The first product to be introduced from the new “Larry’s Garage” series, the Blackstack passive soundhole pickup offers the vintage sound of a humbucking magnetic pickup in a modern, battery-free design.

A departure from the warm, transparent tone of Fishman's Rare Earth soundhole pickups, Blackstack has its own voice... a more vintage roadhouse sound perfect for high volume band situations that require a driving acoustic to cut through the mix and keep up with the rest of the band.

Hard rockers will love it, but so will those guitarists looking for a vintage-inspired tone. Whether your taste is country, classic rock, alt country, or something completely your own - you'll find the Blackstack delivers with a bold, powerful acoustic voice.

The new Blackstack is delivered in a specially-designed metal "poker case" package, complete with Fishman playing cards and a stack of black poker chips. But save the gambling for something other than your acoustic tone - this humbucking pickup is ultra-quiet, extremely feedback resistant, and features adjustable pole-pieces for perfect string balance adjustments.

Made in Fishman's Andover, MA factory, these new pickups offer our legendary quality, performance and heavy duty durability - perfect for professionals and weekend warriors alike.

Like all of Fishman's soundhole pickups, it provides easy installation with no modifcation required - plug and play right out of the box!

For most guitarists, alternate tunings are associated with the blues – the open G, open E and open D tunings that can be the perfect set-up for slide playing. While most of these tunings have been popularised by electric and acoustic players over many years, DADGAD tuning is somewhat different.

The origins of DADGAD – say it as a single word – are not even that clear. DADGAD was popularized by British folk guitarist Davey Graham, some saying he discovered it on a trip to Tangier in Morocco in the early 1960s, and it likely existed in North Africa and elsewhere for many years.

It’s not a “blues” tuning at all, it is what’s called a “modal” tuning. DADGAD is usually associated with fingerstyle folk playing, but it can do much more as we’ll see. Even if you use it rarely, DADGAD is a fantastic tuning to have in your armory.

Retuning your guitar to DADGAD is easy. From the standard EADGBE, you simply standard tune the first, second and sixth strings down a whole step (two frets). Strike all open strings and you will get a Dsus4 chord. That may initially feel like an odd place to start playing, but DADGAD offers many possibilities that can help you write new music and rejuvenate your sense of melody.

Here are some examples of DADGAD players in action, and they are more diverse than you might think.

Davey Graham is acknowledged as bringing DADGAD to a wider audience, but he certainly didn’t “invent” it. Yet Graham’s DADGAD tuning made an impression on many aspiring guitarists who were listening to his ’60s recordings, including Jimmy Page and Paul Simon. Graham’s most-famous use of DADGAD was on his arrangement of traditional U.K. folk song “She Moves Through the Fair.”

Other British folk acoyltes of the 1960s such as John Renbourn, Bert Jansch and Martin Carthy soon adopted DADGAD on some songs. Simon took note of the English folk style: his version of the traditional “Scarborough Fair” is almost identical to Martin Carthy’s and Simon also co-opted DADGAD tuning for later songs, notably “Armistice Day” from his Paul Simon album.

Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page was certainly listening to Graham and the other “baroque folk” masters. Page had played versions of “She Moves Through the Fair” while in The Yardbirds and later recorded the same basic tune as “White Summer” in Led Zeppelin.

Jimmy Page calls DADGAD “my CIA tuning” by which he means Celtic / Indian / Arabian. It’s an apt nickname, as the tuning can offer the pipe-like sounds of Scottish and Irish music as well as the drones of North African, Indian and Arabian musics. “I was well aware of a lot of ‘exotic’ music in the late ‘60s,” Page told this author. “I had a sitar and got interested in modal tunings, Arabic music. Jeff Beck would come round and listen. I wasn’t just listening to blues, I was trying to find all sorts of new ways for my playing.”

And, later, Page certainly developed more originality as a DADGAD player. Proving DADGAD is not just for folk, one of Led Zeppelin’s most-menacing tracks, “Kashmir,” is played in DADGAD tuning.

Think DADGAD is too old and folky? It doesn’t have to be. Slipknot’s “Circle” is in DADGAD, even if it sounds completely unlike Slipknot because of it.

DADGAD is not for every guitarist. Neil Young, for example, favors the more simple double-drop-D (DADGBD). And it is only the brave who will tune their guitar to DADGAD permanently. And if you expect to rip a blues-rock pentatonic solo in DADGAD, you better have elastic hands.

Even so, DADGAD is a tuning that can help you and your guitar sound like new. Go explore…

Tuning down is extremely common today. In fact it’s almost a quaint curiosity when a band chooses to perform in standard tuning. But it wasn’t always this way. Once upon a time, almost everybody played in standard tuning (E A D G B E). But guitarists, like Indiana Jones and astronauts, are always striving for adventure and discovery, and this quest has led them to all sorts of lowered tunings. These tunings are of course distinct from the popular chord tunings (such as Open G) traditionally used in blues music, and generally their raison d’etre is to increase the heaviness of a riff.

Interestingly, one of the true pioneers of low tunings in metal – Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi – played some pretty high chords in standard tunings earlier in his career. The first two Sabbath albums are full of standard tuning, and Iommi tended to play riffs on the lower two strings and higher up on the neck for a thicker sound. Some riffs like Iron Man even took Iommi up to the G5 power chord starting on the 15th fret of the E string. A few years later, however, the mighty Iommi was tuning all the way down to C# (C# F# B E G# C#) for songs like the still-crushingly-heavy-today “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath” from the 1973 album of the same name.

But Iommi’s early ’70s subsonic rumble was not the first popular lower tuning. Eb or “half-step down” (Eb Ab Db Gb Bb Eb) has been a very popular lowered tuning for decades. Jimi Hendrix was fond of it for much of his classic material. Other notable proponents include Stevie Ray Vaughan, Eddie Van Halen, Yngwie Malmsteen, Extreme’s Nuno Bettencourt and Alice in Chains’ Jerry Cantrell. It’s a popular choice for those who need to help a singer out a little bit because it’s still close to the guitar’s “regular” register but leaves a little headroom in case those high notes are just a little too high for the vocalist to comfortably reach. It also imparts a slightly darker tone thanks to the reduced string tension, although some players prefer to use heavier strings that can counteract this effect. Interestingly, the band Placebo commonly tunes up a half-step (F C G# Eb Bb F#).

Metallica’s “The Thing That Should Not Be” from Master of Puppets was a crucial example of a metal band pushing the tuning down for sonic effect rather than to placate a straining vocalist. That track is in C# Standard, and the band was fond of joking in contemporary interviews that the song was hard to play at outdoors venues because the strings would flap in the breeze. A few albums later Metallica explored D Standard for “Sad But True” and Eb on “The God That Failed.” By the time St. Anger rolled around they were delving fully into tunings like Dropped C (C G C F A D).

Drop D tuning (D A D G B E) practically deserves an article of its own, such is its influence and utility. This tuning is popular because it makes it possible to play power chords with a single finger barred across the lowest two strings. Players had experimented with this tuning for years before it became an integral part of the grunge movement – notable examples include Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon,” The Doors’ “The End,” The Beatles’ “Dear Prudence” and Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain.” But Drop D really came into its own when applied to hard rock, heavy metal and grunge riffs. Although Led Zeppelin’s “Moby Dick” and “Ten Years Gone” are great early examples of a heavier band using the tuning, the critical turning point came with Van Halen’s “Unchained.” Eddie’s use of the tuning to play grinding repeated power chords in between higher chord stabs was as influential as it was innovative. Helmet’s Page Hamilton also helped to popularize it in a heavier setting. Now Drop D is almost the new standard, favored by acts like Muse, Evanescence, Rage Against The Machine, Radiohead, Avenged Sevenfold, Soundgarden, Foo Fighters, Incubus, Tool, Stone Temple Pilots and Nirvana.

But that aforementioned exploratory streak meant guitarists weren't happy to stay in Dropped D for too long. Drop C (C G C F A D), Drop C# (C# G# C# F# A# D#) and even Drop B (B F# B E G# C#) are incredibly popular today. Drop C users include Biffy Clyro, Bullet for My Valentine, System Of A Down, P.O.D., Disturbed, Metallica (on St. Anger), and Staind. Drop C# advocates include Deftones, Evanescence (again), System of a Down (again), Trivium on their latest album In Waves, and Alter Bridge. Drop B is perhaps best known as “the Slipknot tuning” but is also employed by bands like Machine Head, Bring Me the Horizon and The Devil Wears Prada.

One increasingly popular tuning is Open C (C G C G C E), often used by Devin Townsend. A benefit of this tuning is that it creates extremely thick power chord sounds by simply barring one finger across the entire neck. Another is that if you fret the shape of a regular root-fifth-octave power chord you’re instead rewarded with a lush-sounding root-fifth-eleventh, a chord that can sometimes be a little tricky to fret in standard tuning, certainly in the middle of a fast riff. This tuning is also very shred-friendly as it allows you to create your own scales with interesting intervals that are easily repeated in different octaves.

Below is an example of a six-note, pattern-based scale in the key of E – these types of scales are typically called “symmetrical scales” because they involve repeating a pattern across most of the neck. Usually they’re used to create atonal melodies, but Drop C is uniquely formulated to make them sound musical.

Back in the late 1960s certain factions in the amplifier industry went to great pains to introduce radical, new solid-state guitar amps and to promote them, partly at least, on the premise that they were “sturdier than fragile tube amps.” Tubes can be fragile if you don’t treat them right, certainly, but look after your tubes and the amp they are in and both should reward you with toneful and trouble-free service. Let's look at some easy ways to keep our tubes happy.

1) Let them warm up: Letting your tubes warm up for 60 seconds before switching the amp to “play” is not just an archaic function of an outdated technology, it’s crucial to preserving the life of your tubes. Tubes operate on two different types of electrical current, a low-voltage AC current that heats up their filaments, and a high-voltage DC current that drives their amplification duties. If the high-voltages DC hits them before the low-voltage AC has warmed them up it can do gradual harm to the components within the tube, and ultimately shorten their life. Most tube amps manufactured today have both Power and Standby switches. With the Standby in the off position, switch the Power to “on,” which will send the AC to the tubes’ “heaters” and start warming them up. After 60 seconds or so, flip the Standby to “on” to send the DC surging through the circuit and you’re ready to play—your tubes will be gently warmed up and ready to go. Some amps don’t have Standby switches, but more often than not they do carry tube rectifiers; because tube rectifiers themselves warm up slowly, they don’t send the DC voltages to the rest of the tubes immediately, but only gradually, once they have begun to warm up themselves. If you have an older amp with solid-state rectification (ie no rectifier tube) that is also lacking a Standby switch, I guess you either live with it that way, or pay a qualified amp repairman to install a Standby switch (although you will want to avoid devaluing any vintage amplifier, or voiding the warranty of a new one).

2) Let them cool down: When you’re done playing, switch the Standby off first, then the Power after a few seconds. Now, even though the amp is off, let it cool down for several minutes before moving it, or certainly before handling the tubes. Vacuum tubes are most susceptible to damage when hot—which renders their internal components more fragile and pliable—and moving the amp or handling the tubes before they have cooled down can lead to premature failure. There’s another reason to let tubes cool down if you’re swapping them, for tone-tasting or general maintenance: these things get hot! A fully-heated power or rectifier tube in particular can inflict a nasty burn. Let them cool down, and preserve both your tubes and your fingers.

3) Avoid excessive physical shocks: Even when cool, tubes can be damaged by excessive jolts or vibrations. On the whole they are usually a lot sturdier than those solid-state amp manufacturers might suggest, but hey, good tubes are expensive, and you might as well get as much life out of them as you can. Obviously you want to avoid dropping, knocking over, or heavily bumping your amp, but you should also avoid the kind of jolts and major vibrations an amp is subjected to when you put casters on it and roll it down a bumpy driveway or sidewalk. Rolling a road case with casters is usually okay, because these things have heavy internal padding, but I have known more than one guy who rolled his Twin or AC30 from the parking lot to the gig, and was dismayed when the thing failed to function on power-up. Roll it across the smooth tiled or wooden or carpeted floor, sure, but carry it over bumpy ground, please.

4) Use (or install) tube clamps: While many tubes will hold themselves in their sockets perfectly well, tube clamps—which come in various formats—will both help to prevent tubes from plummeting to their death if your amp should be bumped or dropped, and will also help to maintain a tight electric contact in the tube socket. The latter point is one that is too often overlooked; even a tube that seems to be seated tightly in a tube socket in a non-moving amp might jiggle, vibrate, or shift around in its contacts during the vibration produced simply by playing at high volumes, and in doing so might cause crackles, noise, or intermittent faults. Tube clamps are most often seen as simple “claw” types (a bent metal retainer with teeth that grip the base of a 6L6GC, 6V6GT or EL34, for example), or as a pair of springs and retainer cap, sized for use with 8-pin tubes or 9-pin output tubes such as EL84s. Another popular retainer for the EL84 is the simple bent-wire type of clip, which also works perfectly well. If your amp has no such clips you might consider having a qualified repairman install a set. Most preamp tubes have metal shields with internal springs that help keep them in place, although these tubes are smaller and lighter than most output tubes anyway, and therefore are less in danger of falling from the amp.

5) Keep your tubes cool: As distinct from No. 2 above, “Let them cool down,” tubes are also happiest when kept as cool as possible while operating. This means ensuring there is adequate air flow through the amp’s cooling vents, and never playing the amp in an enclosed box, small closet, or with its back up against a wall or a road case that might impede such air flow. Beyond this, installing a purpose-made fan to cool the output tubes in a large tube amp (which can usually be switched off for recording), or even using a small, quiet fan behind the amp, can really go a long way toward extending tube life.

6) Use the correct speaker impedance: Mismatching your amp’s output and your speaker(s) total impedance load will strain both your output tubes and your output transformer (OT), and possibly lead to premature failure in either or both. Most tube amp’s OTs will tolerate an impedance mismatch of 100 percent in either direction fairly well—that is, connecting a cab of either 4 ohms or 16 ohms to an amp with an 8 ohm output—although doing so will strain the tubes more than a correct load, and might also impede your amp’s full tonal performance.

7) Bias your output tubes: Some tube amps such as cathode-baised types or those with preset fixed bias circuits don’t require biasing. Just pop in the correct type and grade of replacement tubes and off you go. If your amp is one that is meant to be biased when the tubes are changed—or even as an element of routine maintenance when the output tubes are being retained—then do so. Tubes running at the wrong bias setting will not only age prematurely in many cases, they simply won’t sound their best, and that’s what it’s all about. There are a number of kits available today to let players safely bias tubes themselves, or any qualified amp repairman can perform the function for you for a nominal fee.

Buy good tubes, keep them happy, and maximize your tone. You know it makes sense.

INTRODUCING THE BLACKOUTS MODULAR PREAMP
MAKE ANY PICKUP ACTIVE!

Get the extreme gain of active pickups—with any pickup.

Just swap your volume pot with a Blackouts™ Modular Preamp. It combines the high-output, low-noise Blackouts™ preamp with a quality volume pot and our Liberator Solderless Pickup Change System for quick connections. Get your own sound—with your own look.

The genre-defining crunch and wail of modern heavy rock guitar often comes from active guitar pickups, which have a built-in, battery-powered preamp epoxy-sealed into a stark black casing. It's a distinctly modern sound married to a patently modern look. Now, for the first time, you can make any pickup an active pickup, even pickups with a more traditional look.

Seymour Duncan has taken its award-winning, low-noise Blackouts™ balanced differential preamp out of the pickup and integrated it with a high-quality volume pot. Blackouts™ Modular Preamp is an ingenious way to get that high-gain, active guitar sound with any passive four-conductor pickup. Simply by swapping a volume pot for a Blackouts Modular Preamp volume pot, you can get active pickup performance with a more classic look.

To capture the precise tone and performance of Original Blackouts™ pickups, Seymour Duncan created the specially voiced Blackouts™ Coil Pack, a replacement humbucker designed specifically for use with the Blackouts Modular Preamp. The Coil Pack will be available as a stand-alone neck or bridge humbucker or in a two-humbucker set packaged together with the Blackouts Modular Preamp.

Connecting the Coil Pack or any pickup to Blackouts Modular Preamp is an incredibly simple, solderless procedure, thanks to the same bare-wire Lockdown connector stations used in the Seymour Duncan Liberator™ Solderless Pickup Change System. Installing pickups only requires a mini-screwdriver to secure pickup and battery leads into the rock-solid screw-clamp connectors.

Mention open tunings and some guitarists’ eyes glaze over – especially if they’re from the rock world, where standard tuning lives up to its name or, perhaps, dropped D or even-tempered half- or whole-step across-the-fretboard detuning comes into play.

But in blues and folk music, and in some of Led Zeppelin’s greatest recordings like “Kashmir,” which is in D-A-D-G-A-D, open tunings can create a brave new world of sounds, albeit for an old-world-based technique.

Simply defined, an open tuning is one that allows a chord to be played by strumming a guitar’s unfretted strings. Since a chord is a cluster of notes, that definition leaves a lot of room for interpretation. A tuning like open G, used by the Delta legend Son House for his classic “Death Letter Blues” and by Keith Richards in “Honky Tonk Women,” will have a sound that seems timeless. But check out Sonic Youth’s “Dirty Boots” or Glenn Branca’s Symphony Number 3 to hear how unconventional – but gloriously musical – open tunings can sound.

For comfort’s sake, the coolest open tunings for beginners are open D, open E and open G. So here are a few quick tips for diving headlong into each.

Open D
This tuning has two typical variations, D-A-D-F#-A-D and D-A-D-G-A-D. The former is more closely associated with traditional blues; the latter with folk music from the British Isles and Appalachia. Strike all six strings of your guitar in either one and dig how low the sound goes and how those rumbling tones hang in the air.

It’s a piece of fantastic, fluffy, fudge-frosted chocolate cake to play any basic chord progression in open D, E and G tunings. The I-IV-V progression, for example, can be played with just the index finger using the open position, fifth and seventh frets.

For an example, check out Charley Patton’s 1929 Delta blues classic “Spoonful,” not to be confused with the Cream track, which is based on the later Howlin’ Wolf recording on Chess Records. Listen to the bold dark notes that reel from Patton’s guitar and the thick, cutting tone of his slide.

More on slide in a moment, but let’s take a quick look at D-A-D-G-A-D. The G resonates just a bit higher than F#, of course, but the third string’s different ringing overtones change the entire harmonic vibe of the tuning. Since Gibson Les Paul legend Jimmy Page’s early playing in Led Zeppelin took as much inspiration from British folk music as American blues, his performances on “Kashmir” and “Black Mountain Side” provide sterling examples. The open D-A-D-G-A-D tuning also lends itself to producing the drone tones heard on the latter, giving the song a bonus Eastern feel.

Open E
Elmore James and his disciple Duane Allman both favored open E, which is E-B-E-G#-B-E. But it’s there in Slash’s Les Paul on Guns N’ Roses’ “It’s So Easy” and The Rolling Stones’ “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” too. Open D’s brighter sounding cousin, open E is especially serviceable for slide. Whether using a slide made of steel, glass, ceramic, or, really, any suitable material, the tuning makes tones shimmer with full chords, triads or single notes.

Allman’s exuberant slide guitar playing with his cherry red Gibson SG on “Statesboro Blues” from the Allman Brothers Band’s Live At the Fillmore may be the definitive electric slide rock-era performance in open E. But Allman’s exquisitely chiseled sound was the result not only of his choice of tunings, but his distinctive palm-muting, the exact pressure Allman applied to his strings and other highly idiosyncratic factors that are part of an extremely well-developed signature style.

Open G
It’s back to blues bedrock for open G, referred to by many of the historic Delta players as “Spanish” tuning. This one goes D-G-B-G-B-D. The hitch for novices is watching that low D string. Hit it with any of the open chords below the fifth fret and a very unmagical sound happens – unless, of course, you’re looking for some crazy dissonance. That’s why some players who work extensively in open G, most famously Keith Richards, take the low string off their guitars. The Stones’ “Wild Horses” is a great example of open G at its most pastoral, and a sharp contrast to that is the equally acoustic slash-and-burn roughhouse recordings of Son House playing “Death Letter.” On the rock tip, listen to Richards’ rhythm guitar in “Brown Sugar,” where open G provides the song’s distinctive ringing chords.

Playing in open G is a bit more complex than the open D and E family, which the old blues players referred to as “vestopol” style tunings. While the string relationships are more consonant in open D and E, things can get pretty hairy initially while attempting to play single note lines in open G.

In open D, in particular, the fourth and fifth strings are tuned the same as in standard tuning, which gives players more used to standard tuning a springboard for building a new map of scales and licks on the fretboard. Of the three most popular opening tunings explored here, getting good at playing in open G is lot like getting to Carnegie Hall. It takes lots of practice.

Ever since Jimi Hendrix conjured up “Purple Haze” with an octave pedal, a distortion box and his wiry imagination – and made one of the most eloquent anti-war statements with the pure sonics of “Machine Gun” – electric guitars and effects pedals have been kissin’ cousins.

If you’re new to the world of effects or if you stepped away for a few years of the post-Y2K boutique pedal revolution, the available array of tone-coloring and tone-bending devices can be overwhelming. Some shops that cater to creative guitarists have cases stocked with literally hundreds of brightly colored boxes, all begging for a place on players’ pedal boards.

But cutting through the maze of candy-colored stomp boxes is a direct path that can take you to a place where the sounds on most classic and not-so-classic recordings can be duplicated or approximated. And the stepping-stones of that path are the 10 essential pedal functions that comprise the fundamental tone-tweaking tools.

If you’re considering building a basic pedal board or simply looking to expand beyond the sound of a guitar and amplifier for the first time, here are the primary stomp boxes to consider:

Tuner
Sure, this seems basic, but a good stage tuner is invaluable. And today, dependable stage tuners are available for $100 or less. Nothing you do will sound good if your guitar is out of tune, and whether you’re a working musician or jamming with friends in a garage, issues with tuning always will develop because the condition of your instrument, room or outdoor temperature, humidity and other factors all challenge tuning. The best floor devices will have bright LEDs – bright enough to be detectible in sunlight, ideally, and should have chromatic as well as standard tuning modes should you venture into open tunings or your own Sonic Youth-y creations.

Distortion
The world of grind, growl, fuzz and fizzle is incredibly diverse. A major guitar magazine recently published a cover story reviewing 100 distortion boxes, and that left plenty of pedals in this highly competitive niche out. The key to acquiring the right distortion for you is defining your needs. A basic distortion pedal works by compressing the peaks of a guitar’s signal and adding overtones. But there are complications. Some pedals use tubes for warm, amp-like tones. Others use germanium circuits, which also tend to be warm and more responsive to the dynamics and attack of a performance. And then there’s silicon-based circuits, which have a brighter, edgier sound that often makes them the natty shredder’s best friend.

A little research in this department is required for the distortion pedal novice, or even the long-time user of classic devices like the Distortion+ or Fuzz-Face who may be interested in checking out the new generation of dirty stompers. But the rule of thumb is that if you’re looking for a traditional sound, like a Big Brother and the Holding Company fuzz tone or a Stevie Ray howl, stick with the traditional models or their modern emulators. And from there on it’s a brave new world of manufacturers and boxes that further color distortion with everything from low-level ring modulation to Theremin-like functions.

Individual boxes in the same model line may vary, too, so it’s best to try a few once you’ve circled in on the particular kind you want, if that luxury is available.

Tremolo
This is the oldest electric guitar effect. In fact, the first stand-alone effects unit besides reverb was a tremolo device produced in 1948, and shortly thereafter tremolo became standard issue in several families of amplifiers, including Gibson’s. Tremolo creates a rapid variation in the volume of a guitar’s output. Trem stomp boxes blend the signal from your guitar with a carrier wave that is inaudible, creating the sonic dropouts that produce the iconic stuttering sound heard on so many Bo Diddley recordings and the intro to “Gimme Shelter,” among other classic tracks. Some tremolo units also have a stereo panning function, which moves the signal between two amps. Others have knobs for altering waveforms. Typically, tremolo stomp boxes have a similar basic set-up to the units built into old amps: a dial for “intensity,” “depth” or “rate,” (all controlling the degree of suppression of actual guitar volume) and another for “speed.” And between them lies a world of classic sounds.

Wah-Wah
Here’s another historic pedal, etched into rock history by Hendrix, Clapton, Beck and Page on a host of great recordings: “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return),” “White Room,” “I Ain’t Superstitious,” “Dazed and Confused” and so on. A wah-wah creates its instantly recognizable, voice-like sound by sweeping through the frequency of a guitar’s signal. And, in most cases, the sweeping is done by foot and it is most effective if it’s done in time with the sequence of notes being played. See-sawing the pedal up and down opens and closes a potentiometer similar to the one in radial dial household light switches. But, in this case, the change in voltage alters the signal running to the amp. Canny designers have radically altered the wah pedal since the ’60s, building in wider sweeps and additional functions like distortion and panning. Some take the middleman – or at least the knee – out of the equation altogether, with wah stomp boxes that can be preset to perform wah functions with the tap of an on/off switch.

Overdrive
Distortion pedals are also overdrive pedals, but there is a distinction between the two functions and this family of boxes is more specific to the latter. Pure overdrive pedals are all about giving you more of what you’ve already got, while a distortion or fuzz pedal is going to add its own dirty personality, color and tone. For example, Stevie Ray Vaughan’s favorite pedal was the classic Tube Screamer, which, strictly speaking, is an overdrive rather than a distortion pedal. His breakout contribution to David Bowie’s hit “Let’s Dance” used this box brilliantly to produce a rich, warm, extremely well-rounded and expanded version of his basic guitar sound. Overdrive boxes warm up overtones at low volume and get more snarly and distorted only after their gain knob or the guitar’s volume has been rolled up considerably. Distortion pedals, on the other paw, will produce the same growl at any volume. Some players opt to have one of each on their pedal boards – the overdrive for tonal warmth and the distortion for fuzz, which creates all kinds of possibilities for subtle and not-so-subtle grit.

Vibrato
This is one of the most underappreciated effects in modern guitar, but was a frequent flyer in the psychedelic ’60s and can be heard on the opening of the Electric Prunes’ “I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night” with a little special studio sauce ladled on top. The VB-2 vibrato pedal was also a secret weapon of the sonically adventurous alternative-rock-era group Catherine Wheel, audible on their radio hits “Black Metallic” and “I Want to Touch You.” Gibson began adding a vibrato circuit to its electric instrument amps in the late 1940s, making vibrato another of the most durable effects. Vibrato, as anybody who owns a guitar with a whammy bar or has a good touch on the fret board knows, means slight or rapid variations in pitch. Like the wah-wah, this is a particularly voice-like effect. Typically vibrato boxes allow you to control and modify the true note being played by altering its pitch with a “pitch” or “depth” knob, a “rise” knob that defines how fast the effect will appear after a note is struck and a “speed” knob to define the tempo of the effect. The deeper the depth and faster the speed, generally speaking, the crazier and more intense the ululating quality of the line being played becomes. Various modeling boxes have this effect built in, but none have equaled the best vibrato boxes of the ’80s, which are hotly sought by players and collectors today.

Phase Shifter
Hendrix tunes such as “Pail Gap” and virtually any hit by Robin Trower feature generous amounts of phase shifter, as does Van Halen’s “The Cradle Will Rock.” Phasing, along with chorus, leads the parade of modulation effects, which split and blend signals to create new sounds. Essentially a phase shifter cuts a guitar signal into two signals, and pumps up some tonal aspects of one while lessening characteristics of another. Exactly what sonic range is affected depends on the model of phase shifter. The result is an especially breathy or rippling sound, depending on where the effect’s “speed” control is set. Lower is more gentle; higher more radical.

Chorus
Alternative rock guitar players loved the chorus pedal. It appeared often on tunes by The Cure, but Larry Carlton also used chorus on many studio sessions with his Gibson ES-335, and even Kurt Cobain cranked a chorus pedal way up for Nirvana’s “Come as You Are.” True to its name, the chorus seeks to duplicate the multi-voiced sounds of the likes of choirs and string sections. As a modulation device, it splits a guitar’s signal in two and adds delay and vibrato to one half of the split signal while leaving the other unaltered. Typically a chorus box’s dials can affect the depth of that vibrato and pitch change, and can increase or decrease the blend of the altered portion of the signal with the original tone.

Delay/Sampling
Digital delay pedals and samplers began creeping into the guitar vocabulary with bands like U2 and The Cure. The original delay units were tape-driven, like the Echo-Plex used by Jimi Hendrix (“House Burning Down”) and David Gilmore (Pink Floyd’s “Echoes”) in the ’60s and ’70s. But in the mid-’80s, as digital effects came into use, the delay and early delay/sampler pedals came into vogue. While many effect connoisseurs frown on digital stomp boxes, the plusses of digital delay and sampling over tape are obvious. Primarily, there’s no tape to snarl, wear out or sputter. Today’s delay pedals can also get effects that were once produced by reverb tanks, like authentic-sounding rockabilly slap-back, and hearing The Edge play arpeggios through a delay pedal on “Where the Streets Have No Name” is a sublime listening experience. Plus digital sampling allows players to create and store as many as 99 loops in a single stomp box, doing the work of a virtual armada of tape recorders.

Flanger
And let’s not forget the flanger – a tad anachronistic but still a real head-turner. The flanger uses a solid-state transistor to duplicate an old studio tape trick called flanging. It creates a sound similar to a jet aircraft taking off. In the old days this was accomplished by recording a track on two synchronized tape reels and slowing one down by pressing the edge of its reel – a process dubbed flanging. The pedal duplicated this by creating a second signal that is variably delayed by the circuit and added back to the true signal. The most famous example may be Heart’s 1977 hit “Barracuda.”

This Tone Tip is about as simple as it gets, but it’s one that—once understood, and mastered―proves a surprising revelation to many players. During what I would reverentially refer to as the Golden Age of Tone, the late 1950s, ’60s, and early ’70s, this tip was second nature to great electric guitarists. It seems to have fallen from the knowledge bank, however, in the “high-gain era,” the late 1970s and ’80s, when everything was multi-channel, supercharged, and hotrodded. But long before the propagation of channel switching, the master volume, and massive pedalboards, legendary rock players still had a straightforward means of achieving clean, crunch, and lead tones―right from the guitar even. They set their tube amps for the best lead sound they could achieve, turned the guitar’s volume knob down a little for crunch, and turned it down a little more for clean. That was it: the volume control was used like it was meant to be, as a remote appendage of the amp’s controls. Work with this yourself, and you can get a lot out of this control right here in the 21st century.

Now, this technique works best with vintage-style tube amps, certainly. This includes not only old classics of that aforementioned Golden Age of Tone, but latter-day tube amps made in a similar style, with relatively uncluttered signal paths and a big, natural overdrive achieved by just cranking them up. Among these are amps such as Gibson’s little GA5 Les Paul Junior or medium-sized GA20RVT. After a certain point these amps don’t get any louder (I’m thinking, in most cases, of volume settings between about 3 o’clock and 5 o’clock—max—on the dial), they just break up more and compress more. Crank them up, though, and wind down your guitar’s volume control, and you get surprisingly rich, dynamic clean tones that are often far more appealing and playable than the tones achieved by turning the amp down to a comparable volume with the guitar turned up all the way. In between, you get thick crunch tones, and these real-tube crunch and lead tones are very difficult to replicate with overdrive or distortion pedals.

All of this might seem just a little “too easy to be true,” but it works for very scientific reasons that have to do with the electrical interaction between a guitar and a tube amplifier. Even though your guitar is not “plugged in” to the AC mains power, and carries no “live” current, it does produce an electrical current, which is the form your precious signal—your tone—takes in order to reach your amplifier (or DI, or recording interface). Pluck a string, and your guitar’s pickups convert that energy to a signal voltage that is carried down the wire to the grid of the first tube in your amp’s preamp stage. With your guitar’s volume controls turned up, that voltage is around one volt from a Gibson humbucking or P-90 pickup, or around half a volt from a weaker single-coil pickup. Turn your volume controls down, and a lower signal voltage is sent to the tube. Or just pick the string very lightly, even, and the signal voltage decreases, and because there’s a direct correlation between the level of the signal voltage that that first preamp tube sees and the degree to which the amp distorts, you’ve got a very real and direct means of controlling your distortion levels at the guitar’s volume control, and even with your own pick attack.

Try it out. Even on a channel-switching amp you can achieve it, in many cases, by cranking up your clean channel, or sometimes even by adjusting your lead channel to suitable levels. With non-foot-switchable amps, however, this technique opens up entire new worlds of tone. I have known dozens of players who were madly in love with the lush, raw overdrive tone of their cranked vintage-style or reissue or boutique tube amps, but needed clean tones in the course of their set too, so they kept the amp reigned in and achieved their lead tones with pedals (which are useful and occasionally very toneful in their own right, don’t get me wrong; they just rarely sound quite like a full-throttle tube amp). Play around with your amp levels, learn where you need to roll your guitar’s volume(s) to in order to achieve the desired changes, and you’ll soon discover you’ve got far more control over your tone.

Many guitars darken up a little when you turn them down because the loss of highs is emphasized more than the overall volume cut. Some players work with this, using it to mellow out their tone, then brighten it up at full volume for solos that really cut through. Other players find it a little bit of a problem with the “turn it down” technique. That’s why Gibson’s ES-339 carries its special Memphis Tone Circuit, specifically designed to retain the guitar’s full tone when turned down. But you can also achieve this on your own guitar with one of the simplest modifications you can perform. The addition of a small .001uF capacitor between the input terminal on each pickup’s volume potentiometer (the terminal to which the pickup’s own hot lead, or the hot lead from the switch, is connected) and the middle terminal on the pot allows some of the highs to pass through into the signal even when the volume control is turned down. Some guitar techs also like to add a small 150k to 300k ohm resistor in the same position so some lows pass through along with the highs, so the tone doesn’t thin out too much. If you are experienced with a soldering iron and guitar wiring (if you perform your own pickup swaps, for example) you will probably be able to do this yourself. Otherwise, take this idea and your guitar to your local Gibson Authorized Repair Center. Also, be aware that you want to avoid devaluing any vintage or collectible instrument, and check that such a modification doesn’t invalidate your guitar’s warranty. This minor modification can often be performed in a way that uses minimal solder and can be reversed in the future with little or no trace of the work ever having been done, if necessary.

Either way, play with the very real interaction between guitar and amp, and discover a magical—and magically simple—means of governing your guitar’s dynamics and your clean, crunch, and lead tones.

Measuring (above) and adjusting (below) the pickup height on a pair of Jazz Bass® guitars.

When you’re having your guitar or bass set up, with the action and intonation adjusted all ship-shape, don’t forget to take a look at pickup height.

Like action, pickup height is a personal preference (unlike intonation, which is an exact science), but guitars and basses do have an optimal pickup height that produces the best tone (usually specified in their owner’s manuals and on their manufacturer’s websites). You don’t want the pickups too far from or too close to the strings, and you might find that your instrument really “comes to life” when just the right pickup height is achieved.

You just have to take some time and experiment a little. Fender and many other manufacturers specify standard factory pickup height settings for various instruments (and recommended methods for measuring it; note in the photo at upper right that the height of the bass side of a Jazz Bass middle pickup is being measured with the low E string fretted at the last fret), and these make a good starting point. There are no hard and fast rules; you just have to raise and lower both ends of your pickups until you find the tone you like best.

It’s usually a pretty simple adjustment by means of height screws on either side of each pickup. Besides the right screwdriver, a good tool to use is a ruler with 1/32” or even 1/64” increments that let you accurately note various pickup height measurements and preferences.

Many players think of a guitar’s finish purely in regards to aesthetic considerations and not as another factor in its tonal makeup, but the types of finishes commonly applied to electric guitar bodies all alter the wood’s resonance in one way or another, and therefore affect the guitar’s tone. In the extreme—for example, in the case of heavy, air-tight finishes—they can even impede the way the wood performs, and choke off its voice considerably. Players who know their tone put a lot of stock in the type, quality, and condition of the finish on any guitar, and it’s worth learning a little about the variables here that can genuinely affect your instrument’s performance.

Traditional finishes include oil varnish, spirit varnish, and nitrocellulose lacquer, the latter being that used on the vast majority of vintage electric guitars and still the industry standard for “quality” instruments. “Nitro,” as it is usually referred to, or sometimes just “lacquer,” is hard enough to be buffed to a high gloss, but is also flexible enough to vibrate with the wood; it allows the wood to “breathe” in tonal terms. Nitro can also change hue with age (transparent coats generally go from clear to a golden amber, while colors will sometimes simply fade), and is prone to wear from the constant friction of player contact. The visual effects of this aging process appeal to many players, and they have become one of the tell-tale signs of the “vintage” guitar. Many of these players—the ones in the know, at least—also agree that the amber hues and bare forearm patches are a fair trade-off for a more open and resonant instrument.

Since the early 1970s many more affordable guitars (and some quite expensive ones too) have been given heavy polyester or epoxy finishes, often referred to by their detractors as “plastic” or “thick skinned” finishes. These are both cheaper and easier to apply, the finishing process produces less of a hazard from toxic fumes, and the results survive the dings and bumps of minor abuse extremely well too, so they are appealing to the budget-range manufacturer on a number of counts. But the thickness, rigidity and total impermeability of these finishes can really dampen the wood’s vibration, and make a guitar—relative to the same with a nitro finish—sound tight, choked and nasal. With an awareness of this, many manufacturers have more recently used polyurethane finishes, which represent something of a compromise of characteristics. Polyurethane is relatively easy to apply and more durable than nitrocellulose, but doesn’t seal the wood quite as hermetically as polyester, and therefore encourages resonance a bit more.

These are fine points in any all-encompassing consideration of tone, of course, and the sonic contributions of other components in any given guitar’s makeup will very likely jump out at you more than will its finish. But they are fine points that many sharp-eared players have detected down the years, and they are worth noting. Many guitarists have sent beat up old instruments away to be refinished and restored, only to find that they just didn’t sing and resonate in the same way after they returned with their nice, new coats of paint. In some cases, a guitar buyer might find that an instrument with a heavier finish even yields a preferable tone—one with more tightness and cut when heavily distorted, for example—but in most cases it is desirable to allow the wood to resonate and contribute its own natural tonal characteristics to all the other ingredients that come together to make “your tone.”