E. Intonation

Intonation is basically how in tune the guitar is at different frets and strings. If a guitar is intonated poorly, it will sound out of tune when playing notes higher on the fret board. Chords will be notably dissonant when they shouldn't be.

Most people don't pay much attention to intonation, yet it is absolutely crucial to sound good, especially in a band or recording environment. It's also a fairly simple and risk-free adjustment, although it may take a little time.

The easiest way to intonate the guitar is by comparing the pitch of the 12th fret harmonic vs. the fretted note. If the fretted note is sharper than the harmonic, the string must be lengthened, which usually involves moving the individual bridge saddle away from the nut. If it is flatter, then the string must be shortened by moving the saddle closer to the nut. Once all your strings are intonated, tune up your guitar. You'll notice it will sound much better across the fret board, especially for chords.

Note that intonation is also dependent on the rest of your setup, particularly your action. If you have a high action, you have to press the string down a significant distance to fret it, which is adding tension (and possibly length) to the string. This is why it is difficult to intonate a guitar with high action. You can match the 12th harmonic to the 12th fretted note, but other spots on the fret board may not be consistently in tune. The same principle applies to a guitar with a high nut height. You have to exert more tension on the frets close to the nut to properly fret them, causing them to be sharper than other areas of the neck.

Thus, I like to intonate using at least 2-3 comparisons. I'll start with the 12th harmonic vs 12th fret, then I'll try the 7th fret vs. 19th fret. If that's off, maybe I need to lower my action a little. Then I'll try the 2nd fret vs. 14th. If there's a discrepancy there, it tells me how much impact my nut height is having on getting a proper intonation. If I can't get all of these 3 tests perfect, I'll compromise and get all 3 as close as possible rather than have one perfect and the other 2 way off.

Keep in mind that lower quality instruments might have issues with the nut or possibly even with the fret spacing. Unlevel frets can also throw off intonation, making it impossible to intonate. Technically, perfect intonation is impossible - the best you can do is a compromise to get all the notes as close to in-tune as possible.

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F. Pickups

I feel pickups are the most important part of an electric guitar. They determine the overall tone of your guitar's output. The biggest tonal improvement you can make on a cheap/mid-range stock guitar is to replace the stock pickups.

I. Single-Coil vs. Humbuckers

In general, single-coils are noisier and glassier (have more shimmer in their high-end) than humbuckers. That makes them great for blues and funk (and most "clean" tones), but poor for hard rock and metal, where their noise gets compressed and amplified and high-end shimmer makes for a gritty sounding distortion. While single-coils are usually called "glassy", humbuckers are usually called "creamy" They can sound kind of nasal when used in a clean tone - lots of mids but not a lot of treble.

To be more technical, humbuckers consist of two single coil pickups in series with opposite direction windings. This causes them to cancel out interference and hum. Their increased impedance; however, also causes them to produce less higher frequencies, which gives them their strong mid-range output compared to single-coils which are generally brighter. Because they are two pickups in series, they produce stronger output generated by string vibration. Strong mids are great for distortion - bass tends to generate muddy distortion, and treble tends to generate splatty or gritty distortion. Mids distort in a smooth to searing manner, great for all variety of rock.

I really like a HSH setup - that's bridge humbucker, middle single-coil, neck humbucker. This let's you dial in some solid blues and funk tones, while still achieving most of the classic rock, hard rock, and metal tones you can dream of. Another versatile setup is the HSS (bridge humbucker + single coils middle and neck). If you only want mild crunch, grungy rhythm distortion, blues, funk, and classic rock tones, you may prefer the 3 single-coil setup.

If you want maximum versatility, look into getting humbuckers that have a coil tap (actually coil split) feature. These split the wire between the two coils, allowing wirings that can access the pickup as one of its single coils or as a humbucker, or wire the coils in parallel getting you a single-coil tone but still achieve hum-cancellation.

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