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Two guitar pickups on a textured surface: one black with wires, one shiny silver with attached wires.
photo courtesy SINGLECOIL (https://singlecoil.com)
Mod Garage

Tonewood Teardown: Pickups and Wiring for an Esquire-Style Electric

Our columnist’s upgraded pickup and electronics choices for his Harley Benton guitar

Hello, and welcome back to Mod Garage. This month’s installment in our ā€œTonewood Teardownā€ series will be the most important one, dealing with the electrified tone of our guitar. We’ll start work on the wiring, which is the key component of every electric guitar. I really like the analogy that the pickup is the heart, the wiring the brain, and the wires themselves the neural system of an electric guitar. This means we should take care to do everything as carefully as possible here.

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