5 More Tiny TATAs : Ground Lifts and Skunk Stripes | Too Afraid To Ask

this video is sponsored by Skillshare stick around to find out how you can get two months free membership welcome to CS guitars the science of load today I'm giving some love to the tiny tars the questions oft overlooked because they have answers so simple they wouldn't fill a video on their own I've lined up five of the most common questions with tiny answers that you have been too afraid to ask Olek who is the name given to a certain type of magnet that we often use in guitar pickups and speakers invented in the 1930s these were the first real high performance permanent magnets vastly superior to the magnetic steels which came before they come in many different varieties or more accurately Greed's each with their own subtly different magnetic properties which we differentiate by giving them numbers Allen echos 2 & 5 are probably the most common but three four and eight are also regularly used in guitar pickups to understand these numbers we must firstly understand the chemistry behind the magnet itself obviously being magnetic iron is a major component of an analytical magnet but iron alone won't hold its magnetism permanently for the material to stay magnetic we need to form an alloy mixing in other elements to help improve its magnetic properties these main elements are aluminium nickel and cobalt hence the name our nickel by changing the ratio of how much of each element is present in the alloy the final magnetic properties of the magnets are decided there are many resources online which will give you the mix ratios and the magnetic properties of each I'll Necco grade but to keep things simple for this explanation here as the grade number increases so too does the magnetic strength for example and Elna co2 is a weaker magnet than a longneck or five which is a weaker magnet again from an OL neck or eight the strength of the magnet not only determines the output level of the pickup but also has an influence over its tonality stronger magnets give the coil more high-end response while weaker magnets pervade the pack up a more mellow tone if you've looked at the back of a fender neck you'll probably have noticed the stripe of dark wood many of you have asked why this is there and the answer is incredibly simple this is where the truss rod was installed traditionally fender necks are made from one single piece of maple just like this one the fretboard a neck are one continuous piece of wood so to install the truss rod fender how to wrote a slot in the back of the neck to get it and obviously the slot then needs to be filled with another piece of wood after the truss rod has been installed but that presents a small problem offender had tried to plug this slot with another piece of maple it would have looked bad it would have looked like a repair you'd have seen the seam lines and where the green doesn't line up it would have been impossible to make that maple on maple join invisible so they did the complete opposite and head the repair in plain sight by plugging the slot with a contrasting piece of woods it no longer looks like her appear rather an intentional design element it looks like something done deliberately to make the neck look even prettier and it's worked the fact that I've had so many questions from people asking what the purpose of this stripe is shows the fender of Hadden there appear so well that people have got no ideas or appear at all obviously routing the back of the neck is unnecessary if you're using two separate pieces of wood for your neck and fretboard in such circumstances you'd route your slot on the NC surface of the neck install the truss rod and then cover the whole lot with the fretboard however if you have your heart set on a one-piece neck and fingerboard then a skunk straight is your best option for hiding your truss rod installation point let's stay on Fender guitars for a minute one of the more noticeable design elements on the strat and the tele for that matter is a slanted or angled bridge pickup here we see the neck and metal pickups parallel to the frets but the bridge pickup is doing its own quirky lean why is that the answer is again pretty simple when you strike a guitar string it vibrates more in the middle then it does towards the bridge the bridge saddles form effects note points of no vibration so the closer you get to it the amplitude of the vibration decreases and the tonality changes that means that a vibrating string will sound different along its length and a pickup under the string will sense the string more strongly at the neck where the vibration is fullest and weaker at the bridge where the vibration is more limited if you can slide the neck pickup down towards the bridge while you are playing you'd not only notice the drop in volume but also the change in tone from fill and warm to harsh and baiting it's because the pickup book sends the string definitely depending where it sets beneath it that angling the bridge pickup is a popular choice especially with single coils moving the bass side of the pickup little further away from the bridge ensures that the pickup sense he's the lower strings with a more full vibration preventing them from sounding too thin and treble e and having the treble side of the pickup closer to the bridge means that the pickup will sense the upper strings with more high-end attack it's not just the possession in though the neck and bridge pecker we'll both be wound definitely and often of different magnets in order to balance the sound and output despite the fact that they're under very different parts of a vibrating string would you look at the time jeonyul is almost over already is racing away from us a big Christmas again before you know what and what will you have achieved this year probably nothing as usual but it's not too late to make 2022 the year of exploring new skills deepening existing passions and getting lost and your creativity skills share is an online learning community which offers classes designed to be of practical use to your real life and fit around your busy schedule why do today what you can put off until tomorrow right no that's the procrastination talking skill shares classes give you hands-on skills you can put into action right now to improve your career or personal development like Jake Bartlett's class and animated lettering with and after-effects which I've been looking into to try and learn some new tricks to improve my animations here in videos if you don't want to get left behind as this year passes you by then click the link in the description to secure yourself to three months of premium membership that should give you plenty of time to discover just how much you could learn on Skillshare and you can see without irony that 2020 is the year you got your together here's one that's been requested many many times groaned lifts can appear in lots of different places but I'm assuming you're seeing them on your di box these pedals attenuators or amplifiers next to an XLR connection designated for direct out to connect your device to a recording interface ground left does exactly what it says on the ten it left's the ground connection that is to say it disconnects it from one end of the XLR cable a ballast XLR has three pens two hot wires for carrying the signal and a ground connection I've got a video on how balanced cables work right here the ground connection is very useful but it can present a problem when connecting your amplifier rig to your recording setup which are on two separate power outlets in an ideal world all ground connections would be at the same potential but this is very seldom the case when connecting two different systems together like your amplifier to your recording interface you might find that the - groans set at different potentials allowing a current to flow along that XLR cable this flow of current can cause hum and your audio signal which is undesirable one simple and easy solution to eradicating this hum is to left the ground connection at one end of the XLR keeping the two grounds separated and preventing current flowing between them note that both systems are so safely button dependently connected to the respective grounds the ground left is simply preventing the XLR cable from bridging the two together when should you use the ground left well if you connect your amplifier or di box to your interface and you don't get any hum then great you don't need to use the ground left however when you're connecting your two systems together if you get detrimental ground hum and your audio signal and consider lifting the ground and seeing if that makes a difference the clue to this one is again in its name if a pickup is microphonic then it is behaving alaikum one that as it will be directly influenced by mechanical vibrations in the pickup and not just the string interacting with its magnetic field the cause of a microphonic effect in a pickup is again the same as what causes a microphone to generate an electric current moving parts within the device we know make if one will have a diaphragm of some description which vibrates with incident sound waves by the way check out my video and how microphones work it's really good a microphonic pickup will have loose coils or other parts which vibrate and move with any physical shock to the instrument this results in a pickup that will feedback way oddly and replicate any movement or knock take into the instruments as it shakes the loose components with them the pickup a lot of vintage pickups were like this and a lot of care to be taken on stage to prevent feedback even being too close to the transformer of the amplifier could cause problems so finding the right space on stage where none of those effects happened it was vital the easiest way to prevent a pickup from becoming microphonic it's just immerse the entire unit and molten wax this fills all the ear species as the liquid seeps between the coils and into all the crevices of the pickup when removed from the wax bath the wax solidifies holding all the coils and elements of the pack up in place preventing them from moving independently to the entire unit this process is called porting I use a mixture of paraffin and beeswax to port the pickups that I make paraffin alone solidifies to brittle and word rest breaking apart with vibrations over time allowing microphone --ax to manifest so beeswax is added to the mixture to give it more pliability so that can hold everything together without breaking itself apart over time beeswax on its own has too low a melting point which would rescue turning to liquids and running out of the pickup of the guitar were out on a horse D something that's very unlikely to happen here in Scotland but if you lived in somewhere like Arizona that might be a real threat Peck UPS can also be ported in epoxy or resin if you want to completely entombed them for evermore but this does make it impossible to do any repair work on these pickups why is far more forgiving and less regard of course there are many players who will claim that they prefer the sound of microphone ik pickups because when they're not doing all that feedback stuff and amplifying your own voice etc they apparently sound more lively than potted coils frankly it seems like a lot of hassle for what as essentially a badly made speck up and I wouldn't expect any modern player to put up with that inconsistency and irritating performance from their instrument that's been five tiny tattoos have hopefully given you some insight into these commonly confusing topics if you've got any questions of your own that you are too afraid to ask please do leave them in the comment section below and perhaps they'll become the topic of a future tart hour video it's never too late to learn and if you've liked this video and want to see more content from me then please do kiss that are hitting that subscribe button and smashing that notification bell so you can be notified of all new content as it comes out my patients also therefore exclusive secret stuff t-shirts are available and there's other videos you might not have seen but that's all for now guys keep it loaded and I'll see you later taking a swig of my jag

Channel: CSGuitars

Views: 48,290

Rating: 4.9821429 out of 5

Keywords: CSGuitars, Colin, all the gain, guitcon, scotland, victory, pickups, science, will it shred, whats the difference, studio, recording, guitar, amplifier, pedal, scottish, metal, tata, too afraid to ask, tiny tatas, ground lift, alnico, fender

Id: lckANLnIGe4

Length: 12min 4sec (724 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 29 2020