Guitar tech Gary Brawer numbers Joe Satriani, Metallica and Neal Schon among his clients. So it’s safe to say he knows his stuff.
Lots of people come into his shop and ask him to perform misguided repairs they’ve heard about from friends or read about on the Internet. We’ve asked Gary to set the record straight about guitarists’ biggest misconceptions.
1. Positions 2 and 4 on a Stratocaster are out of phase.
Nope. It’s the positioning of the pickups that cancels the harmonics and gives you that sound. It’s a mechanical “out of phase” tone, not electronically out of phase. You can get close to that sound with humbucking pickups by going out of phase or coil cutting the pickups so the remaining coils are as close to Stratocaster spacing as possible. If you put the center pickup electronically out of phase on a three-pickup guitar, the 2 and 4 positions will sound extremely thin and have weak output.
2. I need to float my Floyd Rose with lots of up-and-down movement to sound like Eddie Van Halen.
Nope! EVH has his trem set to go down only—no up-trem. Think about it: That’s the only way his D-Tuna could drop his low string a whole-step without making the others go out of tune. Any whammy work on a Van Halen record where the pitch rises is the result of Ed depressing the bar first and then hitting the chord or harmonic.
3. To get a big sound you need big strings.
No! All you have to do to debunk this is hear Billy Gibbons playing with a .007 for his high E. Santana, Tony Iommi, Brian May, and a host of others have used .008s and had tone of the gods.
4. The wood has