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Every guitarist wants to have the best tone. In fact we all work so hard on perfecting our technique and our style that sometimes the most important part of the equasion is forgotten. Your guitar of course.

I did not see any other posts about this so I thought that I would cover it. I am no expert, but I will share with you what I know. So here goes.

SHIELDING is the process of covering the electric guitars pickups with a “shield.” Which will keep out interference from nasty transformers, TV’s and other amplifiers.

Have you ever been playing a gig or at home or where ever and suddenly your electric guitar picked up voices and other noise? If it has then keep reading, if you have never had to deal with that then dont fix what aint broken.

If you get a new pickup and want to put it in yourself, or you just find a real swell old fashioned junky guitar that needs some love then keep on reading.

First take off your pick guard which will allow you to get the pickups out of the guitar.

Take off the plastic pickup covers and you will see a bunch of coil. This coil picks up interference like an antenna.

SINGLE COIL PICKUPS

First, look at the pickup and study how there are two very small wires of the winding going over the lead connections. YOU NEED TO BE CAREFUL AROUND THESE WIRES. If you break them, you basically just “killed” your pickup.

The real secret to shielding is, if you put shielding right on the coil you will cause interference with the sound.

So, just wrap the coil with some cloth tape. Then to shield the pickup you need to wrap the copper tape (shielding tape) around the pickup coil. BE CAREFUL OF THE TWO LEAD WIRES (I mentioned this before)

Cut some extra tape and put it across the copper tape wrapped around the pick up coil, and over the ground connection of the pickups two leads (the murder wires/stated earlier)

The ground is commonly a black wire connected to the pot and not the switch.

Solder the extra piece of tape wrapped around the coil and solder it to the ground lead of the pickup. You have done all the shielding that is necessary and you are done.

HUMBUCKING PICKUPS

The humbucker is much easier, as they are usually already wrapped with cloth tape. So all you really need to do to it is wrap copper tape around the outside of the coils and connect it to the metal frame of the pickup. Solder a short piece of wire or copper tape to the copper tape wrapped around the coils and solder the other end to the pickup frame.

OK NOW…this is not to difficult, but done at your own risk. So dont blame me if you screw it up.

IF YOU JUST DONT FEEL LIKE DOING THAT….here is an easy one…

SHIELDING THE CONTROL COMPARTMENT

Remove the “controls” by simply unbolting them from the guitar, or remove the pick guard. Do a real neat job of covering the inside of the control compartment with aluminum foil. Glue it to the sides with rubber cement or wood glue. Just make sure that it is flat, with very few wrinkles.

Bolting them back in place makes the ground connection automatically. Your guitar should be quieter, and probably much cleaner sounding.

If you want I can explain a couple more tricks, but for now just knowing how to do this should make you feel pretty good.

If you come up with a cooler or easier way share the knowledge.

As usual, have fun.

more articles by John Endris

• Chord formulas
• Having fun with modal harmony.