Does the Construction of an Electric Guitar Affect Tone?

So this is an age-old question with people firmly planted in both camps. One group will adamantly adhere to the idea that guitars are magical machines capable of defying physics as we know it and that each is unique and different wherein only one can make the very special sounds it makes. The other group are staunch adherents to physics and they know that the only sound an electric guitar pickup can make is that which is generated by the change in electrical output as a result of the changing magnetic fields produced by ferrous strings moving in said magnetic field.

I'm here to say that both camps are slightly correct and slightly incorrect and it's all about construction (and physics).

Physics is generally right in this case in that if the pickups don't move and the strings don't move, there is no output. It's just that physics on paper is simplified and much cleaner than reality and, in reality, things are always moving.

As an experiment, you can plug in your guitar, max out the volume on your guitar and headphones on the cleanest setting you can find on your amp with no effects of any kind. Also, don't strum, we don't want to deafen anyone. If you just tap on the guitar with a knuckle while adjusting the volume you might convince yourself that you hear the rapping in the headphones. For some guitars, you might be right. Now, let's deaden the strings by placing a cloth below the strings and on top of the pickups, thick enough that there's a good bit of pressure on the strings and you're pretty confident the strings aren't going to move, and do the same rapping. Are you still convinced you can hear the sound? Again, you might actually be and here's why...

If your guitar was made of a material that did not vibrate at all when struck, you'd never hear a sound at all (except maybe the standard 60-cycle hum), but guitars are made of wood, carbon fiber, or other materials that do have the ability to vibrate, some more than others. Now, also consider how your pickups are mounted. On my strat, they are screwed in place and backed by pretty heavy springs. The wood is a solid Alder or similar wood. When I rap on this guitar with the strings muted, I hear nothing in the headphones. This is because there is (for all intents and purposes) no movement between the strings and the pickups, the vibration is too small to create any perceptible sound. However, on my Ibanez superstrat, I have an HSH configuration and the humbuckers are floating on much softer springs so that when I rap on the guitar body, the pickups do move some. Without the cloth in place, they move a lot more than you'd think and some sound from the vibrating wood is heard from the pickup vibrating, yet the single coil in the middle is just like the strat and doesn't move at all and once again produces no perceptible sound in the headphones.

What does this mean to someone who thinks that a guitar should have it's own character and not just sound like whatever pickups are put in it? Well, the more things vibrate, the more the construction will affect what the pickups pick up. Choose pickups that float more softly instead of being rigidly attached to the body. Choose a floating bridge as well since the springs will allow the strings to vibrate with the body. Also, I've noticed that the more solid the body, the less vibration and the less solid the more vibration there is. My strat has the most solid body of all my guitars and pretty much doesn't have any body vibration coming through the headphones, so it is the cleanest tone and really is only colored by its playability (and my skill, which isn't so great). However, my Jazzmaster has a lot of open cavities inside, with a solid tailpiece, I still get quite a bit of what I can only describe as a kind of reverb in the sound when rapping the guitar. This might explain why it was a popular choice for Surf Guitar. The pickups on the JM are supported by two medium sized springs and foam, so they don't get much vibration on their own, but it is still enough to color the sound a little.

One other popular guitar is the Rickenbacker 360. One might wonder what gives it such a characteristic sound. For once, it is a semi-hollow body, so less wood = more vibration in the strings and pickups. Plus, this guitar has a special set of pickups you won't find on other guitars. The combination is an open and jangly sound that you just don't get from other guitars. That doesn't mean you couldn't take those pickups and put them on something like an ES-335 and get something similar, maybe even better. Go ahead, give it a try :-)

Note that the more things do vibrate, the less sustain you will have. This is because the body frequencies are nowhere near those of the strings and will likely be out of phase causing the stings to deaden much quicker. The less vibration you have, the greater your sustain will be. Combined with humbucking pickups which have the lowest output and weakest magnetic field and sustain increases even further. To maximize sustain, use active electronics instead as they will increase your output without increasing magnetic field strength, thereby allowing the strings to vibrate longer.

Now, with all of this said, I have to stress that the vast majority of your sound is based on your electronics. Everything in your signal chain will alter the sound much more than the construction of the guitar. Quality electronics can make wonders of a cheap guitar. My JM is a Squier, solidly built, but had lousy pots (and the stock pickups weren't that great either), so I upgraded those for a much higher quality of sound. The rest of the guitar is awesome, BTW! My Ibanez super-strat is also cheap and could stand to have better pickups and electronics. When I do upgrade it, I'll make sure the pickups don't float because I want a pure sound out of whatever pickups I choose to put in it. I'll also probably block the Floyd-Rose bridge so that it doesn't move either. With that combination, I might get something closer to a Les Paul in sound quality, all on a cheap body with a neck that at least plays well.

I hope this helps some of you out there in choosing your next axe or modifying an existing one. Rock on!

Squire Vintage Modified Jazzmaster Pickguard and Electronics Upgrade

Ok, so this is not my typical technology discussion, but I love guitar and finally purchased a cheap enough one to be willing to modify it.

To start, we have in Tucson a company called Bookman's. They started initially with just used books that people could trade in for cash or store credit (you always got more with store credit). Eventually, they started taking other things such as board games, puzzles, knick-knacks, and musical instruments. Over the years, I've traded in a ton of old books and gaming consoles, such that I had about $200 in remaining credit to use. Since I've been buying all my books on Kindle lately (I like the convenience, okay), I couldn't think of anything else to put my credit to. That is, until a friend of mine mentioned that they had a VMJM available. I've been looking for a cheap way into the P90 sound, so I went down and looked at it. It played really well. I mean, surprisingly well for a cheap guitar. I was amazed by certain aspects of the build quality (though was disappointed in the warped pickguard). The guitar itself wasn't exactly treated nicely, and I know that I could have bought a brand new one for about $100 more, but this was $200 that I already had in credit, so I went with it.

Original guitar

Incidentally, I played terribly in the store. I don't play in public and was so nervous having to plug in and play with at least 50 people having to cringe at my mistakes. But, I heard enough to like the guitar and to know that once I got it home, it'd sound much better.

Fast forward a bit and I found that that while it did have a nice sound with volume and tone at full throttle, once you brought the volume down a notch or two, treble was just completely lost (I have since learned that this is normal and that there is a common modification that people employ called a Treble Bleed Circuit). I decided that since I didn't spend any real money on it, that I could stand to purchase some other pickups, replace the pots (I actually hated the stacked volume/tone pots), and felt it could use a bit better shielding.

On Amazon, I found a replacement pickguard in vintage cream for $6. One thing to note is that the pickguard on this guitar is different from most Jazzmasters. Notice how this guitar has the separate metal angled output jack. Most Jazzmasters have the output jack where the second pot is in the image above, and the pots are both moved up. Also, the pickup selector switch is traditionally on the lower bout and in the upper is the rhythm circuit. I also bought a roll of copper shielding tape and shielded the entire underside of the pickguard and most of the guitar cavities.

Copper shielding on new pickguard

Shielded cavities

I could have spent up to $350 on a loaded pickguard, but I decided it wasn't worth that, at least, not yet. I needed to try this on the cheap, so instead I purchased a set of completely new J Mascis wired electronics with pickups for $100 on Reverb.com. This way, I didn't have to spend a ton on more electronics, or lots of time on figuring out exactly what I'd do if I built this from scratch. Besides, I didn't want to go to the trouble of figuring out the whole rhythm switch circuit and I couldn't find a pickguard to match the existing (the original was warped and I hated that about it). So, the J. Mascis set was a good option. Besides, I really liked the idea of adjustable pole pieces for fine tuning. I did not bother to add the treble bleed circuit yet.

Example of warped pickguard, you can't quite see the bulge near the neck pickup, but it was also very annoying

After shielding the pickguard, I attached the electronics. I did have to solder a few parts as there were two grounds in the cavity; one to the inset to the treble side riser for the stop tailpiece and one just under the neck pickup. I also decided that I might as well wire up the existing output jack. Only one should be used at a time, but I wasn't sure which would be more sturdy, assuming the one in the pickguard would be less robust.

J. Mascis electronics attached to pickguard

The real trick was actually getting everything in place. The pickguard wasn't a perfect fit. I had to trim around the neck quite a bit to allow for greater flexibility to align the screw holes with the existing. In some cases I just had to create new holes. All that was mostly fine. The biggest challenge was with the pickup selector switch. It was a tad too big to fit in the corner designed for it so that once I had the pickguard in place, part of the switch housing came loose causing the switch not to work properly. It took me a few tries to figure that out, and not before I screwed everything down twice. Once I did figure it out, the next trick was determining how to fix it. Originally I looked for some glue, but then it dawned on me that I could use solder to hold it together and also to build up a false ledge on that one side of the switch so that inside the cavity it would be angled away from the wall. That little trick was enough to get it to fit without malfunctioning. I don't have any pictures of this fix, as I'm not proud of the gerry-rigging I had to do.

However, the selector switch still broke after a few months, so I ended up routing out the upper bout a bit.

Routing of upper bout on cutaway side to make room for selector switch

In addition to this, I found that the tone and volume wheels for the rhythm circuit were hard to turn, so I had to do a little routing on that end as well.

Routing of cavity for rhythm circuit volume and tone controls

Complete with new pickguard and electronics. I have to say, the vintage cream on both look better than the stark white of the original

Once everything was all together and actually working, then I had to tweak the pickup height for the low action I was trying to achieve. In the process, I learned what the rhythm circuit actually does. The original configuration had stacked tone and volume pots so that each pickup was controlled individually. I also didn't like that configuration much because as I switched I'd find that the volume would change if not perfectly aligned. It also made setup a little more challenging. I'm used to a strat configuration where the volume was a set value and the the tone knobs were separate. The rhythm circuit is similar, but different. When not using the rhythm circuit, you have one volume and tone that controls both pickups equally, depending on the pickup selector position. When the rhythm switch is engaged, then only the neck pickup is active and it uses the separate volume and tone wheels on the high side of the upper bout. At first, I was confused by why one would want this. Then it dawned on me that in the heyday of the Jazzmaster, there was no "lead" guitarist, it was just "the" guitarist. The idea was to provide an easy way to preset a rhythm sound to switch to. With that in mind, I'm not sure how much I'll actually use the rhythm circuit, but since I understand it a bit more, I might actually try to find uses for it.

There are a few ways I might still modify the guitar. Obviously, I don't need two output jacks, so I could put in another control where the output jack is in the pickguard. That control could be a pan knob, or I could put in a push/pull pot to engage a treble bleed circuit, using the pot resistor to allow for fine tuning of the circuit (normally you put in a physical static resistor). I'd also like to add a switch to reverse the polarity of one pickup to allow for some subtle humbucking. Of course, I'll have to read up on that as I'm sure it isn't so simple.

In the end, how do I feel about it? Well, as I said originally, I liked how the guitar originally played and sounded. The new electronics sound better, especially since I had greater control of the sound with the adjustable pole pieces. I find this guitar to be rather unique. It is solidly made. The woods aren't the greatest, but one thing you'll find to be rare on these guitars is a maple fretboard, of which I really like the feel. Combined with the jumbo frets, which are phenomenally dressed for a cheap guitar, it's quite comfortable to play. The J. Mascis pickups are actually cleaner than the originals. I was kind of hoping for something a little darker, but I'm actually really digging the clean jazz tones I can eek out of this.

I like the adjustable pole pieces a lot. I know I've mentioned them several times before and for good reason. On traditional Jazzmasters, the volume of each string is naturally higher at the low and high ends of the spectrum. This is because you have strings heights relevant to each pole piece that are different. But with the adjustable pole pieces, you can keep the string heights relatively the same. In this way, you can capitalize on the natural resonance of the Jazzmaster and create a more well-rounded tone by maximizing the mid-range. If you've ever wondered how electric guitars can sound different even if they have the same electronics, consider recording them unplugged. I did this with my strat and the JM and found that the added heft of the JM as well as more open cavities provided both a resonance and sustain I couldn't get out of my strat. The pole pieces did not require much if any adjustment at the neck, but at the bridge it really made the difference. I'm not one who likes that tele or strat bridge pickup twang, it's too sharp and almost unpleasant to me. So, making the adjustments on the JM at the bridge was a tremendous improvement.

All in all, I'm pretty happy with this guitar and the mods. It's wonderful for both surf guitar and jazz. I also enjoyed playing some STP and Nirvana with it (while similar to a jaguar and sufficient at producing the tone, it still isn't a perfect match for Curt's sound). I also very much prefer it in the neck position to position 4 on the strat for Yellow Ledbetter, it's just more full sounding than the strat to me. I can also get a nice warmth and jangly tone from the neck pickup which when combined with a fair amount of spring reverb and slight gain on a Fender twin, produces the perfect surf rock sound of the 60's.

Guild Wars 2 Graphics Settings on Mid-tier Laptops

Okay, so I'm not a big gamer, but I am a computer geek so it's okay for me to spend more time troubleshooting lag or screen stutter in Guild Wars 2 (GW2) rather than actually play the game :-)

Now, there are many reasons why GW2 would stutter; RAM, Swap Space, CPU cores, heat, poor GPU, etc. I can't possibly cover all scenarios. This little write-up is specific to heat issues.

My laptop is a fairly new Samsung Notebook 7 Spin. I got the lower spec'd model with only 12GB RAM and a 5400 RPM drive. I immediately swapped out the drive for an SSD, but I have never once used more than 12GB of RAM on my personal computer, so I left that as is. This laptop has an NVIDIA GeForce 940MX GPU in it, as well as an Intel I7-6600U. None of these are top of the line, but they aren't shabby either. I got this computer because my HP Spectre x360 mobo fried, it was a refurbished model and there was no warranty. That will teach me never to buy a refurbished computer or an HP ever again. I wanted something with a touch screen, which the Samsung has, and dedicated graphics which the HP did not have. My goal was to have a solid performing laptop that could handle Visual Studio, TFS, Office, and the majority of the games I play which aren't particularly high on the graphics scale. Well, that was what I thought.

When I started playing GW2, after only a few moments it would stutter when turning around. This got worse with more players in the map, more feature rich zones (like Verdant Brink), and anytime I upped the graphics settings in the game for a nicer appearance. I thought this PC should be able to handle it. My ASUS is 5 years old, a 4th gen I7 processor, and using the 560M graphics card, why does it render GW2 so much better and at higher settings?

Heat is the reason (well, that and the fact that my old ASUS was a quad core where the U processor in the Samsung is only a dual - the difference being 8 logical cores vs four, the four had to work much harder). However, I didn't know that right away. When I researched the problem, I found lots of possibilities, but the best website was the Guild Wars 2 Performance Guide. It basically led me to using hardware monitoring tools to observe what my CPU and GPU were doing.

Note that only the OpenHardwareMonitor showed the NVIDIA GPU, the standard Hardware Monitor only showed the Intel GPU which was useless to me. 

Anyway, as I played the game, I noticed that the stutter occurred when the CPU core temps approached the mid 80s and on up to over 90°C. Using some of the information in the guide, I tried to tweak my settings to maximize GPU usage while minimizing CPU usage.

Another note from the guide is that GW2 is designed to use CPU by far more than the GPU. 

The guide only gave me an idea of what to do, but didn't answer the question of what the best settings were.

There were two crucial things I did to remove the stutter almost completely. The first was to change my power settings. The second was to use the frame limiter. Both of these would reduce core temps.

Normally, you would think that when the laptop is plugged in you can simply use 100% of your CPU. However, with a CPU intensive game like GW2, extended use at 100% will overheat the cores, as I had witnessed. The first thing I did to try to reduce this was to change my power options (Power Options > Change Plan Settings > Change Advanced Power Settings > Processor power management; change the minimum state to 5% and the maximum to 90%) so that I only used 90%. It seems, at least with this particular laptop, that Windows is more gentle about controlling the CPU usage when you set a value like that rather than letting the CPU itself reduce the frequency when it detects an overheat condition, which it apparently does rather aggressively resulting in the stutter. While the frame rate (frames per second or FPS) does decrease with a lower CPU usage value, the overall effect is that the CPU does not heat up as much. Naturally, you could just have extra fans or some sort of cooling pad under the laptop. I don't want to carry more stuff with me just to play GW2 on the road, so setting this value down seemed the most efficient way to handle this. I decided to create a GW2-only Power Profile so that these settings would only be in use when I play the game.

The power setting wasn't quite enough though. I also used the setting within GW2 that limits the framerate to 30 FPS max (Options > Graphics Options > Frame Limitation). Why did I do this? Well, if you hover over the option, it indicates that it will reduce power consumption and heat. Oh really?!? It was effective, provided that the settings are such that the FPS would have been increased otherwise. I was able to maximize the graphics settings in GW2 to give me a nice balance of features that used GPU more than CPU and even those that use CPU would not overheat the CPU cores.

Now, one thing to note is that different zones (maps) use different features, so these settings may not be optimal for all zones. That is why I picked 3 zones to play around with, Lion's Arch (generally the most populated zone), Gendarran Fields (a fairly simply PvE zone), and Verdant Brink (a graphically dense PvE zone requiring a lot more CPU and GPU cycles). In the end, I optimized for Gendarran Fields and LA first, then went to Verdant Brink to lower the specs just enough to make it function smoothly there.

Settings in Lion's Arch, FPS sits nicely at 30, GPU usage is high while CPU cores are below 75 degrees.

Same settings from previous in LA, notice FPS is down to 12 and CPU core temp is over 80. A few minutes playing here and the stutter came back. Even without the stutter, camera movements were not smooth.

The biggest change here was to reduce Shadows from Ultra to simply Medium. I also got rid of Depth Blur, it didn't offer much.

You can opt to change whatever settings suit you and experiment with how your system will handle them. I liked using the Windowed mode to observe in real time how changes I made affected both CPU and GPU. However, I would not use Postprocessing as that is done entirely by the CPU. Every time I set that to Low or High, the stutter would come back. As a last ditch effort, you can change the full screen resolution. I know the other guide said it would look terrible, but I found you could still get a decent looking screen by upping the graphics settings and adjusting things like the camera zoom levels, the interface size to small and so on so that it looks closer to native resolution. Hey, what more can you ask of a mid-level laptop?

Audacity Project Check Error

In an odd turn of events, my laptop died. Now, I have a backup on network storage, so I wasn't too concerned about all my Audacity project files. At least, not until after I attempted to restore them.

It turns out that at some point in the past, maybe during backup, maybe at another time, my Audacity .aup files all got renamed to include something like a date and time stamp "Filename (2016_04_27 02_27_25 UTC).aup" Some of my .aup files are duplicated with different values. When I attempt to open the .aup files, I get a message similar to the following:

I've tried to rename the .aup files but I get the same error. Further research shows that the .au files in the _data folders have also been renamed. I confirmed that if I renamed those files by removing the date and time information, the count in the message above is reduced by that number of files for which I've renamed. Furthermore, I can see the audio in the file that was added after clicking OK which wasn't there before. Therefore, the solution to this error is to rename all the .au files by removing the date and time information.

Unfortunately, that is easier said than done. The .au files are small chunks of audio and for my meager library of recordings, there are literally thousands of .au files. Additionally, some of those files do not have the added date and time information and if I were to rename the files, they would either replace the one without the date and time information or they would create a (Copy 1) type designation. Neither of which I want to do.

The short answer is that we need PowerShell to do this if we don't want to spend days correcting these file names.

If you do not know PowerShell and aren't able to follow my instructions, please Google it. I'm not a PowerShell expert and don't have the time or energy to train someone on what I do know. The internet has a lot of tutorials out there so use them first before asking me questions. 

Naturally, the absolute first thing you should do is back up your files. I will not be held responsible for any damage that befalls your data as a result of this solution. I also recommend that you copy the damaged projects to a new directory that is short and easy to get to. My script is using C:\TEMP\Audacity.

Now, copy the following lines and paste them into a file of whatever name you like, just make sure that the file ends with the .ps1 extension. I'll call my file "FixAudacity.ps1".

Get-ChildItem C:\TEMP\Audacity -Filter "*(*).au" -Recurse | Rename-Item -NewName {$_.Name -replace '\s\u0028.+$','.au'} -Force -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

Get-ChildItem C:\TEMP\Audacity -Filter "*(*).au" -Recurse | Remove-Item -Force -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

Get-ChildItem C:\TEMP\Audacity -Filter "*(*).aup" -Recurse | Rename-Item -NewName {$_.Name -replace '\s\u0028.+$','.aup'} -Force -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

Get-ChildItem C:\TEMP\Audacity -Filter "*(*).aup" -Recurse | Remove-Item -Force -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue


Save this to C:\TEMP. To run the file, you'll need to open PowerShell, search your computer for Windows PowerShell and right-click, then select Run as Administrator.

At the prompt, you'll need to set the execution policy that will allow you to run PowerShell scripts. type the following and press enter:

Set-ExecutionPolicy bypass

You will be prompted with a warning. Go ahead and click on "Yes". After running the script, if you are concerned, you can change "bypass" to "restricted" and PowerShell scripts won't run anymore.

Now, at the prompt, type the following and hit enter:

.\FixAudacity.ps1

Depending on the size of your library, it may take a little while to complete, but you'll know that it's done when the prompt reappears. That's it, all you have to do now is test the *.aup files by double-clicking them. If Audacity opens without the error then this worked and you can now copy all the files back into your Audacity Projects folder. Remember to have a backup elsewhere and it is best to delete all the projects that you were correcting prior to copying the fixed ones in. This will ensure that we do not keep any of the bad files.

On some occasions you may get the following error about orphaned files.

As the dialog states, there is no real harm in keeping the files. I have found that all my files work just fine, some data may have been lost but I wouldn't remember what it was so I opted to choose the delete permanently option (after I first verified there were no problems with the continue option).

Incidentally, I believe that the source of the problem with the files being renamed (and probably orphaned) had something to do with Windows backup or File History. My suggestion is that you may want to manually back up this folder to date-named folders on a separate drive to prevent this from happening again.

Cannot expand disk in VMware vSphere Client

Since searching online did not provide a clear answer for this, or at lease not for my exact situation, I've decided to post my resolution in my own blog for whoever might need it. However, the resolution was ultimately gleaned from this other blog.

I have a Server 2003 VM with two virtual hard disks (ignore disk3 as I added that later), I need to increase the disk size of the second disk. This should not have posed any problems. All disks were SCSI and Thin Provision. The second disk is not the OS, nor is it defined to be used for swap space. VMware Tools are installed. There are no snapshots of the VM either. I CAN increase the disk size on other Server 2003 VMs. So, what makes this one different?

To start, here is a screenshot of disk1:



And here is a screenshot of disk2:



Even though disk3 is listed, I added that after the fact. But here is the screenshot of that one and you can see that it can be modified:



I searched the internet for a reason for the differences and couldn't find one. Many mentioned the drive was being used for swap space, others mentioned it would be IDE, and so on. None of that seemed to cover my problem. Until I noticed the drive names. Each of the previous two drives had a -000002 as part of their name, where the third disk simply has _2. I looked at various other VMs that worked fine and noticed that disk1 was ALWAYS the VM name.vmdk and disk2 was ALWAYS the VM name_1.vmdk.

So this suggests something to me about the problem. It is obvious that the disk file isn't correct. A disk migration was attempted and that did not fix it.Then I found the blog that I previously mentioned. In that, post, it referenced the numbers -00001.vmdk as an indicator that there was a snapshot. However, there isn't a snapshot. So, it looks to me that this VM was moved previously (and most likely from one version of VMware to another) while there was a snapshot. I'm guessing that it kept the disk names but consolidated the VM.

My resolution: Make a new snapshot. It will rename the disks to indicate that a snapshot is present. Then I will consolidate the VM to remove the snapshot and hopefully rename the disks appropriately and finally gain access to the Disk Provisioning section. See the screenshots below for proof of the renaming:







As you can see, each has been renamed and they are all unavailable for Disk Provisioning. Now, to consolidate. Consolidation alone won't fix it, you have to delete ALL snapshots which will also consolidate. But once done, you get this:



I can now perform Disk Provisioning as necessary.