junk microphones—I’ve used absolutely everything you can imagine on a guitar amp, and that selection is always based on the aesthetic of the person playing and then the actual sound that’s coming out of the cabinet. In your mind, you might have an idealized notion of what a heavy guitar sounds like or what a clean guitar sounds like, but until you get down on all fours and listen to the sound coming out of the speakers, you don’t really know what you’re dealing with.
“When you listen to the speaker when the guitar player is playing, the sound that’s coming off—you should consider that the goal. What you’re trying to do is you’re trying to make that sound happen in people’s homes.”
How do you interpret what you’re hearing then?
Albini: When you’re down on all fours listening, you need to be forming a mental image of what that sound is like. Are there spikes and dips in the frequency response? Is there a lot of granular treble detail? Is it a really smooth sound? Does it have a sort of billowing quality, like a trombone-like fundamental, or is it really dry and raspy? Even using wine-tasting words like that, it helps you form an internal image of what that guitar is supposed to sound like when you hear it on playback, and from your experience with your mic collection, you’ll know what microphones are best suited to sounds like that, or you’ll know where to start anyway.
When you listen to the speaker when the guitar player is playing, the sound that’s coming off—you should consider that the goal. What you’re trying to do is you’re trying to make that sound happen in people’s homes.
Steve Albini's Gear
Hands on faders, Albini and his team at Electrical Audio are “constantly in session, constantly under fire.”
Photo by Kevin Tiongson
Guitars
- Travis Bean TB500
Amps
- Tapco/Intersound IVP Preamp
- Fender Bassman
- Custom homemade speaker enclosure based on Electro-Voice TL Series plans with 10" and 12" Celestion Greenbacks
Effects
- Interfax Harmonic Percolator
- MXR Smartgate
Strings and Picks
- Ice picks with the points cut off
- D’Addario XLs (.012–.016–.020w–.028–.038–.048)
Once you’ve chosen a mic, what’s next in the decision-making process?
Albini: One thing that I do that I think is probably distinctly different from what a lot of other engineers do, I tend to have whatever microphone I’m using on the guitar in the middle of the speaker cone, and I don’t generally use microphones pressed up close to the grille cloth right next to the speaker. I tend to use microphones at a working distance of between eight and 14 inches from the cabinet.
A lot of engineers made their bones as live engineers, where they’re trying to get isolation on stage, so they have the mics as close as possible to the speaker cabinet, and that practice translated into the studio. I experimented with that technique because I saw everybody else doing it, but I just never got good results with it. It always sounded slightly tweaked and muffled and weird. I found that when I put the microphone dead center on the speaker, then the sound hitting the microphone sounded more like what I heard when I was down on all fours listening to the speaker myself.
Working distance has a big effect on the sound quality. If the microphone is choked up tight on the speaker, you get a lot more low-frequency energy. You get a lot more muscular pumping low end from the proximity effect of the microphone, and, especially with ribbon microphones that are bi-directional and have a fairly exaggerated proximity effect, you can really use that to tune the response of the microphone. So, I say that I use a working distance of between eight and 14 inches. If I’m in the closer part of that range, six to eight inches from the speaker, there’s going to be a lot more of the sub low end emphasized in a bi-directional ribbon microphone, and that can be great to add weight and heaviness to a heavy guitar.
Then, if the microphone is backed off more like 12 to 14 inches, then you get much more of an overall picture of the sound of the cabinet, where it’s not emphasizing any particular region, for lack of a better word. It’s a flatter representation of the sound coming off the speaker. Being able to tune the behavior of the microphone by moving the microphone in and out just by a matter of inches can make a noticeable difference in the sound quality.
At this point in your career, do you know what mic to use as soon as you listen to someone’s playing?
Albini: It’s really rare for me to listen to a speaker, listen to somebody playing guitar, grab a microphone, put it up, and have it be right in the first instance. When that does happen sometimes, you feel like a fucking genius. That’s really satisfying. That means the first 30 years of your career weren’t wasted, but it doesn’t happen often.
Often, you have to move the microphone, or sometimes you have to swap the microphone out completely, like this microphone just can’t handle that much high end, it sounds too raspy, it’s just too midrange forward, it starts to sound nasal and different parts of the playing vocabulary can sound different as well. Sometimes, you’ll have a setup that sounds amazing when the guitarist is just playing rhythm stuff, but then when they go up the strip and start showing off, it can be too piercing or too woolly sounding, so it’s often a good idea to have a complement microphone.
“It’s really rare for me to listen to a speaker, listen to somebody playing guitar, grab a microphone, put it up, and have it be right in the first instance. When that does happen sometimes, you feel like a fucking genius.”
You’ll have a couple of microphones in the same position, one that is maybe a brighter, drier sound and one that’s maybe a fatter, darker sound. And that way you can either balance those microphones against each other for a composite sound or use them in stereo to synthesize a stereo image. Or when the lead kicks in, you can nudge the brighter microphone for a little bit more bite and attack.
I think having an ambient character available on the recording often helps with the sense of realism. If you’re just using a single guitar, for example, then having an ambient microphone that you can use to create a stereo image helps add to the sensation of hearing the sound in a room, even if it’s a very dry room. Having close mics on the amp and then also having a distant mic out in the room eight or 10 feet away gives you a little bit of air on that secondary mic, which you can then use to create a stereo image to help localize the guitar in the stereo image of the whole thing.
All of those little things, if you don’t have it set up so you have those kinds of options available, then you can’t make those choices down the road. I have been in sessions where some engineers have an array of microphones around a speaker cabinet. They’ll have eight or 10 microphones in a sort of swarm around a speaker cabinet. And that, to me, just speaks of really poor decision making. If you’re recording eight or 10 microphones at once and with the idea that you’ll sort it all out later, that just puts all your critical decisions off until the last minute and means that you’re going to make those decisions poorly. I think it’s much, much better to listen to it on the first playback and decide if you are on the right track or not. And if you’re not, just stop and fix it. Don’t just carry on with the plan to deal with it later, because when you get to later, you just have way too much shit to deal with.
Onstage with Shellac, Albini wields “Old Ironsides,” his Travis Bean TB500. Behind the guitarist lurks his customized amp head, which contains a Tapco/Intersound IVP Preamp and Fender Bassman, and his homemade speaker cabs.
Photo by Tim Bugbee
It’s like it creates option anxiety, and at that point, you’re just making the mix all that much longer.
Albini: Yeah, it’s not even the amount of effort that it takes. I don’t think it’s possible to make 10,000 critical decisions simultaneously and have them all be as valid as if you were to make those decisions one at a time as they came up with all your attention and full consideration. So, while you’re setting up the guitar, figure out which microphones you want to use and commit to them, and once you’ve committed to them, then that decision is made, and you can just get on with your day and you don’t ever need to re-litigate those decisions.
I also feel like over the course of working on a record, you get acclimated to the sound that you’re listening to, and then that becomes the basis on which you make other decisions. If you pull the plug on that by changing the sound around at the last minute, then all of those predicate decisions that were made based on that original place keeper have somewhat been invalidated. And I think that’s a dangerous thing as well.
In one of the videos on the Electrical Audio YouTube page, you talk about developing your practices through an iterative process of trial and error. Is experimentation still a part of your process?
Albini: I actively question myself and verify my preconceptions or challenge my preconceptions. One nice way to do that in a kind of a programmatic way is something I stole from Bob Weston, the bass player in the band Shellac that I’m in. He’s also a fine recording engineer and mastering engineer. I read an interview with him maybe 15 years ago where he said that on every session he does, he tries to do just one thing that he’s never done before. It might be the choice of microphone or positioning a microphone or a processing choice or a routing, just something, and that seemed brilliant to me. Just a very simple way to make sure that you’re always expanding your repertoire and always expanding your knowledge base. You don’t get set in your habits. And so, I stole that, and I do that to this day.
“While you’re setting up the guitar, figure out which microphones you want to use and commit to them, and once you’ve committed to them, then that decision is made, and you can just get on with your day and you don’t ever need to re-litigate those decisions.”
Also, microphones come in over the transom. There are microphones being designed and invented every day, and we get a chance to hear a lot of those either as trial or because people want our opinions on them. They’ll send them to us to put them in use for a while and play around with them. So, I get to play around with stuff that I’ve never heard before pretty regularly, and I like to try microphones I’ve never heard before.
This has proven enormously valuable over the course of the last 15 or 20 years. My routine behaviors have changed quite a bit as a result of these little, tiny experiments that I’ve done one at a time.
With Shellac bandmates Todd Trainer (drums) and Bob Weston (bass) in view, the most legendary Harmonic Percolator is at Steve’s feet, next to his MXR Smart Gate. If you’re wondering, Albini uses a waist strap for his guitar.
Photo by Jordi Vidal
I would imagine that, making as many records as you do, that’s like constant revision.
Albini: I promise you, the moment you get complacent about how you do things, someone will show up with a rig that’s freakish in a way you’ve never encountered before.
I did an album with the group Sunn O))). Their music is really slow-moving, impossibly heavy riffs, but the sound is really minimal. It’s just two guitars most of the time. In the studio, they added a few guests. One of is Hildur Guðnadóttir; she plays the cello.
There’s an instrument that was invented for her by a friend of hers called the halldorophone. It’s an electric cello that has built into it an amplifier and loudspeaker, so it’s a self-resonating, self-feeding-back, infinite-sustain cello. It’s a super bizarre thing, but she’s an expert. There’s one in the world and I’m staring at it and I have to figure out how to record it.
The fact that I am confronted with these new and different things all the time means that my vocabulary and my skillset and my facilities are constantly being tested and improved. And that’s one of the great joys, for me anyway, of doing what I do for a living, that I do get to do these freakish things once in a while.
You use a small pedal setup as a player, but you’re engaging with different kinds of players all the time. What do you think about modern pedal technology?
Albini: The stage that we are at now, where every player in every band has a pedalboard and have this sort of a curated collection of sounds that they come up with, I actually got a preview of that in the late ’80s. The first time I went to Japan, most guitarists that I worked with had a pedalboard with a half a dozen pedals on it, and that’s how they would craft their sound. They could bring that anywhere and plug it into any amp and they’d be happy.
Something very similar is happening now in the U.S. where a lot of people are doing demo recording at home through modeling amps or through interfaces, and rather than using an amplifier for its inherent qualities, they’re kind of defeating the amplifier by using pedals as the principal source of their sound. It’s a trend. I don’t really have an opinion about it.
“I promise you, the moment you get complacent about how you do things, someone will show up with a rig that’s freakish in a way you’ve never encountered before.”
There are some people who are more adept at it than others, but it’s absolutely the case that most players in most bands now have multiple pedals that they’re using, and the songs are arranged in a way where you use this combination for this part and this combination for this part. And nothing about it seems bad to me. It’s a little more cumbersome, especially when you’re in the studio and you’re trying to track down problems. But when you see somebody who’s really put some thought and attention into it and they’re really using the pedals in an expressive way….
I did a session with Reba Myers from Code Orange. She has this really expansive pedal setup where she’s got a main soundboard where the general tone for a given song comes from, and then she’s got a kind of an expression board, which is just all the crazy shit, and she’s constantly going back and forth. She’s an example of someone who’s put a lot of thought and attention into the specifics of the pedalboard and is using it as a creative tool. I’ve seen other people where it’s kind of pro forma—like, Kiss wore funny outfits on stage, and so for a while a lot of bands felt obliged to wear funny outfits on stage.
I know some old school guys are like, ‘Plug the guitar straight into the amp, and if you can’t get it done with that, you’re not a real musician,’ or whatever. That’s horse shit. That’s just boomer shit. I’m not into that at all.
How Steve Albini Gets His Guitar Sound
How did your personal guitar sound develop over the years?
Albini: When I was in Big Black, that band was predicated on the do-it-cheap, do-it-quick, take-no-prisoners approach. That was very much the cornerstone of the behavior in the punk rock scene. Don’t try to get it perfect, just get it. So, everything about that band was done sort of extemporaneously. I made the first Big Black record on my own in my apartment, so I needed an amplifier that I could use for either guitar or bass. I stumbled onto this bizarre preamp called the Tapco/Intersound IVP. It had a clean channel and a distorted channel. I didn’t find much use for the clean channel, but the distorted channel sounded great on either bass or guitar—or great toward my aesthetic at the moment, which was a pretty brutal one.
When Shellac started, I was looking for a fatter, fuller sound than the scrabble-scratchy sound I had with Big Black. I eventually gravitated toward the Fender Bassman as the perfect tube amp for me. But when I would play just the Bassman, I missed a little bit of the bite and the sizzle from the old transistor days. So, I ended up making a hybrid setup with the Tapco IVP preamp, typically recorded direct. And then on stage, I’ll have a monitor cabinet for it that has a horn in it, so it’s like a full-range speaker, and the Fender Bassman going into a fairly bass-y cabinet, typically a 4x12 when we’re on tour in Europe and we’re using backline.
The cabinets that Bob and I made for our amps—I have two Celestion greenbacks in that, a 10" and a 12"—are based on the TL series cabinet that are the published plans that Electro-Voice made available for using their speakers in an enclosure. If you just built a cabinet along those published plans, you would end up with exactly what Bob and I use for our speaker setups.
When you record yourself for a Shellac album, do you always use the same gear?
Albini: No, it has been different on literally every session. I often use the amp that I use on stage. Often, I do not. Often, I’ll use some other transistor amp and some other tube amp as the two complement signals. It’s essentially always two amplifiers, a transistor amp and a tube amp. The transistor amp is typically being recorded direct, and the tube amp is always recorded acoustically through a speaker cabinet with microphones and stuff.
But I have used an Orange OR80. There’s an amp that was made by a company called Sam Amp, and I believe there are very few of them in the world, but I ended up with one of them, and I’ve used the Sam Amp. I’ve used the Traynor YBA-3, Traynor YBA-1, a Marshall JTM-45. I’ve used a lot of different amplifiers for the studio recordings.
The Travis Bean that I use is such an indestructible sound. It’s weird that I’m so fussy about my amp because I’ve demonstrated myself that it kind of doesn’t matter what amp I play through, I can always get something that I like out of it.
We did a tour of Japan very early in the band’s tenure, right after we started. In Japan, it’s normal practice for the venue to have a backline. Every night it was a different, quite crappy by our standards, amplifier on stage. One night, it was a Roland Jazz Chorus. I used a Guyatone amplifier several times, and other Japanese brand names that I was unfamiliar with. Every night sounded fine. As specific as I am about what I like and don’t like, I have sort of taught myself that it’s not that important and that I can zero in on what I like and don’t like about even an imperfect setup.
For pedals, do you use anything other than the Harmonic Percolator, which you’re most known for using?
Albini: I’ve used a noise gate since I first started playing on stage. For many, many years it was just one of the original old-school MXR noise gates. They’ve all crapped out and been repaired and crapped out again many times. There’s an updated version of that MXR called the Smart Gate. I switched over to that. It’s set so that I can just touch the guitar and it opens up, but if I’m not actively playing it, it doesn’t open.
The output of the noise gate goes into the fuzz tone. And the fuzz tone has been a Harmonic Percolator [made by Interfax] since, I want to say, 1986. My friend Jay Tiller from Milwaukee worked at a head shop, record shop, and pawn shop combo in Milwaukee called Record Head. When I was there one time, he said, ‘We have this cool fuzz tone this guy made here. You should try it out.’ And I loved it. So, I bought one from him, and then over the years, I’ve bought a couple more when he stumbled across them at record swap or whatever, or at guitar fairs or whatever, he’s picked them up and I got ’em from him.
I’ve referred to the Percolator as a labor-saving device, because as soon as you hit the switch, the guitar just starts playing. I don’t even need to tell it what notes or anything. It just goes, and that’s my favorite thing about the Percolator, how it’s completely unhinged using it for feedback or whatever. It will choose little melodies that it wants to play, and it’ll just whistle them for you. But you kind of need to be physically moving. I’ve noticed that if you stand in one spot, it just squeals. But if you’re moving around, if the distance between you and your amplifier changes, then the fundamental frequency changes from the physical distance, and you get these really great psychedelic melodies that it creates.
Have you played any of the Percolator clones?
Albini: They all sound very slightly different, but they’re all basically the same. Chuck Collins made a complete, meticulous resurrection of the Harmonic Percolator [through his company, Theremaniacs] a few years ago—those are absolutely perfect. They respond exactly the same way. They sound the same. Almost all the others that I have seen—people send them to me because they feel like I should pass my hands over their Percolator or whatever, I’ve had maybe six or eight others—I can’t use any of ’em. They all behave differently somehow.
I think one of the perversions of my setup is that coming out of the noise gate, the signal into the Percolator is buffered, so it sounds different if you just plug your guitar straight into it, and I never do that.
It’s not for everyone, but locking down a Strat trem can resolve many tuning issues.
Having endured for more than half a century—and still going strong—the venerable Stratocaster has delivered great tone to generations of guitarists. One of the instrument's strengths is how easily it can be adjusted to suit different playing techniques and musical styles.
Here's a case in point: Recently a client brought me his 1993 Strat (Photo 1) for a setup. His primary concern was that he was having a problem staying in tune, especially when bending one string while holding another. While we were discussing this, he revealed he rarely used the tremolo and kept the bar swung back out of the way when he played. Based on this, I recommended he allow me to lock his tremolo down—or "deck" it against the body. I knew this would resolve many of the tuning issues he was having. He agreed and I proceeded with the relatively simple project described below.
If you're a Strat player who doesn't find much utility in the trem system, you might consider doing this too. This tweak isn't for everyone—many Strat players feel the trem provides much of the guitar's magic. But there are also those who play a Strat because they love its pickups, scale length, weight, and feel, but prefer the stability of having its bridge locked down tight against the body. Some even swear this increases sustain.
Fortunately, it's a reversible mod, so you can try it out and see for yourself. If the tuning advantages outweigh losing whammy capability, great. If you find you miss your trem, you can always return to a floating bridge setup. (I explain that process in the DIY video "How to Float a Strat Trem.")
Evaluating the guitar.
Photo 2
This Strat had spent some time on the road, but it was in good shape. It had a vintage-style, six-screw bridge—not the two-post design of modern Strats. I noticed there were only two springs holding the tremolo to the claw, which explained why the bridge was tilting forward so much (Photo 2).
It's crucial to know the intended tuning and string gauges before you set up a Strat. My client explained he strings up with .010-.046 sets and tunes to standard pitch (unlike some Strat players who tune down a half-step à la Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan).
Getting started.
Photo 3
Getting started. The first step is to remove the cover plate on the back so you can access the claw and trem springs. To provide maximum stability, I added three more springs to the claw (Photo 3) and then used a Phillips screwdriver to move the claw toward the body and tighten the five springs (Photo 4).
Photo 4
The goal is to tighten the springs enough so the tremolo doesn't move when you bend a string. At this point, we're just roughing in the spring tension—we'll come back and fine-tune it in a moment.
Tip: Remember to tune the guitar after every adjustment. If you neglect to do this, you may have to redo your work. This holds true for every step of a setup, including adjusting a truss rod, setting saddle height, and intonating the strings.
Take it to the bridge!
Photo 5
Next, turn the guitar over and make sure the six mounting screws holding the tremolo to the body are all adjusted flush to the bridge plate (Photo 5). Don't tighten them too much, otherwise the tremolo will rock forward on its beveled edge. Lower each screw just enough for the bridge plate to sit flat and flush with the body.
Testing one, two.
Tune up and test the spring tension by bending the strings. Does the trem move at all? If so, tighten the claw a bit closer to the body. Hold a note on one string and bend another against it. You want the held note to stay in tune as you bend the other string. Keep in mind that some guitar necks flex a bit when you bend a string and this will subtly affect the tuning. In this case, we're only paying attention to the tremolo to see if it rocks forward when bending strings.
Be patient: You may need to tighten the springs several times before the trem stays rock solid when you bend. Remember to always tune after every adjustment. Once the trem is secured flush to the body and doesn't tilt forward when you bend strings, it's time to move to the final setup stage.
Adjust the saddles.
Photo 6
Now adjust the action at the bridge saddles. Using an Allen wrench, adjust the two screws to position each saddle to your preferred height (Photo 6). Make sure each saddle stays level and doesn't tilt, and adjust the saddles in a gentle arc that matches the fretboard radius. I explain this operation in "How to Set Up a Fender Stratocaster."
Final setup.
After decking the trem and adjusting the action, the strings may be sitting too close to the pickups and this can negatively affect intonation. So we have to check the pickup height before doing anything else. If you want to brush up on this, read "How to Balance Pickups on Strats and Teles."
After adjusting the pickups, then tackle the intonation. Again, I detail this process in "How to Set Up a Fender Stratocaster."
Beware of Stripped Screw Holes
Occasionally when locking down a Strat trem I've encountered worn out screw holes, either at the spring claw or bridge plate. Stripped-out holes must be doweled and re-drilled, otherwise the screws will continue to strip out more wood and will eventually slip out of the hole. Last year I wrote a column about fixing stripped-out holes for pickguard screws, and the same principles apply here, although in this case the holes are bigger and require a slightly larger dowel. Check out "Got a Loose Screw?" for complete details. Remember, if you don't have the proper tools or knowledge to correctly do this—or any guitar job—play it safe and consult your local guitar tech.
Tip: Always put fresh strings on your guitar before you adjust the intonation.
All right—that's it! You've now locked down your trem and should have a much easier time keeping your guitar in tune.
[Updated 9/24/21]
This handy tool can be a guitarist’s best friend.
A digital multimeter (Photo 1) is the perfect tool for testing many components on a guitar or bass. We use them in the shop for testing pickups, output jacks, switches, and batteries, and you can also use them for testing cables and wiring harnesses. Best of all, you don’t need to spend a fortune to get a good multimeter. I still use the one I bought at Radio Shack 23 years ago, and such luthier supply companies as Allparts and Stewart-MacDonald have excellent multimeters designed for working on a guitar, priced from $25 to $35.
Let’s explore five ways to use a multimeter:
• Testing pickups (impedance and functionality).
• Mapping out a switch.
• Testing a guitar cable.
• Identifying the lugs on a TRS output jack.
• Checking battery life.
Testing pickups. On many occasions I’ve used a multimeter before buying a used pickup. I learned the importance of this the hard way when I bought a used pickup at a guitar show, only to discover it didn’t work when I got it home. If I’d brought a multimeter with me, I could have tested the pickup on the spot and saved some money.
It’s a simple process to test a pickup. Set the multimeter to the ohm setting and touch its red test lead to the pickup’s primary lead (hot) and touch the black test lead to the pickup’s ground wire.
Photo 2
If you’re testing a humbucker with four conductors, make sure that the wires are properly attached to each other. For example, before you try to measure the impedance on a Seymour Duncan humbucker (Photo 2), make sure that the red and white leads are connected to each other and isolated from any other connection, and the green and bare leads are also connected to each other. Touch the red test lead from the multimeter to the black wire—the pickup’s primary lead. Touch the multimeter’s black test lead to the green and bare ground wires on the pickup. This should give you an accurate impedance measurement.
To make sense of a particular model pickup’s reading, check with the manufacturer for its exact impedance. If the impedance measurement you take is significantly lower than the manufacturer’s rating, then you know there’s something wrong with the pickup.
only to find you have no signal?
A multimeter can tell you a lot about a pickup before you wire it up. For example, humbuckers typically measure at around 8k ohms for a vintage-style pickup to as much as 25k for a high-output pickup. The 16.25k reading we see in Photo 2 indicates this is a hot humbucker. Single-coil pickups can range from 6k (vintage) up to 16k (high-output).
Mapping out a switch. If you don’t have a diagram to follow, wiring a new switch can be frustrating. An easy way to save time when tackling a wiring project is to use your multimeter to map out the switch. Simply set your multimeter to the continuity setting, which is marked with a speaker or soundwave icon. This setting will produce an audible tone to let you know when a circuit is closed.
Photo 3
On a 3-way toggle switch, for example, touch either one of the side lugs with one of the test leads from the multimeter, then touch the middle lug—that’s typically the output—with the other test lead (Photo 3). If you hear a tone, then you know the switch is on in that position. If there’s no tone in that position, the switch is off.
Photo 4
It’s a similar process for a Strat-style 5-way blade switch (Photo 4). Touch the last lug on the switch—this will be the output lug—with one of the test leads from the multimeter. Then touch each of the other lugs with the other test lead and listen for the tone. By carefully working through each switch position, you’ll be able to locate its corresponding input lug. As you map a switch’s connections, draw a diagram so you’ll have something to refer to in the future.
Testing a guitar cable. Have you ever arrived at a gig or rehearsal only to find you have no signal? The worst part is not knowing where the problem lies. Is the amp blown? Does the guitar have a loose output jack? Chances are it’s the guitar cable—that’s the place to start troubleshooting. The good news is, it’s quick and easy to test your cable with a multimeter.
Photo 5
Set your multimeter to test continuity, then touch the tip of both cable plugs with the test leads (Photo 5). If you hear a solid tone, you have a connection. But don’t stop there: Move the cable around a little to see if it has a short, and test it again. If after shaking the cable and testing it several more times you continue to get a solid tone, you can assume the cable is good. However, if the test tone is intermittent you’ll know there’s a problem. You should also test the ground on the cable. Simply touch the shaft of both plugs with the test leads and listen for a solid tone.
Testing a TRS jack. The output jacks on passive guitars are pretty simple—they have one lug for the primary lead and one for the ground. However, output jacks for an active system have three lugs. Called a tip/ring/sleeve (TRS) jack, these are common in electric guitars with active pickups or onboard circuitry, and are found in most acoustic guitars equipped with an internal preamp. The tip is for the primary lead, the sleeve is for a battery switch that turns the battery on when a cable is plugged into it, and there’s also a ground to complete the circuit for the electronics.
Sometimes the lugs for the tip and sleeve are different lengths, which makes them easier to identify, but many TRS jacks have the same length lugs with no markings to let you know which one is for the battery and which one is for the primary lead. This can be problematic if you’re installing a new pickup system into an acoustic guitar, adding active electronics to a solidbody, or troubleshooting an existing setup. But once again, the multimeter makes it easy to sort this out.
Photo 6
First plug a guitar cable into the output jack and switch your multimeter to the continuity setting. Touch one of the test leads to the tip of the guitar cable’s exposed plug and touch the other test lead to one of the lugs on the TRS output jack (Photo 6). Listen for a tone to identify which lug makes the connection. The lug that gives you a tone while you’re touching the plug tip is where you’ll attach the primary lead from a pickup or preamp.
Next, while still touching the plug’s tip with the test lead, touch the other lug on the jack. There should be no tone. Keep your test lead on that lug and move the other test lead from the plug’s tip to its shaft. You should hear a tone. This identifies the lug you’re currently touching as the battery switch for the active electronics in your guitar.
Testing batteries. Given the amount of battery-operated gear most guitarists have in their rig, it can be a challenge to stay on top of available battery power. You don’t want to arrive at a gig with a dying battery in a stomp, but you certainly don’t want to swap out all the batteries in your gear before every show. Some may still have plenty of life in them, so why not do a battery check to get the facts? (Of course, once you reach a certain number of pedals, it makes economic and ecological sense to get a powered pedalboard and be done with batteries.)
In the early days of rock ’n’ roll, guitarists would test a 9-volt battery by touching its terminals to their tongues—not a very accurate (or sanitary) approach. If you received a mild shock, the battery was deemed gig-worthy. The best way to test a battery is with a multimeter. With it, you can test just about any type of battery: AA, 9-volt, lithium, or even a disc battery.
Photo 7
Set the multimeter to the DC V setting (and if your multimeter offers it, to the appropriate voltage range). Now touch the red test lead to the plus battery terminal and the black test lead to the minus terminal. The multimeter will display the battery’s voltage (Photo 7). If you’re testing a 9-volt battery and the display on the multimeter reads less than 9 volts, the battery is weak. If the battery measures 9 volts or more, you’re good to go.
Put some shimmer and spank into your dual-humbucker guitar with this alternative wiring scheme.
Recently a client brought in a 1995 Fender Strat and asked me to replace its two humbucking pickups (Photo 1). The original pickups had been upgraded years ago with a set of Seymour Duncans—a JB in the bridge position and a Jazz in the neck slot. These are excellent pickups and typically sound great in most guitars, but my client said they were too dark for the type of music he plays.
It was tempting to sell him a new set of pickups, but instead I recommended we rewire the pickups in parallel (more on this in a moment) to see if that would provide the brighter tone he was looking for. Because both pickups have a 4-conductor harness, I knew we could pull this off using the existing 3-way blade switch and without adding any extra switches to this guitar—an important consideration for the owner.
Each guitar has its own resonant frequency. Some guitars are bright, some are darker, and some are just flat-out midrange heavy. In large part this has to do with the density of the wood and the quality of the hardware, which helps explain why certain makes and models of pickups can sound fabulous in one guitar, but not so good in another. If your humbuckers sound too dark, rewiring them could be the perfect solution. It’s certainly worth trying before you replace them.
Some background. The two coils in a humbucker are typically wired in series. This produces the highest output, but also the darkest tone. If a humbucker has a 4-conductor harness, its coils can easily be wired in parallel. In this configuration, you lose about 20 percent of your volume, but the tone is brighter and cleaner.
When a humbucker’s coils are connected in series, the signal path of the first coil flows through the second coil and then on to the pickup selector switch, volume pot, and output jack. When wired in parallel, the two coils still operate together, but the signal path doesn’t travel from one coil into the other.
Photo 2
Planning the procedure. Stock Seymour Duncan JB and Jazz humbuckers are wired in series. Before we can modify the 4-conductor harness to wire the coils in parallel, we need to understand the Duncan color codes (Photo 2). Except for the bare ground wire, each colored wire is either the “start” or “finish” of a coil. How these wires are connected determines whether the pickup is wired in series or parallel. Here’s the breakdown:
• Black is the start of coil 1.
• White is the finish of coil 1.
• Green is the start of coil 2.
• Red is the finish of coil 2.
• Bare wire is always the ground.
Note: This applies only to Duncan pickups—other manufacturers use different color-coding schemes. See “Obey Your Color Codes” for more details.
Photo 3
Photo 3 shows these five wires connected in a series configuration. We have the black wire acting as the hot or primary lead, and the red and white wires are soldered together to create the series link (that is, they connect the two coils).
Fig 1
The green wire is connected to the bare wire and then soldered to the back of a pot to create a ground. Figure 1 shows how the hot wires connect to the 3-way blade switch for series wiring, and how the switch itself is configured.
Photo 4
Photo 4 illustrates how to connect the wires of a 4-conductor Duncan humbucker in a parallel configuration. As you can see, black and red are joined—they become the hot or primary lead. White and green are connected to the bare wire to become the ground, and all three are soldered to the back of a pot. The parallel wiring diagram for the 3-way switch is show in Figure 2.
Fig 2
By wiring the humbucker in parallel, we have connected the start of coil 1 to the finish of coil 2. For the ground, we have connected the finish of coil 1 to the start of coil 2 and both are joined to the bare wire.
Doing the deed. After removing the strings and pickguard, unsolder the pickup wires from the switch and pots, being careful not to overheat them. Separate the wires from each other with your soldering iron. Next, twist and solder the black and red wires together. Do the same for the green and white wires, and join them to the bare wire. Now solder the black and red to the input lug on the 3-way switch, and the green, white, and bare wires to the back of one of the pots.
That should do it. Put the pickguard back on, restring, and test out your new tones.
Obey Your Color Codes
Different pickup manufacturers use different color codes for their 4-conductor humbuckers, so before you start brandishing that hot soldering iron, make sure you’ve got the right color codes and have figured out how to connect the wires. Here are a few parallel wiring combinations for several other popular pickup manufacturers.- DiMarzio: Red and white are hot, black and green are ground.
- Gibson: Black and white are hot, green and red are ground.
- Jackson: Green and red are hot, white and black are ground.