mod garage

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In my guitar shop, players often ask about how to improve the tone in a Tele neck pickup. Here are several ways to address it, including a pickup wiring that removes the tone load in the neck pickup’s switching phase, resulting in a slight high-end boost.

Hello and welcome back to Mod Garage. This month, we’ll continue our “no tone control” journey from last month [“Mod Garage: The Scott Henderson S-Style Wiring”] with a cool mod for your Telecaster. Something I hear a lot in the shop is that people aren’t happy with the tone of the neck pickup in their Telecaster. It’s often described as muffled, colorless, lifeless, or similar. Why is this? It’s usually a mixture of three things:

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How to Install and Maintain Your Guitar's Pots
Photo 1 — Photo courtesy singlecoil.com

When it comes to cosmic tone, it’s critical to have functional potentiometers. Here’s how to install them correctly and keep them ship-shape afterward.

(Originally published March 27, 2020)

Over the last few years, we've discussed the construction of potentiometers and diagnosed several potential problems with these essential, yet sometimes pesky, electric guitar components. (If you missed these, check out “The Trouble with Tribbles" and “Dealing with Knobs and Pots.")

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photos courtesy of singlecoil.com

Let’s build one of my favorite DIY guitar tools that I use daily in my shop. I’ll show you two versions and then explain how to put them into action.

Welcome back to Mod Garage. After receiving numerous requests to show more DIY tools for guitarists, today we’ll explore one of my favorites. For years I’ve used this one in the shop daily and I’m sure you’ll love it. It’s cheap and easy to build, but very effective for analyzing circuits of electric guitars and basses without opening the electronic compartment or lifting the pickguard. It’s a kind of adaptor or extension to measure a pickup’s DC resistance (DCR) from outside the guitar. After building one, we’ll discuss how to interpret the measurements.

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