Hardware and Electronic Choices

Note: The following was originally posted by myself to BASIS Tucson North's Senior Project webpage on April 23rd, 2018.

Hey, everyone. This post is about the hardware and electronics I am going to be using in the final guitar, and how this is going to influence the aesthetic of the guitar. So, I was planning on having the entire guitar with a woodgrain finish, so I think a black pickguard would look good on it, somewhat like how the pickguard looks on this Fender Telecaster:

So, to stand out against the black pickguard, I’ve decided to use chrome coated volume knobs, bridge, output jack, and pickup casings. Plus, the chrome will match with the tuning pegs I have purchased already for the neck. I considered going with gold-chrome or black hardware/electronics, but I think the chrome will look a lot sharper with the woodgrain and black pickguard.

As for the pickups, I would like to go with two Humbuckers and one Single-coil pickup in between them. Pickups are very crucial to good tone, but are extremely expensive, so while I would like to go with EMG pickups (widely regarded as the best), I think I’m going to go with two Golden Age humbuckers, and one telecaster pickup. Golden Age pickups are extremely good for their price range, and are high quality “budget” pickups. (I say “budget” because they are still about 50$ a piece, but that’s much better compared to 90$+ for a low-tier EMG).

As for the telecaster pickup, you can see what that looks like in the telecaster picture at the top of the page. With the telecaster pickup, I may be modifying it based off of how it sounds; most guitar pickups are classified as Alnico or Ceramic, based off of the magnet they use. However, some people have found that they like the sound of a pickup that uses a neodymium magnet. There is a little bit of danger with neodymium pickups however, as the magnets tend to be a little too strong, and pull on the strings too much, causing detuning and making it more difficult to play the guitar. I have looked at videos where people switch out their alnico or ceramic magnets for large neodymium bar magnets (the same size as the magnet that was inside the pickup before), and I think that the size of the magnet might be why the magnet “tends to be a little too strong,” so I think that I will be gluing small neodymium disk magnets to the bottoms of the poles on the pickup.

On a telecaster pickup, you can’t see the poles, as they are covered up by the chrome plating, but this is what single-coil pickups look like without their casings:

Now before I end this post, I’d like to talk about the pickguard real quick again. I said near the top of this post that I want to make a black pickguard. Well, I plan on commissioning a custom pickguard. A good friend of mine, and fellow BASIS senior, Javier Alday has done an amazing custom pickguard for his bass guitar, which features an awesome space design on it (if I can get a photo of it, I will post it here). He is very skilled at laser-cutting/engraving, so I trust that the pickguard will come out perfect. As for the design, I have a couple of abstract designs that might look cool on the guitar.

[insert designs here]

I will post the designs here as soon as I can, and update the post.

Another post to come by the end of this week! Thanks for stopping by!

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Hey, back in the present, I've realized that I haven't explained what pickups are or how they work, so here you go:

Guitar pickups are essentially magnets wrapped with several thousand turns of extremely fine copper wire; they are electromagnets. Most pickups have six pole pieces, one for each string, that lay directly beneath the strings, and electric guitar strings tend to have either a nickel or an iron-cobalt alloy coating. So, when the strings vibrate above the pickup, an electrical signal generated that is then passed to a simple circuit within the guitar that contains a low-pass filter, which affects tone by use of a capacitor and a variable resistor, and a second variable resistor which affects the amplitude (volume) of the signal that is passed through the jack and out of the guitar to the amplifier. I hope that makes sense.