I've read lots of questions at bulletin boards and have asked quite a few myself. There's a LOT of misinformation flying around out there in the ether. So I put together the answers to lots of questions that people ask, and often get conflicting answers to.
This is the shape and size of the back of the neck. Do you like a thin neck that's easy to get your hand around? Or do you like a thicker neck that makes it easier to bend and solo? Common neck contours are:
Many people will try to tell you that a maple fretboard makes a huge difference compared with a rosewood or ebony fretboard for your tone. It does make a difference, albeit slight.
My personal experience has been that Maple fretboards give a brighter, snappier tone. Define "snappy", you say. Maybe it's the fact that maple fretboards are finished, but you can feel the pick attack and you can hear a quicker response.
On the other hand, Rosewood fretboards tend to be more warm, and the wood is unfinished, so there may be more resonance. The feel of Rosewood is also nicer, because it's very smooth and is faster to play.
Ebony is a harder wood, and seems to have all the benefits of Rosewood, with the tone of Maple. It's unfinished, fast, but with a bright snappy tone. That said, it's cosmetically the least appealing of the three to me.
At the end of the day, however, Eric Clapton's comment about Maple fretboards is what I think about. In an interview with Christies about why he likes Maple Fretboards, Eric said he preferred maple becuase it shows wear more quickly. The bottom line is, you're unlikely to hate one or the other for any reason other than aesthetics.
TopFret size makes a huge difference when it comes to comfort. On Vintage and Reissue Fenders, you'll find "Vintage" small fretwire. When playing a guitar with smaller frets, you might notice that depresssing the strings gives you more contact with the fretboard. This may or may not be a good thing. Modern Fenders and Gibsons use "Medium Jumbo" fretwire, which gives you a taller, wider fret for your strings to ride on. Medium Jumbo frets are typically easier to bend. Jumbo frets are even bigger. It's all personal preference. I recommend you go down to the guitar store and play a few different guitars to find out which style frets you like (this works well for neck profile and fretboard radius too).
TopThere's a lot of debate over which tonewood is best, and it's true that tonewood does affect the tone of the guitar. Certain woods have different frequency response, resonance, and weight than others. However, a lot can be done to alter a guitar's tone if the body wood you want (aesthetically) doesn't match the tone you're looking for. You're not solely at the mercy of the wood. However, a good match of woods with pickups, fretboard wood, and electronics can make a guitar that positively sings.
TopTone has become something of a curse word to guitar gurus. Tone is used as a catch-all for "my guitar doesn't sound good! I want it to sound better." However, tone is very much according to your own taste. You should decide for yourself what is appropriate, "good" tone for your style. However, it must be balanced with the output of the pickups. Since this article deals primarily with Strat's, I'll explain the difference between tone and output in those terms.
First of all, a little background. Pickups are electrical devices. They are essentially the opposite of an electric motor. An electric motor applies electric current to a coil of wire surrounded by magnets, causing the coil of wire to spin.
Pickups do the opposite. Wires (your guitar strings) move back and forth over a magnet, generating electrical current. The vibration of your strings causes electromagnetism in the poles of your pickup. Basically, the coil of wire around the magnets captures this curent and transfers it to the amplifier. So, quickly, we can see that several things can alter the kind of electrical current (our sound wave) that we produce:
Now, the closer the magnet is to any given string, the more current will be generated by that string. The amount of wire around the magnets will also increase or decrease how much sound is output. So we see more variables:
Those are the basic variables we have to work with when choosing a pickup. Several other less important characteristics are:
All these variables affect the amount of electrical current that comes out of the pickup. In simple terms, it's what makes the guitar LOUDER. But these variables also affect what kind of frequencies will be picked up the most. This affects the way a guitar sounds. There's "tone" rearing it's ugly head again.
Perversely, you can't have it all. For the "classic" Strat sound, you want thumping low end sounds combined with glassy, rich high end with lots of clear articulation. What's the opposite of this? The Gibson sound: singing mids, with some what less-emphasized lows and highs.
Well as it turns out, the output is directly related to the difference between these two pickups. Output can be measured in many ways, but one way is to see how much resistance there is between the two poles of the pickup, i.e. how much resistsance does electrical current encounter when flowing through the pickup? The more resistance, the more output.
So, to make a long, boring story short, Gibson Humbucking pickups have high resistances (between 9 and 14 KOhms), and classic strat pickups have low resistances (low output, 5-6.5KOhms). That's why a Les Paul can be LOUDER when played on the same settings as a strat.
So we see that there is an inverse relationship between tone and output. Classic Strat pickups are wound with less wire in the coil than "normal" and are called "underwound". Pickups for Strat that are "overwound" have higher output, but suffer from increased mids, sacrificing the classic Strat tone.
Now, that doesn't mean it's bad, just different. It depends on what you want. Now you're left to pick the pickups for yourself. Read up a little bit more on the subject of inductance if you want to pick pickups purely on specs, but the best thing is to actually HEAR the pickups, or better yet, play them for yourself.
This page (Courtesy Acme Guitar Works) has a wealth of Strat pickup recordings, for comparison. It has helped me before. Also, go to the guitar store, and while you're checking out the neck profiles, listen to the pickups. Play with the amp on the same settings for all guitars, and compare them. Then find out what pickups are in your favorite-sounding guitar.
TopThere's a lot of confusion about what exactly a humbucker is, and what makes a good one from a bad one. A humbucker is basically two coils of wire with magnets (single coils, if you will), wired together in series. However, they are definately distinct from two regular single coil pickups wired in series. Several factors account for this difference.
One is the proximity. The two coils are obviously much closer together than, say, the neck and middle pickups in a Strat. The magnetic field of the pickups generally comes from one shared bar magnet, changing the shape of the field. The magnet is generally stronger, which increases the inductance of the pickps.
Another factor are the coils themselves. Often, the coils are not wound to the same degree. This difference in windings makes for a different resistance between the two coils. Since one coil feeds into the other coil, this changes the tone.
Finally, the positioning of the two coils has a major impact on the tone of a humbucker. For single-coil pickups, the magnetic poles are generally placed under harmonic nodes of the guitar strings, or points of maximum vibration. With a humbucker, one coil is under a harmonic, but one is not. this changes the tone that results. Some artists have even flipped the pickups around so that the so-called "slug" coil is under the harmonic. Don't try that at home.
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