Dan Djurdjevic

Finally - a "horsepower rating" for guitar pickups! If you’re a guitar enthusiast, you know the struggle of finding your perfect tone - the one that fits your playing style and your instrument. For electric guitars with passive pickups, evaluating them usually boils down to one metric before you’ve even heard them: DCR (resistance in kΩ) . Unfortunately, DCR alone tells you almost nothing about output or tone. The real picture depends on: Inductance (L) - in Henries Capacitance (C) - in nanofarads Magnet type - Alnico 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, or Ceramic Pickup geometry - bobbin width, length, height, number of coils After months of studying sine wave curves and logarithmic formulas, I created a 6-sheet Excel workbook that fully analyzes pickups given their L, C, R, and magnet type. It’s robust, but a bit heavy for casual use. That’s why I developed a “quick and dirty” metric - one number that gives you: Relative output (volume) - taking L, C, R,...

Broadly, when we talk about “overdrive”, distortion” and “fuzz”, we are talking about wave clipping , which happens when the signal exceeds the headroom of the amp.  Soft clipping is normally called “overdrive” and mimics the gain on your amp being turned up. Hard clipping is more aggressive, cutting the peaks flat. This is called “distortion”. When the wave form is so clipped that it turns a sine wave into a fully square shape, this is called “fuzz”. Here’s a diagram: Overdrive can be likened to a boost: it drives your amp harder so that the amp (rather than the effects pedal or app) creates the distortion. Think of overdrive in the way you might think of the gain on your amp (or the “power knob” if you one, which affects how much the gain knob drives the amp). Obviously some “overdrive pedals” are just weaker distortion pedals (because they do more than drive the amp).  Likewise, some “distortion pedals” are really more like overdrives because they really don’t introduce a c...