Dave Hunter

Every guitarist seeks to produce an expressive and distinctive tone, but trying to figure out what kind of gear you need to create your sound can be baffling.This Cheat Sheet explains the three main equipment categories that comprise your music-making rig: your electric guitar, guitar amps, and effects pedals and units.

Several woods have been used to construct electric guitar bodies over the decades. The four described in the following discussions are by far the most classic, appearing in the seminal designs of the 1950s and ’60s and continuing to be used today.MahoganyMahogany is a rich, warm-sounding tonewood with good depth.

The signal chain that works to create any electric guitar sound is made up of several major building blocks, each of which has lots of smaller building blocks within it. These main ingredients that influence your sound include your guitar, any effects pedals you use, and your amp.Electric guitarIn addition to being a musical instrument in the pure sense, your electric guitar is a signal generator: It produces the small electrical signal that carries the “sound” of your playing all the way to an amplifier.

Every guitar’s neck plays partner in anchoring the strings, so the wood it is made from plays a part in the instrument’s sound, in tandem with the wood and construction of the body. Many of the woods used for guitar necks are also, unsurprisingly, those used in their bodies.RosewoodRosewood is commonly used for fingerboards on necks made from maple, mahogany, and Korina.

Occasionally dwindling supplies of some of the more traditional guitar tonewoods — a situation that has affected guitar makers for decades, although more dramatically in recent years — has sent many manufacturers in search of alternatives. Others have turned to different woods simply to yield the different looks and sounds they afford.

As with so many things in the guitar world, the vast majority of control and switching layouts used today follow what was employed by one or another classic make and model dating back to the ’50s and ’60s. For that reason, a quick perusal of these templates familiarizes you with the majority of what you find on guitars hanging on the store walls today.

Humbucking pickups take their colloquial name from the fact that they’re designed to reject hum that can be induced from electrical sources. They can also be called double-coil pickups (as opposed to single-coil pickups), because they achieve this noise reduction by pairing together two coils wound in opposite directions.

A pickup gets its name from the fact that it picks up your guitar’s sound and sends it to an amplifier. Back in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, pickups were sometimes referred to as microphones or guitar mics, which makes sense, but pickup is pretty much the universal term for these units today. Pickups are electromagnetic devices, meaning they use a coil and magnets to produce an electrical signal, and the vast majority of them are passive, meaning they require no electrical input from a battery or wall socket to function.

Many vintage effects pedals and stand-alone units have sacred names out there in guitarland. Major artists will name-check them reverentially in magazine interviews; players will discuss them in hallowed tones on discussion sites; and vintage dealers will charge you enormous sums to get your hands on the more prized examples.