Guitar Lessons Blog

I have been playing guitar for about 20 years but it wasn’t until recently that I finally decided to learn the basics of guitar wiring and changing pickups. So I thought I would share with you what I have found to be the most useful sites out there. 

The first thing you will need to acquaint yourself with is soldering. From there you open the door to any conceivable guitar mod, from changing pickups to installing a mid range boost/cut switch to installing a special switch that prevents you from making any mistakes while playing. Ok that last mod is unlikely, but you can do some pretty damn creative mods that will help you unleash your guitar’s full tonal potential.

Soldering:

http://www.kingbass.com/soldering101.html

http://www.theguitarfiles.com/guitarfile504.html

http://www.tdpri.com/wiringsolderTIPs.htm

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2007/01/soldering_tutor_1.html - contains video

http://curiousinventor.com/guides/How_To_Solder - another video

Wiring Diagrams:

http://www.1728.com/guitar.htm

http://duhvoodooman.com/musical/humbucker_mods/humbucker_mods.htm

http://guitarelectronics.zoovy.com/category/wiringresources - diagrams for practically any pickup configuration

http://www.guitarnuts.com/wiring/menu.php - lots of useful mods

http://www.carvinmuseum.com/pdf/guitarbass/passivekit20-50guitarwiring.pdf - easily adaptable to other pickups

http://www.geocities.jp/dgb_studio/faq_e.htm - this site has an insane number of diagrams; requires some technical knowledge to interpret though as it does not indicate wire colors

http://www.stewmac.com/freeinfo/Electronics.html - info on pickups from a variety of manufacturers

Pickup Replacement Procedure:

http://www.musicplayers.com/tutorials/guitars/2006/0906_Pickups201.php

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isW6Mxp0uPc

http://www.magnusolsson.com/index_music.html - just click on “Guitar Setup” then scroll down and select the tutorial on changing pickups

Parts:

http://allparts.com/ - this place has pretty much everything you could possibly need; lots of parts stores get their parts from allparts

http://www.guitarelectronics.com/ -

http://www.stewmac.com - lots of parts and useful kits as well

http://www.guitarpartsdepot.com

http://www.bestguitarparts.com/

Technical Help:

http://www.jemsite.com/forums/f35/ - incredibly useful forum on pickups and wiring

http://music-electronics-forum.com/forumdisplay.php?f=9 -  another incredibly useful forum on pickups and guitar tech work in general

Of course, you can always call tech support at Dimarzio, Seymour Duncan, etc and you will find their tech support to be top notch!

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Tags: Miscellaneous, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, free guitar lessons, guitar, guitar lessons, guitar wiring, pickups

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 28th, 2009 at 8:38 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any comments to this post through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.