Brad Labelle
Question: What are some personal qualities of yours that set you apart from others in your writing or playing?
Brad Labelle - Nap Eyes
A: I love dance music and have an unrelenting thirst for new and fresh sounds. I don’t feel my guitar playing is particularly groundbreaking, but those influences must seep through somehow. I do believe I’m a fairly expressive player and my short attention span keeps me endlessly improvising.
Nap Eyes’ latest release, The Neon Gate.
Obsession: I can’t stop listening to the recent Jane Remover track “Magic I Want U.” The production is deeply detailed but doesn’t feel cluttered, and her melodic sensibilities are intoxicating. She gives you crunchy guitars paired with breakbeats, West Coast synth lines, a Janet Jackson-esque electro outro, scratching, a fun little guitar solo.... I could go on.
As of late, Two Star & the Dream Police by Mk.gee has been in Brad's regular listening rotation.
Galen Brownson - Reader of the Month
Metallica’s two-guitar format inspired Galen when he was learning guitar.
A: When I was learning how to play, I was listening to a lot of two-guitar bands, like Metallica and Megadeth and Iron Maiden. I tried to find ways to play both guitar parts at once, which is not always possible, but I write two parts for one guitar now.
Metallica’s second album is a fan favorite of their early, pioneering years.
Obsession: My latest obsession is finding ways to combine metal music with electronic music, particularly dubstep. My younger brother once chastised me for ignoring electronic music by saying “metal and dubstep have a lot in common,” and he was absolutely right. I’ve since made it a goal to weave them together.
Galen names Polis by Uppermost, a French electronic music producer, as one of his favorite records.
Ted Drozdowski - Editorial Director
Ted takes a slide solo on his well-traveled and beloved Dollycaster.
A: My interests toggle between history and mystery, so my technique is based in archaic/anarchic blues playing styles and an expansive sonic palette that relies on blending fingerpicking, slide, and an array of pedals to create tones and sheets of sound. I think of it as cosmic roots music, and don’t hear a lot of other people doing what I do the way I do it.
The marquee image for Ted and Coyote Motel’s new movie, The River: A Songwriter’s Stories of the South.
Obsession: For a few years now, much of my creative energy has been invested in a feature film I created with my band Coyote Motel—scripting, recording narration, performing as part of the band, editing, and learning many painfully new and hard lessons about movie-making. And then getting the film to festivals, where we’ve won laurels, and onto a few select screens. Now, I’m working on distribution, in a field where there ain’t no Bandcamp or DistroKid. It ain’t easy, but I’m obsessed with getting The River: A Songwriter’s Stories of the South into the world.
The current state of Ted’s pedalboard. (He’s aware he could do a better job with the wiring.)
Kate Koenig - Managing Editor
Kate’s newest album, which contains some of their rawest and most vulnerable lyrics to date.
A: I wear my heart on my sleeve—to the point where I’ve always struggled to have a verbal filter—so I tend to write very raw, vulnerable lyrics. A taste for cerebral art during my formative years has also informed my approach to coming up with challenging and intricate fingerpicking guitar parts.
When PG’s worldly gear editor Charles recommended Black Flag’s record Damaged, Kate got on that posthaste.
Obsession: I’ve been revisiting, digging into, and expanding my knowledge of classic ’80s and ’90s punk in preparation for my next artist interview for Premier Guitar(some foreshadowing, eh?). I have always been intrigued by punk culture’s outspoken rebelliousness and commitment to anarchic ideals, which strike me as free and authentic.
Kate has a distinct memory of a classmate playing “You’re Gonna Go Far, Kid” on loop in their senior-year studio-art class. (They still wonder why their teacher didn’t intervene.)
Fender’s Greasebucket system is part of Cory Wong’s sonic strategy.
Tone pot with Fender Greasebucket tone system:
This 250k tone pot is a standard CTS pot with a 90/10 audio taper found in all U.S.-built Fender guitars. The Cory Wong guitar uses the Fender Greasebucket system, which is added to the pot as a ready-to-solder PCB. The Greasebucket PCB is also available individually from Fender (part #7713546000), though you can use conventional electronic parts for this.
Fender introduced this feature in 2005 on some of the Highway One models and some assorted Custom Shop Strats. The Greasebucket name (which is a registered Fender trademark, by the way) is my favorite of Fender’s marketing names, but don’t let it fool you: Your tone will get cleaner with this modification, not greasy and dirty.
According to Fender, the Greasebucket tone circuit reduces high frequencies without adding bass as the tone knob is turned down. Don’t let that description confuse you. A standard Strat tone control does not add any bass frequencies! As you already know, with a passive system you can’t add anything that isn’t already there. You can reshape the tone by deemphasizing certain frequencies and making others more prominent. Removing highs makes lows more apparent and vice versa. In addition, the use of inductors (which is how a passive pickup behaves in a guitar circuit) and capacitors can create resonant peaks and valleys (band-passes and notches), further coloring the overall tone.
Cory Wong bringing the funk onstage.
This type of band-pass filter only allows certain frequencies to pass through, while others are blocked. The standard tone circuit in a Strat is called a variable low-pass filter (or a treble-cut filter), which only allows the low frequencies to pass through while the high frequencies get sent to ground via the tone cap.
The Greasebucket’s band-pass filter is a combination of a high-pass and a low-pass filter. This is supposed to cut high frequencies without “adding” bass, which has mostly to do with the resistor in series with the pot. That resistor means the control will never get to zero. You can get a similar effect by simply not turning the Strat’s standard tone control all the way down. (The additional cap on the wiper of the Greasebucket circuit complicates things a bit, though; together with the pickups it forms an RLC circuit, but I really don’t want to get into that here.)
The standard Fender Greasebucket tone system is used in the Cory Wong Strat, which includes a 0.1 μF cap and a 0.022 uF cap, along with a 4.7k-ohm resistor in series. These are the values used on the PCB, and without the PCB it looks like the illustration at the top of this column.
Push-push tone pot with preset overwriting function:
The lower tone pot assigned to the bridge pickup is a 250k audio push-push pot with a DPDT switch. The switch is used to engage a preset sound by overwriting the 5-way pickup-selector switch, no matter what switching position it is in. The preset functionality has a very long tradition in the house of Fender, dating back to the early ’50s, when Leo Fender designed a preset bass sound on position 3 (where the typical neck position is on a modern guitar) of the Broadcaster (and later the Telecaster) circuit. Wong loves the middle-and-neck-in-parallel pickup combination, so that’s the preset sound his push-push tone pot is wired for.
The neck pickup has a dedicated tone control while the middle pickup doesn’t, which is also another interesting feature. This means that when you hit the push-push switch, you will engage the neck and middle pickup together in parallel, no matter what you have dialed in on the 5-way switch. Hit the push-push switch again, and the 5-way switch is back to its normal functionality. Instead of a push-push pot, you can naturally use a push-pull pot or a DPDT toggle switch in combination with a normal 250k audio pot.
Here we go for the wiring. For a much clearer visualization, I used the international symbol for ground wherever possible instead of drawing another black wire, because we already have a ton of crossing wires in this drawing. I also simplified the treble-bleed circuit to keep things clearer; you’ll find the architecture of it with the correct values in the previous column.
Cory Wong Strat wiring
Courtesy of singlecoil.com
Wow, this really is a personalized signature guitar down to the bone, and Wong used his opportunity to create a unique instrument. Often, signature instruments deliver custom colors or very small aesthetic or functional details, so the Cory Wong Stratocaster really stands out.
That’s it! In our next column, we will continue our Stratocaster journey in the 70th year of this guitar by having a look at the famous Rory Gallagher Stratocaster, so stay tuned!
Until then ... keep on modding!
The magic is in the interactive nature of all these factors … and then some. (This list is for passive pickups and does not include many aspects of active pickups.) Sometimes I see pickups boiled down to only a few factors, and I do not think that is a sophisticated enough view of these complicated and potentially beautiful-sounding devices.
As an example, it is thought that most players have an idea of the sound that humbucking pickups with alnico 4 magnets that are wound to 7.8k make. They’re historically associated with PAF humbuckers, but those qualities don’t fully explain what gives those pickups character. For example, if the pickup’s wire is standard-size 42 gauge, at 5,000 turns the pickup would have a resistance of about 7.5k. If you use 42-gauge wire that is undersized (which is a common inconsistency) and 4,800 turns, the pickup would still be around 7.5k. Because of the wire diameter and different number of turns, the pickups would sound different even though it’s the same magnet and same resistance. The wire matters; 7.5k is just the resistance of both coils. Just as wire diameter varies, alnico 4 purchased from four manufacturers sounds four different ways, so you have to compensate for that in other design areas as well.
If you think about the sound of a Strat, there is a “whistle note” (or you can think of it as a “ping note”) in every note you play. Think about playing on the neck pickup on a Strat; you can hear that whistle sound in every note. The pickup without a load is resonating at about 11k and at about 15 dB. Fifteen decibels is a lot. Imagine adding 15 dB of 11k (high treble) to your vocal at a gig! The potentiometers on a Strat, and those are 250k (which is a fairly low value for a volume and tone control), calm down how loud the whistle note is. When these single-coil pickups are built well, this whistle note can be very musical. Just think of Robbie Blunt playing “Big Log” on Robert Plant’s 1983 album The Principle of Moments. For us at PRS, getting the whistle note to be the right frequency and the right volume is very important. It is believed, for good reason, that an old PAF pickup can sound very much like a single-coil Strat pickup. That is because of the frequency and volume of the whistle note coming out of these vintage pickups.
“In the end, it’s really simple. Do you like the sound of the pickup? Will it do the job that you’re looking for the instrument to do?”
In the end, it’s really simple. Do you like the sound of the pickup? Will it do the job that you’re looking for the instrument to do? When David Grissom worked with us on our DGT pickups, he spent almost a year on them, and at the end of the process, he was adjusting the coil wire by 25 turns at a time until it was exactly where he wanted it. And that’s only the amount of turns. We also evaluated the magnetic type, strength, etc. I bring up all these parameters to give you an idea of how complicated it is to get all the specifications to dance well together. I like what’s going on pickup-wise at PRS and believe that our 2025 offering is gonna turn some heads. Normally, I don’t bring up what we do at PRS in these articles, but this time I think it’s worth mentioning, so stay tuned.
Consider all the types of pickups out there: humbuckers, covered humbuckers, P-90s, Strat single-coils, Tele single-coils, Gretsch Filter’Trons, Jazzmaster, P Bass, Jazz Bass, no-hum single-coils, and mini-humbuckers that make single-coil sounds. Within each one of these types, there can be scores of variations. How to choose? Simply try a pickup and see if you like it!