New book by Helmuth Lemme with lots of tips and tricks for modding your guitar!
Here’s something that every electric guitarist who works on his instruments, or every technician curious about the innards of electric guitars, will appreciate: GITEC-friend (and honorary member) Helmuth Lemme has published another book – this time exclusively in the e-book format. It is titled: Inside Electric Guitars: Pickups, Pots, Switches … and much more incl. […]
Enhanced possibilities: Active Guitar-Electronics
In our third installment of articles by Helmuth Lemme, we go – compared to the last topic of low impedance pickups and a lot of tricks to get various sound out of passive guitar electrics – completely the other way: we are looking at the possibilities that active guitar electronics offer. Once we get over […]
A vintage story: restoring an old Burns Bass
Helmuth Lemme is not just an expert in electronics but also a true hands-on craftsman who loves working on guitars and basses. He has a particular knack for bringing derelict instruments of lesser well-known makes back to life, actually not just restoring them but often making them much better in sound and playability than they […]
Potential trouble-makers in the amp: Passive Offenders
In the last articles posted here, author and guitar & amp expert Helmuth Lemme has been looking at pickups and circuitry in guitars … now we switch to the partners of these instruments, the amplifier. There is a lot of continued discussion about tubes vs. solid-state devices, and indeed these active components are what drives […]
Under the looking-glass: Measuring Pickups
Magnetic pickups for electric guitars really are very simple devices: a magnet, some wire wound as a coil within the magnetic field … that’s it. However, due to the specific circumstances around the electric guitar and ist amplification as it has historically evolved, these pickups have some idiosyncrasies that give them their sound. Of course, […]
So many options: wiring electric Double-Neck Guitars
Electric double-neck guitars are very special beasts … not easy to wield but very impressive in several ways – especially in a live-setting. If you own one, chances are that you have thought about about modifying their circuitry according to your own special needs, or have even already taken corresponding action. I certainly have modded […]
Low-impedance pickups – Les Paul’s favorite … but a generally neglected kind
In our second installment of articles by Helmut Lemme, we turn to a special kind of pickup that was favored by Les Paul but for a number of reasons never made it big in the guitar world: the low-impedance pickup. In fact, it has all the right features and should be the go-to type of […]
No more interference … how to decrease noise and hum in electric guitars
I am quite excited: Helmuth Lemme, honorary GITEC-member and well-known expert in “all things electric guitar” has made some articles available to us for publication. Helmuth has published books on the technical background of electric-guitar circuitry since the early 1970’s – among those interested in the topic in the German-speaking community, these books have legendary […]
The Aperture of the magnetic Pickup
We all know that the magnetic pickups mounted on our guitars sense the vibration of each string. However, the details of this often elude us. In fact, the pickup “looks” at merely a portion of the length of the string – just like a camera in the optical domain, the pickup has an “aperture”. This […]
Do the pickup magnets influence the sound of a guitar? … the MAC-guitar may provide an answer …
In 2019 and 2020, we posted 3 articles discussing the Fender Wide-range Humbucker (see in particular here: https://gitec-forum-eng.de/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/TZ-Fender-Humbucker-Pt-3-WKM.pdf). In that framework, we showed the central element for the listening tests when comparing pickups: the PUC-guitar … PUC standing for Pick-Up-Change. Given the persistent (and sometime quite emotional) discussion of the question whether the magnets of […]