soldering

DIY: How to Wire a Guitar Output Jack

In the video, Dave Johnson of Nashvilleā€™s Scale Model Guitars shows you the steps for replacing a standard 1/4" jack, with a boat-style plate, with a Pure Tone Multi-Contact Output Jack.

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Long to try your hand at building a pedal but can't help feeling overwhelmed? Let us enlighten you on the tools, materials, and available resources, as well as teach you how to build a critical, oft-overlooked testing device.

The DIY guitar-pedal world has been exploding over the past few yearsā€”so much so that it's likely at least a few of you have dipped a toe in already. I know I did. After using pedals for so many years and becoming pretty much obsessed with them, I felt a burning desire to learn what's going on inside these contraptions. But initially I was pretty intimidated. There is so much to learn! And even though we live in an age when all the information we need is practically at our fingertips, it's sometimes difficult to know how to word things in a search engine to get what we're looking for. Luckily, there's an immense DIY community out there, tooā€”blogs, forums, and general-information reference sites. In my experience, just about everyone in the community is eager to help each other, so it didn't take long for me to feel welcome and encouraged.

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Fig. 1

Illustrations courtesy of singlecoil.com

You can split a humbucker to the north coil or south coil, or you can access a tapping point in the middle of a single-coil pickup. Learn what this means, and how to do it.

Hello and welcome back to Mod Garage. This month we'll take a closer look into what tapping and splitting a pickup really means. Coil tapping is often confused with coil splitting, and a lot of companies and mod pages use the term tapping when they mean splitting, and vice versa. As the golden rule of thumb, you can remember: You are tapping single-coil pickups and you are splitting humbuckers. This should avoid major confusion about this subject.

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