The official website, currently overwhelmed with traffic, posted this statement:

“It is with profound sorrow that we announce the passing of our beloved founder and leader for the past 50 years, Jim Marshall. While mourning the Guv’nor though, we also salute a legendary man who led a full and truly remarkable life.

“Jim’s ascent into the history books as ‘the Father of Loud’ and the man responsible for ‘the Sound of Rock’ is a true rags-to-riches tale. Cruelly robbed of his youth by tubercular bones, Jim rose to become one of the four forefathers responsible for creating the tools that allowed rock guitar as we know and love it today to be born. The groundbreaking quartet also includes the late, great trio of Leo Fender, Les Paul and Seth Lover – together with Jim, they truly are the cornerstones of all things rock.

“In addition to the creation of the amps chosen by countless guitar heroes and game-changing bands, Jim was also an incredibly humble and generous man who, over the past several decades, has quietly donated many millions of pounds to worthy causes.

“While the entire Marshall Amplification family mourns Jim’s passing and will miss him tremendously, we all feel richer for having known him and are happy in the knowledge that he is now in a much better place which has just got a whole lot louder!

“Rest in Peace & thank you Jim.

“Your memory; the music and joy your amps have brought to countless millions for the past five decades; and that world-famous, omnipresent script logo that proudly bears your name will always live on.”

My Marshall Story

I got my first Marshall, a Christmas gift, when I was 15. It was a Valvestate 8240, a rich sounding 2×12 combo with built-in stereo chorus and, in comparison to earlier Marshalls, more than enough thick, chunky gain for a kid raised on the roar of modded amps, like the infamous SIR #36 used by Slash on Appetite For Destruction, or overdriven non-master-volume building topplers, like Malmsteen’s beloved MKII stacks, recorded at 10.

My 8240 had an ingenious Contour knob that I wish had caught on in guitar amp design. The control shifted the focus of the midrange in a musical and effective way, opening up tones from vacuumed out low-mid chug to searing vintage honk, with a smooth sweep through everything in between, so you could always find what you were looking for.

The amp saw me through my first shows and well into adulthood; it was still going strong when I gave it to my brother, unable to take it with me to a new life in America. When I’ve been back years later and played it at his house, it’s surprised me with its warm, chunky tone all over again.

I’m still transfixed by the sear and sizzle I heard on those classic albums as a kid. Though it might have been a while since a stock Marshall knocked your socks off, the boutique boxes we chase today — Splawn, Fortin, Friedman, Cameron, Bray et al — have their roots, sonically and technically, in Marshall design. Thanks, Jim.

What’s your Marshall story?

If, like me, your guitar is always just a little bit out of tune, at least with the 440Hz world around it, because your tuner’s battery is always flat, then you too will praise the arrival of the solar powered guitar tuner.

When I first saw the TC-1S, advertised in a real made-out-of-paper guitar magazine prior to Christmas 2010, my first thought was yes! and my second thought was why did this take so long? When I was a little child my aunt gave me a solar powered calculator the size of a credit card. I didn’t have a lot of equations to do but I thought it was neat as hell. A mobile electric thing that never runs out! That must have been mid Eighties. By 2010, why weren’t there solar powered things everywhere? And today, it’s still pretty much just calculators.

Tascam, unfortunately, knew it had something unique, and mistook this for the same thing as valuable. The price of a TC-1S was $50 for what, as we’ll see, is quite an under-featured tuner besides the solar bit. I don’t think many sold. A year later, looking for Christmas presents, I looked it up again: $17. Sold! (Currently it is $14.99 on Amazon.)

The tuner is attractive not just for its head slapping solar technology, but its design. It comes in a rainbow of bright, happy colors, like Apple used to offer, soft silicone jackets protecting the clean white device inside. It also has a tough nylon strap and a metal rock-climber’s looking clip so you can attach it to stuff that needs a tuner hanging off it. Tascam suggests hooking it on the outside of your gig bag to keep it charged, but they live in an experimental biodome where no one steals things.

The tuner can be charged via the hidden USB port if you inhabit a lightless nightmare world.

Yes, to keep it charged. If I put my finger over the solar cells on my calculator, the display faded out; either there was enough light to work, or it was off. The TC-1S is charged by light (or by USB if you have no windows or bulbs, like perhaps a hostage) and stores that energy until switched on. This distinction is actually one I’d prefer it didn’t have, as internal rechargeable batteries become problematic when inevitably they lose capacity, as with the iPod. Right now it’s working well. In an east facing guitar room/office that often has the blinds drawn, the TC-1S always shows four bars – full charge – when I turn it on.

Input is simple, the usual internal mic for acoustic instruments, 1/4 inch jack for electric. There is no through or out, so you can’t leave it in the effects loop or between the guitar and amp – the first point in the tuner’s Damn Shame column. A device that never runs out of batteries would be nice to have permanently connected, getting around the four step unplug-replug ballet.

Expecting the simplest possible version of a digital tuner, it was surprising to find four ways to tune up using the LCD display.

• Needle: roughly emulates an analog tuner, animating three bars of the display as the needle.
• Strobe: a strobe-style tuner, where the speed of passing bars indicates how close you are to pitch.
• Fine: a more accurate version of Needle, with the whole screen covering only ±20 cents.
• Meter: a solid bar grows out from the center to the left or right, depending on whether you’re flat or sharp.

Strobe sounds the least intuitive, but is in fact the most, making tuning quick and easy. It’s like a game where caterpillars of segmented LCD are racing past the screen, and your job is to stop them. Traveling left means you’re flat, right means you’re sharp, their speed indicating by how much. Something makes sense about slowing them  down as you turn the tuning peg, until eventually they freeze. In all modes, the played note is stated on the far right.

The Tascam seems good at ignoring the harmonics that often confuse tuners into giving skittish results, though it’s still a good idea to turn your tone knob down. It does a grand job of getting you in tune quickly without the doubt of more jittery machines.

One place you might appreciate the chance to tune up quickly is on stage, but you won’t be using the TC-1S for that as – second Damn Shame – it has no illumination. With an unlit black-on-gray LCD, it would be like trying to read a Casio by your feet in the dark.

The third Damn Shame: the USB port is hidden under the silicone jacket, so that you have to mangle the thing off of one end to reach it. You get the impression the port was added after the rest had been finalized.

The fourth: the tuner turns itself off after a few minutes, whether you like it or not. Heaven forbid you get caught up in a little jam while checking out how the first few tuned strings sound; the display will be blank when you regain your focus. This auto shutoff also makes it a wee bit annoying for longer jobs like setting intonation, as you have to keep leaning over to turn it back on. I understand why my digital cameras drop into standby after a bit, laptops, but something powered by the sun? We have several billion years before that power source dries up. Let’s splurge a little.

However, I’m still fond of my little blue TC-1S. I like its feel, its shape, its look, and its most important feature: it always turns on. While weak in almost every area – too dark for stage use, too narcoleptic for setups, less accurate than a true strobe, no through jack – it’s now at a price where all of that is fair. I’m more in tune than I’ve ever been, no longer listening out for handy sustained E, A or D notes from the TV while noodling around the house, because it’s always ready to go.

If the next version could power LEDs, add another jack, and stay on ’til you turn it off, it might be worth that fifty dollars.

If that doesn’t cure the problem, you may want to know more about cabinet stuffing, which you’ve likely heard about in various forums, before turning your 2×12 into a giant plush toy.

First, some names.

• Batting
• Dacron
• Polyfill
• Padding
• Hollofil
• Fiberfill

Polyester fiber does not make for compelling illustration, so we will have this image of approx. 10% polyfill, 90% Kelly LeBrock in Weird Science.

For our purposes, these are all one and the same: light fluffy material made from polyester fibers, usually sold in sheets. You can use the loose fiberfill type, which looks like a cloud trapped in a bag, but it’s harder to work with as we’re not looking to stuff the cab, as you might a hi-fi speaker or subwoofer, so much as line it.

Polyfill vs. Poly-fil®

Don’t make my mistake and assume these are interchangeable. Polyfill is a general term for the compressible polyester fiber stuff we’re talking about; Poly-fil is a brand name used by Fairfield Processing Corporation on several products, including some that perfectly suit this project, and some that do not.

At Joann Fabrics I found what looked like exactly the right material, whitish polyester fiber padding, and it said Poly-fil on the box, which is what I thought I was looking for, having woven the two terms together. I had them cut a few yards, and nearly lost my eyebrows when asked for $45 at the checkout. Apparently I had picked up NU-Foam, a product of the Poly-fil brand indistinguishable to the layperson from plain polyfill, but varying in some revolutionary way probably important to people who shop at Joann Fabrics. After a short cry, having spent good video game money on advanced quilting supplies, I learned that they accept returns on cut-to-order fabric as long as you’ve not done any more cutting.

I got the right stuff for around $12. I overbought to experiment; you could line a cab for $8. It is available from upholstery suppliers, craft stores like Joann, and sometimes Wal-mart has it.

The Other Wrong Stuff

Do not use fiberglass, like home insulation, even though it looks kind of like what you want. It gets in your eyes, your lungs, your skin. If you don’t care about yourself, care about your speakers: this once popular cabinet-filling material breaks down over time and has been discovered invading the voice coils of speakers. It does not improve them.

Jute padding, or carpet underlay, isn’t hazardous or damaging, and works, just not as well as polyfill/Dacron etc. As I understand it, the closed-cell nature of this type of foam means that while it will absorb some of the boom from standing wave problems, it doesn’t have the surface area to perform polyfill’s neatest trick: making your cab sound larger. Oh yes. More on that shortly.

Stuff the Stigma

In some online communities a stigma surrounds lining a guitar cab, as if you are living on the fringes of acceptable society and performing unnatural procedures on unwitting wooden boxes. “It kills the cab,” is the sort of thing they say. Actually, it’s not just the purview of experimental hobbyists; a surprising number of very respected builders do it to get their cabinets sounding so good, most notably Bogner in its oversize 2×12, perhaps the most widely praised 2×12 there is. In addition, Cameron, Diezel, Rivera, Fuchs, Zinky and some upstart called Fender are among those with fluffy white secrets in their cabs.

I Feel Better About My Polyfill. Now Where Do I Put It?

Measuring the inside panels of my cab — sides, top/bottom, back — I cut two matching rectangles of each size from the roll of batting and experimented placing them in the cab in every configuration I could think of. I encourage you to experiment, too: it’s surprising how different amounts on different panels alter the sound. However, I’ll let you know what worked for me.

Most people attach the padding with light spray-on adhesive, or staples. I used brass thumbtacks; I like that I can remove them with little hassle or trace. At the experimental stage, save for the top and back panels, you may not need to attach them at all, as the stuff mostly stays where you put it.

The Embiggening

A frequently circulated number is that polyester batting can make your cab behave as though 30% larger, which Photoshop says is this much.

Here is where I encountered the strange but beneficial side-effect of cab stuffing. The more you put in, the bigger the cab sounds. Paradoxically, in this case filling a space makes the speakers react as though you’ve increased the box’s volume (as in cubic space, not loudness.) Though I started the whole business to tame a boomy bass problem, this stole my attention for a while. Suddenly finding that big woody thunk and chunk under your palm, as though dealing with a much larger cabinet, was arresting. I gather it’s something to do with all the added surface area increasing the time it takes a wave to travel to the cabinet wall and bounce back, which our ears take as a cue the enclosure is bigger.

Hungry for change, it’s easy to overdo things. I had batting on all but one side panel at this stage; top, bottom, left side, back. It sounded wonderfully deep and large, rich mature tones the cab couldn’t make before. That big Les Paul kind of heft. But when I came back days later and found my timing was horrible (worse than usual!) when playing reasonably fast, I realized I couldn’t hear my pick attack. Focussed too much on this addictive new depth while lining the cab, I had stopped hearing the whole sound and murdered my high end.

This led me to respect the oft-quoted rule: don’t cover parallel surfaces.

So, if you put batting on the top, don’t put it on the bottom; if you put it on the left, don’t put it on the right, and so on. Having a real wood surface on every opposing side seems to let the highs breathe. In all configurations, I found this a rule worth sticking to.

This doesn’t prevent adding as much fill as you like. You get better results, say, layering two pieces on the left side panel rather than one left and one right. The same extra sense of size, without the throttled high end.

I had cracked The Embiggening. Treat just one surface of each pair of opposing surfaces. My cab sounded much better.

Sadly I still had the boom problem.

Taming Boomy Bass

Top, bottom, sides, even a vertical hanging sheet of polyfill between the two speakers, none of it had as much effect as I’d hoped on that obnoxious bass hump around B4 and C5, I assume the product of some standing wave issue. What addressed it most directly was doubling up two layers on the back panel. This had the most dramatic effect, in fact, of any of the changes, and my first instinct was to undo it because right away it transformed the sound from mellow to in-your-face.

All that seemed to linger in the back of the box came rushing to the front; mids suddenly sounded very forward, present, the clearest and tightest tone of the dozens of options I tried. It sounded fantastic for riffs and rhythms, crisply gripping every note, but overpowered the big, round, woody chunk I’d uncovered in The Embiggening. My phantom 4×12 was gone. The speakers almost sounded like they were on planks instead of in a box.

Yet it had evened out the bass boom quite nicely.

The solution I settled on was doubling up the other covered panels as well, for yet more apparent volume, which recovered enough of the big box sound to make the best combination of both.

The totals of my roughly one-inch thick batting inside the cab were: two layers on one side, two layers on the bottom, two on the back. Clear and tight but fat and big. Glorious. Done.

The guitar amp. Why does one control seem to alter what another one does? Why does the mids knob affect volume? And why is the treble pot more like a blend control? Because they’re connected in ways we could not intuit.

After searching repeatedly for a layperson’s explanation of the tone stack – the EQ section found in guitar amps – I realized one would not be forthcoming. There seemed to be two camps: guitarists, who, despite an adorable belief that the three knobs do what the labels suggest, have no understanding of it; and amp builders, who understand it too well and talk to each other in Martian.

As I forced myself to learn it anyway, I took notes using the ordinary language that my brain prefers. Those notes became this article. An understandable description for players who want to better grasp how to get the tones they seek.

I will sometimes have to use words like capacitor and resistor, but only to identify where we are. You don’t have to know how they work. It is however handy to know that:

A high-pass filter lets sounds above a set frequency through, and is formed by a capacitor followed by a resistor.

A low-pass filter lets sounds below a set frequency through, and is formed by a resistor followed by a capacitor.

I recommend opening the little circuit diagram in a new window to keep your bearings while reading. Unnervingly, if you see it enough it even begins to make sense. The diagram and the article describe the so-called FMV tone stack; the design used by Fender, Marshall, and Vox, and the hundreds who followed in their footsteps. Here’s how it looks:

The tone stack. Click to open in a new window.

I’ve dispensed with off-putting things like component values that, as players rather than builders, we don’t need to worry about, but the layout is complete, the real deal. It is called a stack because in an electrical diagram the sections sit on top of each other like this, incoming signal at the top, ground at the bottom.

TREBLE

The treble circuit is first in the tone stack. The signal comes in, hits the treble capacitor, then, in place of a single resistor to complete a high-pass filter, like a neat little component on a circuit board, it instead sees the combined resistance of all three pots – the Treble, Bass, and Middle pots – which lie in a row between the treble cap and ground. “The resistances of these three add up and can be thought of as a single resistor.”*

A pot, the knob you turn on the front of the amp, is a variable resistor.

So, being at the top of the stack, the treble circuit has the longest journey in terms of resistance, which is resistance against losing stuff to ground. It sees resistance from the Treble pot, then the Bass pot, then the Mids pot, with ground at the end. So, quite aside from the effects these later pots, Bass and Mid, have on their own bits of the sound, their setting already affects the high-pass filter at the beginning, moving its cutoff point, that is, the point at which sounds are deemed high-frequency enough to be let through to the treble control; basically determining the range of what falls under ‘treble.’

quite aside from the effects these later pots, Bass and Mid, have on their own bits of the sound, their setting already affects the high-pass filter at the beginning… determining the range of what falls under ‘treble.’

Turning the treble control clockwise imposes the least attenuation of this high-end sound isolated by the high-pass filter made by the treble capacitor and the three pots. (It seems we can never add or boost in the tone stack. It’s all about resisting loss to ground, like trying to keep water in a hole-ridden bucket. Carrying the bucket down the hill, you can’t add more water, just try to stop too much getting out. So we resist loss as much as possible when a control is on 10, and allow it as much as possible – “oh to hell with it, let it leak out!” – on 0, turned fully counter-clockwise.)

Signals above the cutoff frequency pass “right through the [treble] capacitor to the top terminal”* of the treble pot. Turning it up, you’re favoring the signal, the product of our high-pass filter, that’s making it to that terminal. BUT. Turning it down doesn’t simply drain more top end to ground, because off the bottom terminal of the treble pot the next controls are waiting: bass and mid. Over here, as the dial twists counter-clockwise, you’re not just attenuating treble but choosing to listen more to bass and middle, shifting the amp’s focus. Think of a flashlight beam; turning this control down is like sweeping the flashlight from right to left across a dark room. You thought the bright and pretty soprano on the right was the only one there – she was all you could see. Now as you pan left you find a baritone and a tenor standing in the corner. And they’re singing.

So the treble control is not a simple more/less top-end knob, it’s a balance control between the product of a high-pass filter (on the right of its dial) and the filter created downstream (left of the dial) by the next two controls in the stack: bass and mid. When the Introduction to Tube Amplifier Theory says in its short summary, my notes in brackets,

“[the treble] potentiometer acts as a balance between the output of a high-pass filter formed by C8 [the treble capacitor] and the three potentiometers [treble, bass, mid], and the output of the complex filter created by R11 [resistor behind bass and mid pots], C9 [bass pot cap], C10 [mid pot cap] and VR3 [bass knob] and VR4 [mid knob],”

that is what they’re talking about. I had to read it about 25 times.

BASS

The bass control is the only one that acts mostly like it should, in a sensible, predictable way, at least when considered on its own, so let’s be grateful to it. For the treble control, we made a high-pass filter in order to play with stuff up there in the zingy, sparkly ceiling of sound. For the bass we want the opposite, a low-pass filter, so we can play with stuff down in the low end. To make one of these you just put the components of a high-pass filter the other way around: resistor then capacitor. Presto. A low-pass filter.

This arrangement, resistor then cap, says “everything below this frequency point gets through.” So, all available low end gets through. That’s not controllable though, it’s everything, no lower limit, and would sound like a boomy mess. Luckily, the arrangement that comes next, of that same cap then the bass knob – a variable resistor – makes a high-pass filter right afterwards.

Cap then resistor, high-pass; resistor then cap, low-pass, remember?

So you have a low-pass filter (“all bass this way, please”) running into a high-pass filter (“okay, okay, not ALL bass, jeez.”) Where the cutoff frequency steps in between the two, to sort the welcome from the unwelcome, varies with the setting of the bass knob. If the audible bass were a hump on a graph, turning the control up would move the left wall of the hump further left as the cutoff frequency descended, deeper toward the very boot soles of sound, letting increasingly low frequencies through. Turning it down would shift the left wall of the hump to the right, narrowing the hump, the range of bass that gets through.

Sadly, the bass control isn’t completely normal, even though it’s the most normal of the three. Treble has the longest journey in terms of resistance adding up to affect its filter, like we talked about, because it’s first in the stack. Bass has the next longest; the resistance of both the bass pot and the mid pot, which is last in the stack, add together to be the ‘resistor’ in this high-pass filter (bass cap + bass, mid pots = filter.)

So again the setting of the mid pot, separately from the effect it will have directly on the mid range, teams up with the bass pot to determine how much resistance the high-pass filter in the bass circuit encounters, resistance against losing bass to ground.

You start to see how interactive this shit is.

Resistance Recap

• The resistance of the treble pot only affects the ‘treble filter’.
• The resistance of the bass pot affects the ‘bass filter’ and the ‘treble filter’.
• The resistance of the mid pot, last in the chain, affects all three.

MIDDLE

Here we are at the last control. Yes, on the front of the amp the middle control is in between the other two, but that’s some well-meaning deception by the amp designers; electrically it’s last, which becomes significant.

The mid circuit largely copies that of the bass: coming off the same resistor, in fact, it places its own capacitor to form another low-pass filter; then that capacitor and the mid pot, the ‘variable resistor’ here, form a high-pass filter. It’s the same setup, except the high-pass filter starts way higher up in frequency, because mids are higher than bass, silly.

It’d be nice to think that, being last in the tone stack, the mid control made fabulous logical sense, what with there being no other pots after it to vary the resistance to ground like treble and bass have to put up with. But where would the fun be in that?

The output from the mid circuit’s low- and high-pass filters is delivered to the wiper terminal, the central lug, of its control, the mids knob. You can see from the diagram that despite similarities this doesn’t look identical to the bass portion of the circuit. The effect of this is that the mids knob does not raise and lower the cutoff frequencies of its high-pass filter as the bass control does, enlarging or shrinking its range. It acts instead on their amplitude, their ‘volume’. This seems to make sense: if you don’t like the mid voicing of an amp, at least one with this standard kind of tone stack, you can’t alter it, only raise or lower how loud that predetermined mid voicing is. The mids are where they are. Okay. Understandable. People with a working concept of the tone stack sometimes talk about the mid control as a way to fill in the big valley missing from midrange frequency response created by the way the two other tone controls work. Patching an imperfect design.

The mid knob, in addition to its other duties, controls how loudly the entire signal leaves the tone stack.

Being last in the stack means this knob affects other things at the same time. The stack can be thought of as Treble, Bass, Middle, Ground. Middle is the last one before ground; its bottom lug is connected to ground. Turning it down, that is, turning its wiper towards ground, doesn’t just send more and more mid range frequencies to their doom like a regular control, it shorts to ground the mid cap in its little high-pass filter, the cap feeding the pot at the wiper. Things start to collapse backwards from there. The mid cap was the one also creating a low-pass filter in partnership with an earlier resistor, which is now also being grounded out via their connection. And, oh dear, that resistor was shared, serving as the resistor in the bass circuit’s low-pass filter too, so the bass is disappearing into ground as well. Treble is next, via it’s inextricable relationship with these two… Soon few frequencies are left standing but scattered stragglers. The amp is noticeably quieter because almost every range of sound it makes is being diverted to ground, where signals are sent to die.

I like to think of this as scientific proof that if you aggressively scoop your mids you are confused by tone and trying to avoid as much of it as possible, a grounded mid pot not just reducing mids but eliminating much of the rest of the amp’s sound.

But more importantly this explains why the mid control not only attenuates the mid frequencies, “it also attenuates the overall level of the output signal.”*

So: the mid knob, in addition to its other duties, controls how loudly the entire signal leaves the tone stack, before continuing its journey. This level holds sway of course over what happens next inside an amp, and so on and so on until you go mad or join the Metro forum. But the tone stack, isolated such as we have traveled it here, has at least begun to make sense. I hope.

THE CAVEAT AND THE ASTERISK

The reason I looked for a layman’s explanation of the tone stack is because I am a layman. With good reason you may now be pondering the apparent paradox in a man hoping to bring clarity to a subject he doesn’t understand by writing about it.

It’s true: I don’t understand physics or electrical circuits especially well. In the absence of a satisfying explanation of the subject I simply forced myself to look at the dryer literature until it made sense. Hours and hours with articles and diagrams. The wife was quite worried. However I have no training in these fields and extensive training in humility; if something’s not right here, I believe you. Just tell me what it is.

I’m just a picky musician who fiddles with tone a lot. The more I tweaked the controls, the more curious I became about their relationships, about what was going on back there. It certainly wasn’t as simple as each control independently adding or removing whatever the label said underneath. It appears as a strange knowledge gap when only amp-building electrical geniuses know this stuff, while we legions of guitar tone obsessives spend hours coaxing our results from controls we greatly misunderstand.

* Quotes from ‘Introduction to Tube Amplifier Theory’ by David Sorlien and Stephen Keller, a gem which, as the most-digestible of the not-very-digestible available literature on amplifier design, I learned much from, and encourage you to read should you seek a more technical understanding of the tone stack.

Introduction to Tube Amplifier Theory, PDF.

Anyone can tell you, “Get brighter pickups.”

I don’t really consider this to be advice. It works, of course it does. Off-the-shelf options like Seymour Duncan’s Jazz or Pearly Gates models will most likely be brighter than what you have. Indie-winders can listen to your grievances and hopes and custom wind a set of humbuckers for you. But here I’m interested in working with what you’ve got. First, because it’s cheap, educational and immediate. Second, because, well, that Jazz you put in the neck is still going to be more open and versatile in another, more neutral Les Paul. How do you get there with your dark LP, unless you know some tricks, hmm hotshot?

Avoid The Trap

The pickup adjustment trap: To knock some mud off the tone, you lower the pickups like everyone says. Unlike a microphone, which seems to get clearer the closer it is to a voice, a pickup sounds most garbled close up to the string and gets clearer as it’s backed away. Around about the time you lower it to where it best cleans up, the sound seeming to open like a flower (sometimes pretty drastically low, such as below the rim of the pickup ring) your smile of discovery fades to a frown when you realize half your gain has gone, the guitar no longer pushing the amp hard enough to make the sexy noise. You begin to incrementally raise the pickup back up, seeking the sweet spot, the compromise between both extremes. When it gets high enough to make playing feel loose again and the overdrive sweet, you’re back in mudtown, not three yards down the road from where you set off. Dagnabbit.

The answer is to raise and lower it at the same time.

“That’s impossible!” you shriek, throwing down a law book for emphasis.

“Shut up when I’m talking,” I insist.

We spar. Your shirt gets torn. I admire your flat, toned midriff as your eye, beneath a mischievous arched eyebrow, considers the accommodating sofa, then returns to me, within it burning an unmistakable suggestion.

Wait a minute. Pickups.

Raise the pole pieces but lower the pickup itself, is what I’m saying. And don’t be shy about it.

Tweak ’Em If Ya Got ’Em

Usually pole pieces are considered for fine adjustments: echoing the radius of a neck or bridge to get similar distances to each string, say, or mildly de-emphasizing a loud string that seems to want to shout louder than its friends. Balance, basically.

I’ve read absurd tips suggesting an optimal formation, passed down through the decades, based not on height but on the correct rotation of the screw heads, arranging the slots into the magical pattern!

Some players never touch them. Indeed humbucker inventor Seth Lover is often quoted admitting that the screws were not for anything, other than placating a marketing team that wanted the new pickups to look a certain way. (He first tried to get away with false screw heads stamped into the nickel covers.)

But adjustable pole pieces are useful, in both common and unorthodox ways.

When fighting for clearer, brighter tone without giving up output, it helps to think of the humbucker in two parts.

The main body of the pickup can be thought of as affecting thickness versus clarity. Higher is fatter, lower is clearer. The adjustable pole pieces can be thought of as affecting output: higher for more, lower for less. Playing each of these for their strengths, your ballsy Les Paul doesn’t have to start whispering anemically just because you want to drop the pickups down for clearer tone. Set the pickup where you like the clarity, then jack up the poles to get your output back.

Beauty is Only Screw Deep

The combination you arrive at can end up looking pretty strange; the pickup sunk unusually low, the poles standing well proud of the casing. But experiment and find what works. It only matters how it sounds — no one is going to point and say, “Hey, Joey! This guy is ripping, but get a load of his high pole pieces! Ha ha!”

Obviously, there are limits. Past a certain point, the sound seems to overshoot the loud-and-clear sweet spot to become aggressively midrangey. Possibly you’ll get there before things sound quite as bright as you’d like. Don’t sweat it. We’re not nearly done yet. There are still several cheap, quick and easy ways to wake up Lester. Come back for Part Four.

I was curious, too, but not quite curious enough to pay the main guitar amp riser company $50 plus shipping for a square of MDF and foam. I searched for homebrew options and eventually stumbled on a forum post recommending the use of a moving dolly, which is what I’m using in the video.

I wasn’t manly enough to know immediately what a moving dolly was, but soon learned it’s a rolling platform to help move heavy pieces of furniture; it’s four caster wheels, four bits of wood, and some stapled-on carpet. Though, as the man at Lowe’s validly informed me, you could make your own (they don’t sell them), I am impatient and don’t own a saw and drove to Home Depot where I bought a finished one for twenty American dollars.

At that price I wouldn’t be upset if it had negligible or unpleasant effect, and coincidentally I am soon moving house, so I could still use it to move my elephant and piano.

Rated for a 1,000 pound load, with good chunky casters, it is quite well appointed for $20. It even has a handle, or monkey grip if you speak Ibaneze, a feature that alone would have cost me a good ten days of frowning thoughtfully at a plank, fist bunched at my hip, to produce, had I done the virtuous thing and built my own.

But let’s not get caught up in the amazing features of this particular moving-dolly-amp-riser. What’s important is that the idea works: getting your cab off the floor affects how it sounds. Quite a lot.

The quality of your computer speakers and general namby-pambyness of your character will dictate what differences you discern from that video. I would not claim it a scientific test, but I did keep all else constant in the segments with and without the riser in place: amp settings were untouched; guitars, strings, even the pick is the same throughout; and I measured both distance from the back wall and distance along the wall to ensure the riser was the only variable.

Four Wheel Overdrive

What I’d long taken to be the bass of my amp and speakers turned out to be the bass of my floor. Right away I experienced less spiking or ballOONing in the low end which had at times made recording tricky both for casual YouTube clips and more serious recording. You would get a good level going then hit a ‘bad’ bass note, usually a wound string on the neck pickup — B and C on the low E string were especially grumpy — and send the levels shooting into the crackly red. Levels are dramatically more even using the riser, which tells you what’s going on in the room.

The tone is clearer and tighter, though certainly thinner. With the riser I feel like I’m hearing more of what the amp and speakers are doing, rather than the room, or at least the floor.

If you’ve ever had that problem setting the bass control where you can’t seem to win — turned high enough to make the lead notes fat and juicy it makes rhythms muddy and causes sudden boomy peaks; turned low enough to get the detail back and tame the hot spots it sounds too thin — you really might want to try a riser.

Some low end flab I did expect to get rid of, but the change in the mids was unexpected. Focus on the little hammered-on semitone in the chords of the video’s first demo, how it clears up when the riser is added. Overdriven riffs generally sound sharper, with a bit more attack.

I hear the least differences in high register parts, like the segment of Blues Saraceno’s ‘Bouree’ at around one minute, but there’s still something more defined about the notes in places, particularly on the descending phrases that reach down into the wound strings.

You probably wouldn’t want to use a moving dolly this way at a live venue; a nudge from a mobile singer or even the pound of the kick drum could send it rolling. But live players are most often the ones to benefit from risers because it takes shitty boxy plywood stages out of their sound and gives them something more consistent and controllable in varied venues. Casters with brakes, easily found in the home improvement stores, would be a wise mod for the frequent gig player.

The take-home points:

• Removes a lot of mud or boom
• Tightens the sound
• Use your bass control again!
• Gives your amp/cab wheels without actually installing any
• Apartment players: send less palm-mute thunder to your neighbors

It’s been refinished in a greeny-blue metallic pearl — quite nicely, too — but has yellowed in places, taken a few scrapes around the edges, and is wearing through on the back to what might be the original bright red. A home nitro job, I suppose. The paint will certainly be stripped; I have a few ambitious color ideas.

It’s also going to need some filler. One owner looks to have gouged some wood out of the pickup cavities to accommodate long-leg vintage style pickups screwed all the way down, and may have lengthened the neck pocket to take an aftermarket neck. Thankfully he doesn’t seem to have widened it, which might have scared me off.

What interests me is the config:

• Floyd Rose trem route
• Neck & bridge humbucker routes
• Single volume pot route

Meaning it’s of similar spec to the prototypes Blues tended to use, versus the production models, so makes a great platform for a reasonably authentic Saraceno project, even without Karl Sandoval’s mojo! I’d guess it’s a Radio Ten — I’ve never seen a TV Twenty with dual humbucker routes.

I would say watch this space, but I am hella slow with projects, so we’ll just see where it goes. Cool plans are brewing in my head place.

In these screenshots from Saraceno's 1995 REH Hot Licks video you can see the configuration he used at that time: one pot, two humbuckers, Floyd Rose.

Don’t Look Now

I adore the tone of my Splawn amp, and it’s still throwing out addictive new sounds after almost four years of obsession. The controls are madly interactive with one another, and often don’t do what you’d think they would, what you’d conventionally expect. “Set it with your ears, not your eyes,” Splawn sage Shred(d)er75 often impels newcomers, and this is why.

Even for us old hands the effect of the controls can be counter-intuitive, especially as how they work changes, depending on how the others are set. Couple that with the Splawns’ modded track car styling, which means no numbers around the knobs, and getting a certain sound back isn’t as simple as it is with a regular production amp.

(Splawn owners talk to each other in a dialog of clock face settings — “I set my gain at three o’clock and my mids around noon…” — in an attempt to communicate dial positions to one another. You could perhaps record them the same way, but small fractions can make all the difference, and for this clock face isn’t so suited. Am I really going to note down that I like my treble up around twelve minutes past two?)

Download the Templates

Enough is enough, I decided, and off I went to design an amp settings sheet, a nice neat chart that can be printed out and have dial positions recorded on it with a pen. After I’d made one for my Competition, I realized it’d be a small matter to adapt the design for other Splawn amps, the Quick Rod and Nitro, and so here they all are. These are high-res PDFs made for printing on standard 8.5″x11″ paper.

• Splawn Competition settings template
• Splawn Quick Rod settings template
• Splawn Nitro settings template

The hook comes from the sunny whistled melody, this in turn drawing you in to examine the breezy guitar chords beneath. It’s all so content and carefree. The reason you pay such attention is because its prominent, repeated inclusion in a Japanese murder mystery, replete with twisted J-horror style zombie-ghosts and elaborate ritual homicide, is as bizarre and unexpected as Cheerios on a turkey sandwich.

Here is the original tune, ripped from the soundtrack:

Any tabs I found online were not just a little off but desperately inaccurate, seemingly the work of well-intentioned green players unaware of 7th chords. All but one or two chords in the entire track are 7th chords! That’s why it sounds smooth and loungey and cheesy, that’s where all that soft, easy vibe comes from. 7th chords form the basis of the whole tune, yet tabs such as this tried to fumble through with rudimentary major and minor chords in their place, resulting in a nightmarish wonky version of the music. There would be no shortcut: I’d have to figure it out myself.

Notes

The piece is so slow and uniform in its execution that I felt chord windows would be the most economical way to lay it out versus tab; the pattern is easy to hear throughout, 90% of it alternating between thumbing the root of each chord then plucking the top three notes together with the first three fingers of the right hand. (It’s all played with the fingers — put your pick aside.) Learn the chords and you’ve learned the song.

If you’re not used to these, imagine your guitar sitting upright in its stand. The six characters in the chord window represent your six strings from left to right; the numbers the frets, a zero for an open string, an X for an un-played string.

So a standard open E major chord would be:

022100

…and D major would look like this:

xx0232

Simple, right Zach? Let’s begin.

Part 1:

3x443x      x4535x      x3545x      x5453x

These are the staples of Part 1. Now repeat them, but instead of the last chord, Dmaj7, play this little octaves motif, one of the song’s biggest ear worms:

x5x7xx      x7x9xx      xx4x7x      x5x7xx

Repeat the first four chords again, then the first three; this time the variation is to play just the first two notes of the fourth chord, Dmaj7, before coming to rest on the main G7 that features throughout, like this:

x54xxx      3x443x

To finish Part 1 we go once more through those first four chords, then the first three, then, in place of the distinctive octaves we encountered the first time, first pick in sequence the lower two notes of that D7:

x54xxx

…and pluck these barre chords, all four notes at once, making a little joiner that echoes the earlier octaves:

3554xx      5775xx      7997xx      3554xx

Part 2:

x3545x      x3554x      x2423x      xx2021

5x553x      x5755x      3x443x      x5346x

x3545x      x3554x      x2423x      xx2021

5X553x      x5755x

And here the song plays a little trick on you, dropping what you naturally anticipate to be the last two bars of this section to warp abruptly to the beginning of the tune again.

Repeat Part 1.

Repeat Part 2.

This time, in the space where those last two bars were missing at the end of Part 2, we are permitted the G7 that should have been there all along:

5x553x      x5755x      3x443x      3x443x

The music makes sense again, lines up according to convention, and we are shown what was previously obscured. It’s like York replaying criminal profiles in his head, gaps in the sequence of events filled in on subsequent passes. Either the soundtrack’s composers (Riyou Kinugasa, Takuya Kobayashi, and Hiromi Mizutani) were conscious of this narrative device in the game and wove it ingeniously into the music for those few who would bother to put it under the microscope, or it’s a coincidence and I’ve simply played too much Deadly Premonition.

Part 3:

3x443x      x3233x      x5453x      3x443x

x2323x      x3535x      x5453x      3x443x

Here the song plays its second little trick on us. We repeat Part 3, but this time around where we’re expecting the last of its eight chords, G7, we get it, yes, but it’s actually the beginning of familiar old Part 1. We’ve been duped again. A bar has been dropped, like a basketball player faking left then going right; another little misdirection that seems well-placed in the soundtrack of a detective game.

So, we’re in Part 1 again, which looks like this:

3x443x      x4535x      x3545x      x5453x

(X2)

The song then concludes with the same G7 chord that’s been its home base throughout, played twice. Listen to the song for the jazzy timing:

3x443x      3x443x

And you’re done!

Video: Guitar Only

I recorded a video of the piece. Though familiarity with it caused me to rush the meter a bit, it’s all there. The rhythms and fingerings in particular might make for useful comparison as you learn the song. Beware that it is dangerously addictive once you’ve got it.

Test Guitar

As before, the test guitar here is my Edwards E-LP-98LTS, modeled after a ’59 Gibson LP. You may be prejudiced against copies, you may not, but almost every Les Paul-style guitar, from the low-end imported facsimile to the $4,000 US-built Gibson Les Paul Custom, comes with an Asian die-cast heavy zinc tailpiece because it saves the manufacturer money. It’s been going on so long, I’m sure some don’t even know these were aluminum on the ’50s originals that are considered perfect.

Aluminum Tailpiece

Being such an established upgrade, there are a lot of choices out there for someone looking to buy a lightweight tailpiece. Faber parts are well received, but I don’t appreciate the misdirection in Faber’s marketing model; customers assume they’re buying German hardware from the strong “FABER — GERMANY” branding, only to learn on receipt that the “PW” stamp of the Ping factory in China has been obscured in the promotional pictures. By most accounts it’s good stuff, and Ping makes hardware for several big names, I just don’t like to be hoodwinked. However, King of the hoodwinkers has to be Gibson, which sells essentially the same part as an “Historic Spec” aluminum tailpiece — a bar of metal, remember — for $233.

Any sufficiently large sampling of opinions overwhelmingly reveals the highest quality (and most historically accurate) piece is felt to come from Pigtail, though at $130 without mounting hardware, while clearly a labor of love by its creator, I’d consider it the last piece of the puzzle for the vintage-correct compulsive rather than a tail for someone who just wants to know how aluminum sounds.

That everyman’s lightweight aluminum tailpiece, I think, would be the widely used Gotoh GE101A, which is what I got. $33 at StewMac.

Fitting

It’s an easy transplant, as nothing needs to be drilled, cut, bent, forced, or encouraged with profanity. You take off the strings, the old tail, in this case the Gotoh GE101Z that was stock on the Edwards, slips off, the new one goes on. StewMac supplies either imperial or metric studs as per your order. These are non-magnetic and so presumably nickel-plated brass (ideally they would be steel) but fit the Edwards’ bushings better than the originals (also not steel) which can only help what we’re trying to do here. The flange on the studs — the gap below the head where the tailpiece slots on — is about the same: a hair too big, allowing for a very little bit of lean in the tailpiece. Also included are a pair of bushings, should you need them.

The vintage profile of the Gotoh, with its sloped face, means the strings exit higher than on the modern part, which allows you to bolt it down further than before without the strings hitting the back of the bridge. The deeper those studs go, the more contact we’ve got between body and tail, and the happier the mojo demons are.

It comes in both nickel and chrome. They don’t have an aged option, and it’s going to take a while for the nickel one here to blend in with the vintage smushed hardware on the rest of the guitar. Currently it screams “NEW!” and looks like it was cast from the hull of the spaceship from Flight of the Navigator.

Sound

If you’ll allow me to be completely honest, and you will, I have to say of the five or six alterations with which I’ve experimented in brightening a Les Paul, this had the subtlest result. Before-and-after comparison is difficult because, unlike most of the other mods, the strings must be removed in the process. Often players make the change then run to the forums to report how their guitar is brighter, spankier. Of course it is — you just put new strings on! I let the strings settle in for a week or two before trying to answer the question ‘does my LP sound like it always did?’

In contrast to what I’d imagined, there is a fair bit of vibration traveling through the tailpiece; touch it and strum the open strings. But it’s not as directly involved in transfer back there as the bridge; I think the body is vibrating it, rather than the other way around. You can damp the strings entirely with the edge of your hand where they slope from bridge to tail — some players rest here naturally — but it doesn’t take the top end off your tone. I’ve got to assume then that the tail is just not as critical a point in the chain as the bridge; that what little effect you’re hearing comes from the (literally) massive body resonating with a small aluminum bar versus a small zinc bar, whereas materials at the bridge dictate what gets transferred from string to body and so alter tone more drastically.

“Little effect?” Yes, there is some. I perceive it as a light alteration in attack, a fleeting wisp of extra zing at the beginning of notes, like the effect stainless steel frets have, though less pronounced, and a little more openness thereafter. It’s barely there, many times less apparent than changing bridge posts, less even than swapping picks. And that’s listening acoustically; talk about bringing in an amp, the sweetened limited range of guitar speakers, and some dirt, and it you’d be hard-pressed to tell the difference.

The cleaner your tone, the more apparent the change. Here is a nice mp3 recorded by MyLesPaul forum member markanini, which depicts a more extreme swap: the same short pieces of music are played with an aluminum tailpiece and a brass tailpiece, alternating throughout. Brass is about twice as heavy again as zinc, and has a warmer, thicker tone. If you can’t tell the difference between these two materials, you probably don’t need to worry about the subtler effects of switching from zinc to aluminum.

Brass and Aluminum Tailpieces by markanini

Highlight this white text to discover in what order they were played: 1st each time is the aluminum, 2nd is the brass.

Though minimal in its influence, especially with a bit of gain in the equation, I’ve no notion to remove the TP. It still does something after all, and an aluminum tailpiece is one of those things it’s just nice to know is there. These guitars are meant to have them, and if it weren’t for a number at the foot of a manufacturer’s spreadsheet they still would. I don’t notice much impact on sustain from the lower mass, and saving a few ounces off an LP is never unwelcome.

Still, there are a number of more effective ways to brighten the tone of that dark Les Paul, another of which we’ll get to in Part Three.