Glad you are interested in these subjects…
This website is to attack the subject of guitar electronics in a scientific way without too much of the “heavy stuff”, meaning without lots of long equations and calculus, but to mostly explain in words and examples how it really works. The literature that goes along with this is listed in “References”. As I will mention in a few of the pages here, I have been watching a lot of YouTube videos and read some popular guitar magazine articles about guitar shielding, which was my first subject when I started searching. After that came guitar electronics, pickups and so on. As I was watching, becoming more and more annoyed with the slim knowledge of the people making these videos. The problem, I know, is when you don’t know the fundamentals of a subject, you tend to say a lot of wrong things. If you read my background on the page called “Who am I?”, you will know that I am not talking shit here.
Please note: When you see the top menu, there is a drop-down menu for each item. Please click on the top menu first, because it contains a lot of information as well. Then try the drop-down menu items next.
Like I said, I was disturbed by how much wrong information was spread out in YouTube land so it was decided to do something about it and get correct information out there.
So I started searching for scientific information, it was not easy, of course, to get beyond all the popular “science” on YouTube and elsewhere. But I did find a handful of books, articles and dissertations that were scientifically at such a high level and they were treating the the subject with an emphasis on physics and mathematics as they were approaching the subjects having solid background in the subjects.
Well, I never found anything on the subject of guitar shielding, so what is written in here is base on a long career of dealing with the subjects of shielding and EMI. I did, however, find a lot about just about everything else, mainly string behavior, pickups, some electronics, but nothing about amplifiers, luckily I have amble knowledge in this area as well.
As mentioned elsewhere, I saw no reason to repeat the university level stuff that I had been reading, so I wanted to break it down and explain the relatively complicated areas of string motion and pickup physics so it was easy to understand. This is just a taste, there is a more in depth introduction under “Why am I doing This”, please check it out.
I will most likely mention a few times that my approach is scientific, something that is natural to me. Very important to understand is that it requires that you can substantiate every claim with some experiment, something that proves that your theory or claim is backed up by something that can be measured, no more no less. Every scientist that develops a theory or states a claim is always thinking ahead on constructing some kind of experiment to prove the validity. As you will see, I have no tolerance for these people that claim something and prove it by playing the guitar before and after some claimed improvement and their only type of “measurement” is listening, It is worthless as a proof, because listening not only involves you hearing, your ears, but also your perception and you tend to hear things that aren’t there, because your brain tells you to do so. In psychology it is called “suspension of disbelief”. Your normal instinct to be skeptical is put on hold. As a scientist I always find the need to investigate more, I am always critical so I see the need to dig deeper until I am convinced that I am right. I wish everybody would do that!
In case you want an “appetizer” before reading the different subject pages, it would probably be a good idea to start with the page “Q and A”. This page opens up to some of the subjects described in detail in the many pages of different subjects here.
Hank GESMAG is my YouTube handle.
Hope I succeeded!
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Information herein can be quoted with indication of source.